by Judith Curry
David Rose has published an interview with me in the Spectator.
The title of the piece is ‘I was tossed out of the tribe’: climate scientist Judith Curry interviewed‘. Subtitle: For engaging with sceptics, and discussing uncertainties in projections frankly, this Georgia professor is branded a heretic. David’s originally proposed title was ‘Climate Heretic’, and hence the title of this post. In case you are unaware of Part I of the Climate Heretic saga, see this previous post from 2010 [link].
Be sure to link to the article, there is an astonishing cartoon.
Excerpts from the article:
It is safe to predict that when 20,000 world leaders, officials, green activists and hangers-on convene in Paris next week for the 21st United Nations climate conference, one person you will not see much quotedis Professor Judith Curry. This is a pity. Her record of peer-reviewed publication in the best climate-science journals is second to none, and in America she has become a public intellectual. But on this side of the Atlantic, apparently, she is too ‘challenging’. What is troubling about her pariah status is that her trenchant critique of the supposed consensus on global warming is not derived from warped ideology, let alone funding by fossil-fuel firms, but from solid data and analysis.
Curry’s independence has cost her dear. She began to be reviled after the 2009 ‘Climategate’ scandal, when leaked emails revealed that some scientists were fighting to suppress sceptical views. ‘I started saying that scientists should be more accountable, and I began to engage with sceptic bloggers. I thought that would calm the waters. Instead I was tossed out of the tribe. There’s no way I would have done this if I hadn’t been a tenured professor, fairly near the end of my career. If I were seeking a new job in the US academy, I’d be pretty much unemployable. I can still publish in the peer-reviewed journals. But there’s no way I could get a government research grant to do the research I want to do. Since then, I’ve stopped judging my career by these metrics. I’m doing what I do to stand up for science and to do the right thing.’
She remains optimistic that science will recover its equilibrium, and that the quasi-McCarthyite tide will recede: ‘I think that by 2030, temperatures will not have increased all that much. Maybe then there will be the funding to do the kind of research on natural variability that we need, to get the climate community motivated to look at things like the solar-climate connection.’ She even hopes that rational argument will find a place in the UN: ‘Maybe, too, there will be a closer interaction between the scientists, the economists and policymakers. Wouldn’t that be great?’
Climate heresy
To provide some context for my so-called heresy, take a look at this presentation that is being given by IPCC lead authors to the Canadian PM in preparation for the Paris talks [link].
My latest public talk on climate is now on youtube [here]. My talk was given in Ocala, Florida, at the the Institute for Human-Machine Cognition (IHMC). This is a FASCINATING and unique organization, I encourage you to take a look at their web site. There were 250 people in attendance at my talk, which was followed by a very nice dinner with 22 individuals.
The people at the dinner had a broad range of political perspectives, but I think all came away thinking about this issue in a new light. I was particularly struck by one of the comments at dinner, something like this: “What you are doing is science: evaluating the evidence from both sides.” This was remarked as something being highly unusual in the climate debate.
It is indeed a travesty that climate science has become so politicized and that a large majority of the scientists visible in the public debate on climate change are partisans. For the sake of science, not to mention the policies that are being driven by the science, we need to open up the debate on the causes of the warming and scenarios of climate change for the 21st century.
Filed under: Skeptics