MONTGOMERY, Ala. — President Donald Trump has turned to a small circle of high-profile climate skeptics — including two Alabama scientists — to shape new federal climate rules, even as Alabama lawmakers push a bill that would bar the state from adopting stronger environmental protections than Washington.
The five-member group, sometimes described by critics as a “contrarian” climate panel, includes John Christy and Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, along with Judith Curry, Steven Koonin and Ross McKitrick, all of whom question mainstream findings that human activity is rapidly warming the planet and driving more extreme weather. Their report downplayed the severity and risks of global warming, and a federal judge has since found that the administration’s effort to elevate their work inside the Department of Energy violated federal law governing advisory committees.
Christy, Alabama’s state climatologist and a UAH professor, is widely known in scientific circles as an outlier whose work has been repeatedly corrected or contradicted by subsequent research, including revisions to satellite temperature records he developed with Spencer. Despite those corrections bringing their temperature data largely in line with mainstream climate models, both men have continued to promote older interpretations that minimize the amount of warming, a pattern that has made them favorites of Republican politicians looking to cast doubt on climate science.
Curry has similarly built a public profile by challenging consensus conclusions of international climate assessments, while critics and watchdog groups note her paid work for utilities, insurers and fossil fuel interests and her involvement with organizations that have opposed climate regulations. Together, the five-member working group produced a federal report that framed climate change as less dangerous and highlighted potential “benefits” of warming, language scientists outside the group say leans heavily on disputed or already-debunked claims.
The composition of the panel — all long-standing skeptics whose views fall well outside the dominant scientific literature — has fueled accusations from environmental advocates and many researchers that the administration deliberately bypassed the broader climate science community to install a narrow set of voices more likely to justify weaker regulations. Lawsuits filed by advocacy groups argue that the committee’s membership and operations were designed to sidestep normal safeguards and give outsized weight to analyses that understate climate risks.
In Alabama, critics say that strategy now dovetails with a push at the State House to tie the hands of state regulators. Senate Bill 71, sponsored by Sen. Donnie Chesteen, R-Geneva, would prohibit state agencies such as the Alabama Department of Environmental Management from adopting environmental rules that are stronger than federal standards in areas ranging from drinking water and air quality to hazardous waste. The bill, which has cleared the Senate and advanced in the Legislature, also restricts when Alabama can act in areas where Washington has not yet set a rule, requiring any new state standards to rely on what it calls the “best available science” and “weight of scientific evidence” and to show a direct causal link to “manifest bodily harm.”
Supporters cast the bill as a way to ensure regulatory predictability and keep Alabama aligned with federal policy, arguing that national standards already reflect extensive scientific review. But environmental and health advocates say the proposal would lock the state into whatever rules come out of a federal process already being steered by the small group of skeptics Trump elevated, effectively preventing Alabama from responding more aggressively to local air and water problems even if new evidence emerges.
The result, critics contend, is a two-step political strategy: first, populate federal advisory bodies with a narrow slate of skeptics whose conclusions are out of step with most climate researchers, then bar states like Alabama from going beyond those federal baselines, no matter how lenient they become. With two of the most prominent skeptics based in Huntsville and one serving as the state climatologist, Alabama is both exporting some of the nation’s most controversial climate voices and importing the weaker standards their work is used to justify.
Christy’s and Spencer’s long-running disputes with mainstream scientists have become a recurring feature of congressional hearings and conservative media, where their arguments are cited to question everything from temperature records to the urgency of cutting emissions. Their influence in Washington, amplified by their roles in the Trump-aligned working group, now intersects with a state policy that would require Alabama regulators to treat those contested views as the ceiling for environmental protection, even as most climate scientists warn that faster and deeper cuts in greenhouse gases are needed to protect public health and the economy.