Patrick...John Christy was a member of the National Academy of Sciences panel created at the request of the Bush administration, as I mentioned above.
As I also mentioned above, he was a signatory to the UNAMINOUS statement that global warming is real, that ground data is as accurate as satellite data, and that there is almost certainly an anthropogenic component to that warming.
So he's surely recanted in the sense that he no longer argues that his data explodes the "farce" of global warming.
That was part of the point of putting him on the committee. Shit or get off the pot.
A little background...when Christy first published his data, it was claimed by some that the lower temperatures he saw in the troposphere proved that ground data was innaccurate and that the supposed record of warming was simply an artifact of measurement.
That's why the second part of the NAS committee statement is important. Christy and a slew of other people have been examining the ground data, methodology in correction for known innaccuracies (city "heat island" effects), etc. The conclusion: the data's good.
Likewise Christy's satellite data has been closely scrutinized. Please realze that the NASA satellites in question do NOT directly measure temperature. Rather, data collected for an entirely different purpose is massaged by using a (dare I say it?) model to indirectly compute temperatures in the troposphere.
There has been some conflicting data from other sources, Talli's pointed out one paper published in Science.
Regardless ... the ground data's been scrutinized in so many ways by so many people that I think it is safe to say that the NAS is correct in their assessment.
Christy says that uncertainty in the models is reason to not take any action despite the committee's findings - and again, he signed on to the statement, and when interviewed afterwards did not recant - that the warming already seen is likely in part due to anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gasses.
Now ... he's also on record as saying that we shouldn't do anything about it even if the models are spot-on perfect and he bases that opinion on his religious and political beliefs combined with a belief that warming temperatures will be a good thing (without any scientific basis for that argument).
Others suggest that given the uncertainty it might be wise to begin mitigation efforts today. And, no, this doesn't mean a return to the stone age. British Petroleum is working to cut its greenhouse gas emissions voluntarily (their scientists and management accepted the scientific consensus some yeaars ago) and has yet to suffer financially.
