Climate Change: 3 Underlying Issues You Should Know - 10-04-2023
Episode Summary:
The document discusses the perceived crisis of climate change, highlighting that despite alarming messages, climate-related deaths are decreasing due to technological advancements. Climate scientist Judith Curry, initially an alarmist, reflects on her journey and the media's role in propagating climate change fears. The document reveals that the emphasis on climate change often overshadows real issues like poverty, poor governance, and inadequate city planning. It suggests that the narrative around climate change has been significantly influenced and perhaps distorted by funding politics, media hype, and advocacy groups, leading to a kind of "consensus" that may not accurately reflect the complex reality of climate science and its uncertainties.
Key Takeaways:
- Climate-related deaths are decreasing due to technology.
- The focus on climate change often overshadows real issues like poverty.
- Funding politics, media, and advocacy groups influence the climate change narrative.
- There is a consensus on climate change that may not reflect the complex reality of climate science.
CLIMATE CHANGE: 3 UNDERLYING ISSUES YOU SHOULD KNOW - 10-04-2023
People are dying. People are dying. The planets on fire. We must do more to fight climate change, we're told, because this is an actual crisis. But is it really a crisis?
Thanks to better technology, climate related deaths are actually falling still, the media tell us, experts say, that we have until 2030 to avoid catastrophe. Climate scientist Judith Curry once was one of those alarmists. Hurricane Katrina happened that changed everything. Well, yes, it did, and I'm partly to blame for that. Curry spoke about a link between big storms and global warming.
I was co author on a paper published in Science that was actually published two weeks following Katrina's devastation of New Orleans. And in the paper, we analyzed global hurricane intensity since 1970, and we found that the percent of category four and five hurricanes had doubled over that period. Okay. We didn't really blame it on global warming. We just put it out there.
Here's what the data says. And so this was picked up by the media as a global warming catastrophe. And for the first time, the propagandists and the alarmists said, oh, here's the way to do it. Tie extreme weather events to global warming. Okay.
It was very hard for people to say, well, one or two or even four degrees, who cares? People couldn't really relate to why we should even care about that much warming. Just from day to day and day to night. The temperature changes by more than that. But now if it's associated with more intense killer hurricanes, now we have something to be worried about.
So this hysteria is your fault? Well, sort of. Not really. They would have picked up on it anyways. But I was there right at the beginning of this hysteria, and this is the point when I entered the public debate on climate change, of the four co authors, I was the one who was most familiar with the climate change debate.
And so I became the spokesperson for the team on climate change issues. And I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the Alarmists, and I was treated like a rock star. What does that mean, treated like a rock star? Oh my God. I was flown all over the place to meet with politicians and to give these talks and whatever and lots of media attention and this, that, and the other.
And within about two months of that, besides being exhausted, I mean, the main message we wanted to get across is that if you're going to rebuild New Orleans, you need to think about protecting it from a category five. Just don't rebuild what you already have. That was the message that we wanted to get out there. But no, it became this big global warming. Nobody was interested in that other argument.
I felt it was sort of my responsibility to be out there. It's not a comfortable place for me. I'm not somebody I'm much happier behind my desk at my computer than talking to people and being part of this big political debate. We were called terrible things by people on the other side of the debate. You're in it for the money, you're in it for personal fame and publicity.
And so I was demonized by the people on the other side. What do you mean the other side? The people who didn't like the whole idea of global warming didn't buy it, didn't think we needed to reduce fossil fuels. Now called the deniers. Now called the deniers.
Okay, so after a few months of this, scientists were criticizing our study. Okay, well, the data wasn't any good in the this is natural variability. And so like a good scientist, I went in and investigated all that stuff. Oh gosh, you mean the data is no good in the 1970s? I better check that out.
So I was taking these criticisms very seriously. And in all honesty, there were a lot of stupid criticisms, but in all honesty, a few of them stuck like the data wasn't any good in the 1970s. And I was really reflecting on all this. And after being misquoted a couple of times badly in the news, I said, I'm done with interviews. I am just done with this.
I am just done with this. But in the meantime, I was invited to give a lot of lectures. And I would do that, but people would ask me questions. Oh, the hockey stick and the ice sheets and sea level rise and things that I didn't know that much about. And so I started, well, I need to learn about all these other things.
So I started learning broadly about the whole thing, not just going beyond my own personal research expertise. And then when Climate Gate struck, climate Gate threatened to overshadow the work ahead. And this was in 2009 with the unauthorized release of the emails from the University of East Anglia, if you remember this by IPCC authors. And it showed a lot of really ugly things. Avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests, trying to keep data out of the hands of people who are questioning their results and bullying, trying to get journal editors fired from their job, trying to bypass the rules of the IPCC, and on and on.
