Searching for Climate Change: A More Temperate Take on Global Warming

Prof. John R. Christy — one of a handful of scientists to actually build “data sets of climate variation and change from scratch” — talks about how finding “dramatic changes in climate systems” is really quite difficult.

Dr. Christy is professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he and a colleague have collected and analyzed global temperature information from satellite-observed microwave data going back to 1979. For this breakthrough, he was awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement. He likewise has been honored by the American Meteorological Society, which later named him a Fellow — and since 2000, he’s also been known as “Alabama State Climatologist.”

A contributor and lead author to several reports of the U.N. International Panel on Global Climate Change, Professor Christy earned his doctorate at the University of Illinois.