In honor of the revelation today, that Koonin, Christy and Spencer have been made Special Government Employees at the Dept. of Energy, we present a quick round up of our commentary on the caliber of their arguments we’ve posted here over the last decade or so.
TL;DR? The arguments are not very good.
Steve Koonin
Roy Spencer
- Spencer’s Shenanigans (2024)
- Flyer Tipping (2021)
- Review of Spencer’s Great Global Warming Blunder (2011)
- Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedback (2011)
- How to cook a graph in three easy lessons (2008)
John Christy
- How not to science (2023)
- The true meaning of numbers (2017)
- Comparing models to satellite observations (2016)
- Tropical temperature trends (2007)
There is more in the archives if you care to look, but this should be sufficient background reading to start with.
And, since people ask, the comparisons of the Spencer and Christy dataset (up-to-date version) and similar records to the climate models are here (and updated every year).
This looks like a myth in the making -Jason and the Ask Me Nots
Long before Steve enlisted on the side of fuel in the climate wars, Jason founding father Edward Teller read the riot act to the oil industry at its 100th birthday party thrown by The American Petroleum Institute at Columbia: in 1959:
‘” Whenever you burn conventional fuel, you create carbon dioxide[….The carbon dioxide is invisible, it is transparent, you can’t smell it, it is not dangerous to health, so why should one worry about it?
“Carbon dioxide has a strange property. It transmits visible light but it absorbs the infrared radiation which is emitted from the earth. Its presence in the atmosphere causes a greenhouse effect ….a temperature rise…. sufficient to melt the icecap and submerge New York. All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.”