All this skull thought. And then it clicked in my head. I said, well, I can't take their word for know. This is what goes on behind the scenes of the IPCC. All this skulldugery and bullying and cherry picking and trying to keep these papers who challenge what you want the message to know out of the literature and out of the IPCC.
I can't trust the IPCC. So what did Climate Gate have to that's one university? What? The IPCC is bigger. Okay, but they were emailing all the other IPCC authors all over the world.
You have to understand the origins of all this. The origins go back to the 1980s and the UN environmental program had this big environmental agenda, anti capitalism. They hated the oil companies, and they 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. Sign this.
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 cause climate change. Okay? That was their mandate. Okay?
And then the national funding agencies directed all the funding in the field to look for dangerous human caused climate change. So anybody who you're a scientist and you say, well, we don't know that this is a problem you don't get. You can I was getting funded even after I stopped to do things that weren't directly related to global warming, to analyze NASA satellite data sets, something like that. I could get funding to do that, but to do 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 cause climate change. Mostly the impacts. Not even looking at the causes of all this. Why? There's a couple of things in play.
Once this whole thing was in motion, if you wanted to advance in your career, like be at a prestigious university, get a big salary, have big laboratory space, get lots of grant fundings, be director of an institute, get big awards by professional societies, well, there was clearly one path to go. Why it was tied in with the funding politics. It wasn't until like the 2000s, maybe 2003, 2004, where a climate scientist in a university would be called a denier, and then after climate gate, then it became really bad. I've been called a denier. Not so much that I deny mainstream climate science.
My perspective on the science is very defensible. I'm called a denier is because other people who they've called deniers, including Republicans, mostly seem to pay attention to me, and I've been invited to present congressional testimony by Republicans maybe ten or eleven times. So I'm regarded as enabling the deniers. So I must be a denier myself. This is the peculiar logic of what's I mean.
This is all part of cancel culture, and I think the climate scientists might have invented cancel culture because we were the first ones who were really out there doing this even 20 years ago, whereas in other fields it's a lot more recent. If you say we're all going to die and we got to spend a ton of money on this. You get funding if you say we don't know you don't get funding. No, it's more subtle than that. The funding agents initial send out an announcement of opportunity for grants.
We're looking at how global warming is changing water resources in the United States. Okay? That's the topic. So if you want to get funded, you say, well, I'm going to look at California, Nevada, and I'm going know, do this, that, and the other, and they'll probably get funded if it's technically credible. But if you come in saying, well, I don't see that there's any reason to think that fossil fuel emissions are changing water resources, and I'm going to go at this in such and such a way, you're probably not going to get funded.
So it's more subtle than that because the announcements of opportunity for funding are really tied to assuming that there are dangerous impacts. So the researchers aren't stupid. They know what they need to say to get funding. Exactly. Many people now act as if climate is everything.
I know there was a Time magazine cover, climate is everything. And there's this whole cottage industry of climate scientists who are trying to correlate migration. The price of wine, the quality of wine, floods, extreme weather events, transportation, congestion the size of frogs, everything. Airplane turbulence blamed on changing air currents. Scientists expect turbulence like this to become more frequent due to climate change.
Childhood obesity through inactivity caused by heat. A new study showing how climate change is making our children more obese. Oh, you've seen some good ones. You've seen some good ones. The issue is, this is a way to get you can always get a paper published that says that you can get money to do that.
You're going to get a good press release. I mean, this is playing into that whole professional game. If this was just a silly academic game, it wouldn't be so bad. But 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.
Well, it's climate change. What's the real underlying problem? Well, 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. Oh, it's climate change.
So we need to solve our real problems rather than trying to solve fake problems. People are dying. The potential extinction of the human race. The planet's on fire. The planet's on fire.
That's Bill Nye. Okay, in terms of lives lost, I mean, over the past hundred years, the number of live lost from extreme weather or droughts or whatever has dropped by 97%. It's a paltry sum. 97% more people are living with slightly warmer temperatures. Yeah, in terms of extreme weather, I mean, you have better infrastructure.
The biggest thing is advanced warning. Okay? In 1970, there was this really bad hurricane that struck Bangladesh. Estimated 500,000 people were killed. Simply the worst of the many cyclones the 2 million people who live here have ever experienced.
