We came to the point where we think that we’re going to prevent bad weather by eliminating fossil fuels. It’s just about the most nonsensical, illogical thing that I can imagine, and the whole world is caught up in this nonsense.
~~~ Climatologist, Judith Curry
In the interview below with John Stossel, climatologist Judith Curry explores the origins and problems with Climate Change as it exists today.
She notes that the IPCC’s role in climate change goes back to the 1980s, and the UN environmental program had this big environmental, anti-capitalism agenda. They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change issue as one to move their policies along.
“The 1992 climate Treaty of the UN to prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate change, 196 countries, including the US scientists, this was in 1992 before there was any evidence that humans were impacting the climate and they went ahead with this treaty so you can see that the policy cart was way out in front of the scientific horse from the very beginning.
“So, the IPCC’s mandate was to look for dangerous human-caused climate change. The IPCC wasn’t supposed to focus on any benefits of warming. They weren’t supposed to focus on natural climate variability… they were just supposed to look for the signal of dangerous human-caused climate change. OK, that was their mandate.”
“Then the national funding agencies directed all the funding in the field to look for dangerous human-caused climate change so anybody who wants scientists to say ‘well, we don’t know that this is a problem, you don’t get funded.”
Judith Curry’s science isn’t the problem for these people; It’s that she enables climate deniers, so she must be one too. It’s also problem for all scientists who want grants. They have to walk the walk.
She couldn’t get funded for the big grants unless she planned to find “dangerous human-caused climate change.”
“I was getting funded even after I stopped to do things that weren’t directly related to global warming to analyze NASA satellite datasets. Something like that, I could get funding to do that but to do, you know, something big that would relate to the broader issues, no, all the big center and institute fundings was going to people who were establishing these programs to support dangerous human-caused climate change mostly the impacts.”
The problem is making everything about climate change takes us away from the real problems.
“The real issue is that blaming everything on climate change detracts from the real, underlying problems, which get ignored. People just throw up their hands when it’s climate change …the real underlying problems — poverty, lifestyle, poor governance, poor land use, poor city planning, on and on it goes. There are all sorts of underlying problems behind all these things that get ignored.”
In terms of lives lost, the number of people lost due to extreme weather in the past 100 years has dropped by 97%. The big thing is early warning and better infrastructure.
It’s much cheaper than trying to change the weather and pretending to fight climate change.
Any climate change is an area of concern, and we need to find ways to mitigate it.
An area of concern is “a better way to describe it. Any kind of climate change, whether it’s a natural cause or human cause, is an ongoing predicament that we need to understand. We need to adapt to and try to manage the impacts. We came to the point where we think that we’re going to prevent bad weather by eliminating fossil fuels. It’s just about the most nonsensical, illogical thing that I can imagine, and the whole world is caught up in this nonsense. I mean. We laugh at Tulip Mania, you know, back in the Netherlands, many centuries ago, but this is really on that same level years ago.”
Temperatures are increasing, and there is more CO2 in the atmosphere; beyond that, we don’t have a consensus on anything. How much of the recent warming is caused by fossil fuels? We don’t know if warming is dangerous – that’s the weakest part of the argument.
She goes into hurricanes in this clip, one of her specialties, and there is no evidence hurricanes are worsening.
Ms. Curry was critical of Climategate and the IPCC, putting her in the denier camp. She’s not a climate denier.
There is no extreme emission scenario any longer. It’s nowhere to be found scientifically. It’s moderate. To get to the extreme, “You have to make some crazily unrealistic assumptions…Climate scientists are addicted to that scenario.”
Whenever there is an extreme weather event, “fossil fuel warming is just a fairy tale.”
People who are older are very skeptical because of the rigorous education they have received. People who have knowledge of climate are shrinking, and that is being exploited.
Simply put, it’s “personal politics. They want fossil fuels to go away.”
You will not get published in a prestigious paper unless you go along with the extreme narrative.
Watch:
~~~
Judith Curry needs to get a lot more attention than she does in the field of climate change. Judith A. Curry is an American climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was a member of the National Research Council’s Climate Research Committee, published over a hundred scientific papers, and co-edited several major works. Curry retired from academia in 2017 at age 63 and now works in the private sector.
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