Tony and Kirye

Name: Tony Heller
Country: USA

“Hello, this is Tony Heller from realclimatescience.com, setting the record straight on climate.” This is the standard opening sentence in the many Youtube-videos that Tony Heller has put online. Heller has become a well-known figure in the public climate debate, with his website, his Youtube-channel and twitter-account. His focus is on weather and climate history and the data tampering by US institutes such as NASA and NOAA.
Through his climate work he came in touch with the Japanese lady Kirye. She is also very active on twitter and on the climate blog Notrickszone. During the covid pandemic she decided to come over to the US and now she and Heller are married. They live in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with their dogs.
We welcome Tony as our number 1500 of the World Climate Declaration! He was happy to answer some questions, partly by email and partly in a phone interview.

What is your background?
I have worked in many different fields of science, engineering and education. Here is a partial list.

Education:
BS Geology, Arizona State University
Masters Electrical Engineering, Rice University
Boston University Geology
Northern Arizona University Computer Science
Colorado State University Computer Science
University of New Mexico Geochemistry

I am a lifelong environmentalist. I used to work as a Wilderness Ranger in Cibola National Forest, New Mexico and Santa Fe National Forest, New Mexico. Amusingly, the operator of Sandia Peak Ski Area outside Albuquerque shut the area down this year due to global warming fears. It is 1F (-17C) this morning and the empty ski area is buried in deep snow. This area is very close to Albuquerque and now people have to drive 70 miles to the nearest ski area.

I testified at my first Congressional hearing in support of Wilderness in 1972.
I fought for the Clean Air and Water acts. I am currently battling the City of Boulder, Colorado to stop development on the South Boulder Wetlands. I am a full time cyclist for all my local transportation, for the past 40 years. I am member of the CO2 Coalition.
I have worked as a science teacher, Athletic Director and Soccer Coach at Oak Creek Ranch School, Arizona. As a Math teacher at Phoenix Country Day School and as a Substitute teacher at Murphy School District, Phoenix Arizona. I was Computer instructor at Tomball College, Texas.
I did Geothermal research and oil shale research at Los Alamos National Labs. Later also
Thermodynamic research of methane hydrates and Volcano research. I wrote a Safety Analysis Report for the Permian Basin DOE nuclear waste disposal site. I was Volunteer curator Arizona Mineral Museum.

I also became an Electrical Engineer and worked on many different projects:
Compaq/SGI MIPS consortium design team
Power PC design team IBM/Apple/Motorola (Used in most game consoles over the last three decades, and PowerMacs)
Sandia Labs computer architect
Sandia Labs representative to Al Gore’s Bankers Trust key escrow consortium
Cyrix Media GX microprocessor design team manager
Raycer Graphics OpenGL graphics processor verification lead
Design manager Hitachi/ST SH5 microprocessor
Verification lead MemoryLogix microprocessor
Founder, design lead Visual Media video effects/editing software
OpenGL driver development ATI
Itanium/i7 design team Intel (very likely being used by you right now)
Sped up Helicos DNA sequencing algorithm by 50X
Sped up NCAR weather microphysics kernel by 500X
Ported NCAR’s radiative transfer model to GPU
Ported NCAR’s WRF weather model to Windows
Drone visualization and control software for the US military
Medical device control systems (under NDA)
Virtual reality visualization design (under NDA)
Radio control and visualization software (under NDA).

I am busier than ever. I founded a startup company, developing software.

Since when and why are you interested in climate change?
I have been interested in weather since I was a small child, and have been studying global warming since I was introduced to it at Los Alamos Labs in 1980.

How did your views on climate change evolve?
I was a global warming true believer for decades. My boss at Los Alamos introduced me to the idea. It all seemed rather plausible, I saw changes in the weather. In the nineties I flew to London frequently. One time I was flying in February and I saw people water skiing just west of Heathrow and that is pretty remarkable. But then one day in January I took a train from London to Cambridge and got stuck due to heavy snowfall. I started seeing changes in the weather which appeared to be cyclical rather than a linear trend. I started looking at climate data from NASA and NOAA and discovered that it was being tampered with under the guise of “adjustments” – which in the case of the United States actually reversed the trend. I quickly realised this was probably the worst science I had ever seen.
After examining historical records of glacial melt I realized they were inconsistent with NASA temperature graphs. My research has found no evidence of an increase in extreme weather.
In about 2008 I started writing a few articles for The Register, then for Anthony Watts his blog and then I started my own blog. I have been doing this for 15 years.

You seem to be specialised in weather and climate history, how did that come?
I have always been interested in the weather, even as a kid. When I started looking at temperature data from NASA and compared these with actual historical records I quickly found out there was just no correlation at all. Take the year 1921, it was a very warm year, in the United States and around the world. There were terrible heatwaves and drought, which was widely reported in the newspapers. A lot of people starving in Eastern Europe, Russia and Asia.

And 1921 in the raw temperature data for the US was the second warmest year on record. But if you look at the NASA temperature data it shows 1921 is one the coldest years on record! The Arctic was melting very quickly, lots of reports on glaciers disappearing. But somehow NASA concluded it was one of the coldest years on record which is absurd. What they are doing is wildly fraudulent.

Have you paid a price for speaking out about this?
Yeah, I definitely lost a lot of jobs and contracts due to my climate work. You can say I was an early victim of cancel culture. I have been able to maintain myself financially, through donations on my blog. And I am also a pretty good programmer so I am usually able to find some program work. I don’t have any regrets doing this. I realised it is important and the people doing this are up to nefarious things. It’s important to let people know what is going on. My observation of history is that when governments start engaging in very big lies like this, their intentions are very bad and they kill a lot of people.

What is your position with regard to climate sensitivity?
I think that the whole concept of climate sensitivity is a joke. It is based on a very simplistic model that there is only one variable in the climate system. I was very good friends with dr. Bill Gray. His big thing was that if temperatures goes up, so does convection, leading to thunderclouds, causing more heat to be dispatched into the upper atmosphere. Even the numbers that Judith Curry is using, say 1.5 Celsius for a doubling, are much too high anyway. I think these numbers are absurd to begin with and they assume a static climate. For me the whole idea of climate sensitivity is a farce.

Is climate change a big issue in your country and how do you notice this?
There is a non-stop bombardment of climate propaganda in the US.

How would climate policy ideally look like in your view?
There shouldn’t be “climate policy” – which is a Trojan horse for controlling energy policy. We need a rational discussion of energy policy which is not tainted by superstitions about an imaginary relationship between energy and climate.

What is your motivation to sign the Clintel World Climate Declaration?
An opportunity to help educate the public.