And this is what precipitated East Pakistan splitting off from Pakistan. I mean, it was that event. So that was a case of weather causing real changes. Yeah. And another tropical cyclone of similar magnitude hit Bangladesh.
The super cyclone bringing torrential rain and 150 miles an hour winds. 3000 people died and the difference was better warnings. Okay. And people had advanced much cheaper than trying to I know. People were able to evacuate.
More than 600,000 people were evacuated. Advanced warning is affordable. It's really cheap the price, really spending pretending to fight climate change totally. And the whole issue of danger, I mean, this is the weakest part of their case. Even the IPCC, the UN climate Assessment Reports, the more credible one, the physical science basins, they don't use the word danger.
They use reasons for concern. And that's a better way to describe it. Yeah. Any kind of climate change, whether it's natural cause or human cause, is an ongoing predicament that we need to understand and we need to adapt to and we need to try to manage the impacts. How we came to the point where we think that we're going to prevent bad weather from happening by eliminating fossil fuels is 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 back in the Netherlands many centuries ago, but this is really on that same level years ago with lousy technology, holland adjusted to rising sea levels. Okay, this is really a pretty amazing story. I mean, Holland has worked on this for centuries. I mean, parts of the country are as much as 7ft below sea level.
It's not that hard to manage a small amount of sea level rise. 7ft underwater, that's not a little I know it's a lot. The technology is amazing. And people over in the US. And around the world are consulting with Holland to figure out how to manage their sea level rise issue.
I mean, this is something that's manageable the John Oliver segment. This whole debate should not have happened. I apologize to everyone at home. My thanks to Bill Nye and the overwhelming scientific consensus. The overwhelming scientific consensus, that's what people still believe.
Okay? This whole climate consensus and this is chapter two in my book about the consensus. When you talk about a scientific consensus like the Earth orbits the sun, you don't need to say there's a consensus that the Earth orbits the sun. It's a well known fact. When you're talking about consensus, it's usually on a topic where there is disagreement.
And a government has asked a group to come to some sort of an agreement on what's what. You see it in science, you see it in medical boards when they're deciding what drug gets reimbursed for insurance for whatever disease. So it's a manufactured consensus. It's a consensus of scientists, which is different than a scientific consensus. Okay, so it's been politicized.
Something as complex as the Earth's climate is crazy, crazily, complicated, complex, ambiguous, uncertain. And there's a true scientific consensus on very little of this that the temperatures have been increasing for over 100 years, that burning of fossil fuels emits CO2 into the atmosphere, and CO2 has a radiation spectrum that sort of keeps the Earth's surface warm, all other things being equal. Beyond that, there's no real big consensus on anything. The most consequential issues we don't have consensus on how much of the recent warming is caused by fossil fuels. We still don't know fossil fuel.
And is warming dangerous? This is the weakest part of the argument. There's no agreement as to whether warming is dangerous. That's a weak part of the argument that was assumed. Okay, well, you're conflating the extreme this is the Hurricane Katrina argument.
You know, Hurricane Katrina wasn't caused by global warming. It was caused by but your paper said there's more hurricane activity okay. Associated with warming temperatures. Two issues. Part of it was bad dava.
Part of it is natural climate variability. And the most recent assessment of the category 45 issue is that it's maybe a 13% increase since 1980. And all of that increase is in the North Atlantic and the North Indian Ocean. You don't see it in the Pacific, which is where most of the hurricanes are. And in the Atlantic, the recent increase is known to be associated with the large scale multidocadal ocean oscillation.
So it's natural climate variability. And the worst landfall us. Landfalling hurricanes were actually in the 1930s. So there's really no evidence that hurricanes you're the unusual researcher who looks at criticism of your paper and actually concluded they had a point. They had a point for sure.
And I figured it out very early on about the data. But for saying that, you're yeah, you know, people pay attention to my science. The reason I really got knocked over into the Denier camp was I was critical of the climate gate scientists who I thought behaved unethically, and I was critical of the IPCC. That was my cardinal sin for getting me dumped into the denier camp because I was critical of their behavior. And I think my criticisms of the IPCC were echoed a few years later after Climate gate, when there was an inter academy council appointed by the UN to investigate what the IPCC was doing.
And they agreed they weren't paying enough attention to uncertainty and that a lot of their conclusions were overconfident. And this is exactly what I was saying. But the IPCC is one thing, but then you get the UN officials that cherry pick and overhype this. Climate change is quite simply an existential threat for most life on the planet, including and especially the life of humankind. And then this gets even further hyped in the media.
