Satellite Scientist Upset at “Well Funded Video” February 4, 2016

John Christy, the Ned Flanders of climate denial, appeared once again before a welcoming crowd at Rep. Lamar Smith’s House Science committee, in a show-hearing designed to whip up more impotent right wing rage against pointy headed intellectuals, their wacky left-wing climate science, and a suspiciously French global climate agreement.

Especially entertaining for me – Dr. Christy spent a good part of his time responding to stinging and long overdue critiques of his science, and his much ballyhooed satellite measures of global temperature, delivered by several of the world’s most respected atmospheric experts in my recent video.

Dr. Christy is one of those fortune-favored individuals who consistently make a name for themselves by “failing up”. It’s a time-honored path to success, celebrated in films like Forrest Gump, and Being There – and George W. Bush proved it will take you all the way to the Presidency. Christy has done it in the science world.

In a series of egregious errors in the 1990s and 2000s, Dr. Christy and his partner Roy Spencer, actually managed to read their satellite data as showing the planet cooling, a 180 wrongway boneheaded analysis, let’s call it “Freedom Science” – that they defended stubbornly for more than a decade, until the overwhelming weight of evidence forced them to admit they were wrong.

For ordinary people, blowing it that bad could be a career killer – but if you are telling climate deniers and wealthy barons of the world’s most profitable industry what they want to hear, it makes you the toast of Washington.

Certainly, if not for a rich history of bungling, error, and accompanying arrogance, no one would ever have heard of Dr. Christy. But in these confusing times, for a science-challenged and ideologically blindered audience, Dr. Christy is science denial’s enthusiastic go-to guy, and a hero to intellectual titans like Ted Cruz, Rush Limbaugh, and Lamar Smith.

Below, if you have not seen, the satellite video that’s gotten under Dr. Christy’s skin.