I am John R. Christy, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science, Alabama’s State Climatologist and Director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. I have served as Lead Author, Contributing Author and Reviewer of United Nations IPCC assessments, have been awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, and in 2002 was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society.

It is a privilege for me to offer my analysis of the current situation regarding atmospheric temperature datasets and whether the traditional scientific method using these datasets has been applied in climate science regarding the pronouncements about climate change used in policy. I addressed other aspects of climate change including extreme events, crop production, impact of regulation (there is none on the climate) and data confidence in my last Senate (Commerce, Science and Transportation, 8 Dec 2015) and House (Science, Space and Technology, 2 Feb 2016) appearances.

My research area might be best described as building datasets from scratch to advance our understanding of what the climate is doing and why – an activity I began as a teenager over 50 years ago. I have used traditional surface observations as well as measurements from balloons and satellites to document the climate story. Many of our UAH datasets, generated by myself and UAH colleagues Drs. Roy Spencer and W. Daniel Braswell, are used to test hypotheses of climate variability and change.