Global warming poses an existential and a real threat, which then gets further amplified by the advocacy groups we are now facing. Existential crisis. In the old days, Greenpeace and Natural Defense Council, I mean, these were fairly sane advocacy groups. Now we have extinction rebellion and just top oil and all of these groups that are just completely off the rails. What is worth more art or life?
Is it worth more than food? Worth more than justice? Greenpeace and the Nrdcra club are reasonable oh, compared, relatively compared to extinction rebellion. But they're all basing their scary claims, give us more money, we're going to stop it on UN. Predictions.
Okay, now this is where it gets interesting. So exactly what is the UN. Predicting? Well, over the last two years, the UN. Climate Assessment Team has published a series of reports and they put out a range of projections for the 21st century that are tied to how much greenhouse gases CO2 that we emit in the atmosphere.
And there are some alarming predictions tied to the extreme emission scenario in these IPCC reports. They really emphasize the simulations from the extreme emission scenario. It's more than half of what they talk about in these reports is tied to the extreme emission scenario. Well, in 2021, the UN. Climate negotiators dropped the extreme emission scenario and they're working off of the medium emission scenario as a baseline.
And right now we're tracking slightly below the medium emission scenario. And so this gives a much more moderate amount of warming than the extreme emission scenario. Even the Biden administration just issued a new report on the social cost of carbon. The extreme emission scenario is nowhere to be found. So you can see that the climate scientists are so addicted to the extreme emissions scenario that what they're doing has become divorced from the actual policymakers.
Why did the UN Drop it? Because the economists say, look, this is so not happening. In order for the extreme emissions scenario to happen, we'd have to increase our use of coal by six times, which is some have estimated that's more than the known recoverable reserves of coal. I mean, this is just not the path that we're on. I mean, it's just totally unrealistic.
In order to get to the extreme emissions scenario, you have to make crazily unrealistic assumptions and the UN. Climate negotiators, okay, well, we need to get real here. To their credit, don't give them too much credit, but they get credit for that one thing. But the climate scientists remain addicted to that scenario. But does this stop the UN.
Climate negotiators from saying, wow, this is good news? No. They say, well, the warming isn't as bad as we thought, but the impacts are worse. So we need to double down on the alarm. Rather than two degrees is the target.
We need to knock it back to 1.5 degrees as a threshold of danger. And the only way they get the impacts to be worse is if they're assuming that the extreme weather events are all caused by CO2 emissions, which of course, they aren't. In New York City, you've had the smoke from the Canadian wildfires because the temperature is warmer in Canada. Well, actually the trend in Canadian wildfires is actually down. So blaming this one.
Global warming is sort of hard. It was actually a fluke of a dry period and some lightning, out of season lightning, which caused those fires. And it's not warming. Back in the 1930s, the weather in the US. Was way, way worse than what we've seen in the last couple of decades.
We had far and away the worst heat waves, the worst droughts, the worst wildfires. Actually, the worst wildfires were even earlier in the 20th century, in the late 19th century. It's what John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath. Don't know which way to turn. Oh, exactly.
What caused a dust bowl and all of that. That was horrible. And the worst landfalling hurricanes, us. Landfalling hurricanes were in the 1930s. So what was going on then?
Well, it was natural climate variability. There was a bunch of El Ninos and the Atlantic and the Pacific. Circulations were in a certain phase, and you got a decade of really awful weather and it was over most of the United States, not just the Dust Bowl region. It shows up in New York. Even shows up in New York.
The worst heat waves in New York were back then. Also. Wait a second, I see all these record high temperatures. Oh, but there's also record low temperatures. You're always going to be setting records somewhere high and low.
Do you remember back to Christmas when you had the crazy cold weather that came down in the stream? Variability caused by manmade climate change. Well, actually, if you really look at the climate dynamics, if you're warming and you're warming the Arctic faster than the lower latitudes, that's actually going to reduce the variability. And there's so much arm waving whenever there's an extreme weather event to try to tie it to global warming. Sure, fossil fuel emissions did have an impact, but there was a lot of other stuff going on in the 20th century that were influencing our climate.
And to think that all of this is global warming, human call it global warming, fossil fueled warming is just a fairy tale. And yet that's a minority opinion if you read the media. Oh, I know. Well, I mean, the people who understand this are a subfield of climate science called climate dynamicists. Okay?
