He has recalled that "I built my first climate datasets when I was 12, using a mechanical pencil, graph paper, and long-division (no calculators back then.)
[1] His doctoral thesis was titled, An investigation of the general circulation associated with extreme anomalies in hemispheric mean atmospheric mass.
After earning a Master of Divinity degree from Golden Gate Baptist Seminary in 1978 he served four years as a bivocational mission-pastor in Vermillion, South Dakota, where he also taught college math.
Part of the discrepancy between the surface and atmospheric trends was resolved over a period of several years as Christy, Spencer and others identified several factors, including orbital drift and decay, that caused a net cooling bias in the data collected by the satellite instruments.
"[9] In a 2003 interview with National Public Radio about the 2003 American Geophysical Union (AGU) statement, he said he is "a strong critic of scientists who make catastrophic predictions of huge increases in global temperatures and tremendous rises in sea levels".
"[10] In a 2007 editorial in The Wall Street Journal, he wrote: "I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see.
"[12] In 2014, Christy and his UAH colleague Richard McNider wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, arguing that climate models projected temperatures consistently higher than real-world satellite and balloon data.