115. Climate Change Has Become a Quasi Religion – Judith Curry
”In the good old days, those of us with solid scientific training understood what we didn't know and we were excited about the knowledge frontiers", says professor Judith Curry. ”Now, ecologists, economists, social scientists and other people who don't really understand climate dynamics are busy reciting alarming talking points rather than showing any understanding of what's really going on.” Curry is one of the world’s top climate scientists. However, she fell from grace with the mainstream scientific and political community after having dared to openly criticize the biased and manipulative research methods revealed in ”climategate” in 2009. She was ostracized. Some years later, she left her tenured position at Georgia Tech to become a full-time consultant in the private sector. ”I saw the writing on the wall”, she says. She had made attempts to find another academic position, but she was told there was no point. Headhunters said: ”You're a great candidate, but no one’s going to hire you, because if you google Judith Curry, what you get are things like ’climate denier’ and ’serious disinformer’”. ”The whole field has become highly politicized. Everybody thinks they are a climate expert. It has become quasi religious”, she says. Sadly, even the scientific journals have become politicized. ”If you have something skeptical to say about climate change, don't bother to submit it to Science or Nature.” Going into the technical details of the climate debate, Curry assesses that the weakest part of the alarmist argument is that warming is dangerous. ”Extreme events have little or nothing to do with the slow, incremental warming that’s going on.” The 1.5 and 2.0 degree targets are purely political, she says. ”The policy cart has been out there in front of the scientific horse since 1992.” ”When and if we meet the 2 degrees target will largely be determined by natural variability factors.” Besides, she adds, the baseline for these targets is the 1800s, which was at the tail end of the little ice age. ”Why people think of the pre-industrial climate as some kind of nirvana, I don't know.” This year, 2023, has seen some spectacular records that the mainstream immediately connects to human emissions. But the fascinating thing is that the suddenness of the temperature spike as well as the slowing of ice growth in the Antarctic are basically evidence that the incremental CO2 levels can’t be to blame for the 2023 events. Interestingly, Judith Curry more or less coincides in this with one of the alarmists’ most revered scientists, James Hansen. Many factors are likely at play, such as reduced cloudiness and less aerosols, volcanic activity and ocean current oscillations. Many point at a looming El Niño, but as a matter of fact, this warming phenomenon hadn’t really begun when the temperature spike started. ”The CO2 increase is lost in the noise here”, says Curry. Are the oceans, and also the Antarctic ice sheet, perhaps being warmed from below? ”I pay more attention to this possibility than most people do. There is a lot of volcanic activity. To think that atmospheric CO2 is the driver of what’s happening with the west Antarctic ice sheet is rather a joke.” Why aren’t more people looking into these things? ”Well, because people really like this narrow framework, that everything is CO2. Every career, money and policy depend on this.” But she thinks we may have reached ”peak craziness”: ”I wouldn't be surprised if we twenty years from now have a different view of what exactly is going on.”