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A well-known skeptic of the seriousness of climate change will join the Environmental Protection Agency’s science advisory board. Alabama climatologist John Christy has been a favorite of Republican lawmakers who disagree with the science that shows humans are heating the planet and causing an environmental crisis.

Christy was a lead author of a section of a 2011 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But that year he testified to a House panel that “it has become popular to try and attribute certain extreme events to human causation.”

“The Earth, however, is very large, the weather is very dynamic, especially at local scales, so that extreme events of one type or another will occur somewhere on the planet in every year,” he said.

International scientists have warned that climate change will cause more heat waves, stronger storms, and more erratic weather.

In 2014, in a column he co-authored in the Wall Street Journal defending his views, Christy said scientists at one time had achieved consensus that the Earth was flat.

The Trump administration’s picks for EPA science boards have been controversial, as they have removed scientists who received agency grants to conduct research and replaced them with more representatives from industry and state government. The panels review the research EPA uses to make major decisions about protecting public health.

Another new member, Richard Williams, is a consultant and the former director of regulatory studies at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, where he focused on cost-benefit and risk analysis.

New addition Hugh Barton retired from the biopharmaceutical company Pfizer.

An appointee to a chemical assessment committee, Michael Jayjock, has previously consulted for Dow Chemical, as well as government agencies, according to his website.