And this is a relatively small group who have their roots in physics, not in ecology, not in sociology, not in economics, not in whatever, but have their training in physics and back in the old days. And this is why a lot of people on the older side in their fifty s, sixty s and seventy s tend to be more skeptical of the mainstream narrative is because they got this very rigorous education in geophysical fluid dynamics and climate dynamics, so they understand the circulation patterns and what's going on nowadays. You get your degree in climate studies, and the only thing you know about what is actually causing climate change is how to recite IPCC talking points. There's no understanding there. So when you hear experts talking about all this, there's three categories.
One is people who are fluent in reciting IPCC talking points. Bill Nye would be an example. You're adults now, and this is an actual crisis. He can talk about this stuff, but he doesn't have really any real understanding. He doesn't have a graduate degree, and his undergraduate degree is mechanical engineering, but he's the right, right.
And then the second class is people who actually have some understanding, who can read the full UN climate report, the full one, and actually understand it. And then there's a third class, people who are genuine experts who can critically evaluate all that. Okay? And unfortunately, that third category is shrinking proportionally because the rest of the climate field is exploding. You have a preponderance of this category.
One, people like Bill Nye who are judged to be experts, who are talking about all this. What's in it for them? Fame? Fortune? It may be their personal politics probably plays a, you know, fame and fortune.
So the IPCC has several scenarios, and the extreme one they've dropped. And as a result of these more moderate reference scenarios, the amount of warming predicted for the 21st century relative to the extreme emission scenario has been cut in half. So we're looking at half the amount of warming than what we expected, even still do lots of damage. It could, maybe, but I still think those projections are too high because they haven't adequately accounted for natural climate variability. But that leads us to the point is, what's dangerous might be dangerous.
The slow creep of global warming is associated with two main impacts, okay? One is the slow creep of sea level rise, and the other one is melting of glaciers and ice sheets. And those are slow processes. And again, the modern sea level rise and the modern glacier meltoff started in the mid 18 hundreds. Remember, we're coming out of the Little Ice Age right now.
Sea level rise is rising at 3 year. To put that in perspective, 3 mm. You stack two pennies on top of each other, that's 3 mm. That's how much sea level is rising each year. Per year?
Per year. It adds up. It adds up, but it adds up to maybe eight inches, eight or nine inches less than a foot. Okay? If you think about what the tides are from day to day, it's a lot more than a foot.
And a storm surge from a hurricane can be more than 10ft. So we're talking about a slow creep that we can easily normalize and adapt to. But I hear that we could be approaching the tipping point where everything gets worse. There have been abrupt climate changes in the past, and around 10,000 years ago, there was a hugely abrupt climate change tied to a change in ocean circulation patterns ten degrees over a century. And this was just tied to internal circulation patterns in the ocean.
Scientists are still trying to sort this out, but we don't know. But there can be these abrupt shifts in the climate. They talk about collapse of the Atlantic Ocean circulation and the Gulf Stream and all these crazy possibilities. Even the IPCC puts these know, low likelihood or low confidence. The only one that they give high confidence to is the disappearance of summertime Arctic sea ice.
And by disappearance, they mean 80% of it, they don't mean 100% of it. And in any event, the Arctic sea ice would reform again in the winter. So I don't know exactly what kind of a catastrophe that would cause. The most scary of these scenarios is the potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The West Antarctic ice sheet is very unstable.
If you took away the West Antarctic ice sheet, that part of the continent would actually be well underwater. So it's what we call a marine ice sheet. The glacier sits above the water level, but the continental part is well below sea level. As a result, it's unstable and the ice sheet moves a lot faster than you would expect a glacier to move and icebergs break off. You hear in the news, oh, one just broke off the size of Rhode Island, and you hear this.
And that happens in the normal course of events. It is an unstable ice sheet. And if this were to collapse, it would take some centuries for all this to melt, but it would be a lot of sea level to rise. So to me, that's the one scary thing that could happen. On the timescale of three or four centuries, it would raise sea level rise six, 7ft globally on the timescale of centuries.
But that's something that we can adapt to on the timescale of several centuries. But the likelihood of that happening, I mean, it's one of these big wild cards. The ODS are very low of anything like that happening in the 21st century. Why don't other scientists who recognize the nonsense push back? If they work at a university, it's going to be very uncomfortable for them.
I mean, there's a young geologist who recently left the University of Alabama, actually, before his tenure decision, saying, I don't want to play this game. I know what it takes just to see it here. I don't want to play this game. I'm out. There's a lot of young scientists, PhDs, who would love to work at a university, say, well, which university should I go to or try to go to where they would accept people who do this.
Kind of research and I give them a list of a few places that I know of. I said, but the jobs are very competitive and you're going to have a tough time getting funding. And then people have retired prematurely, like myself, and then a few have stuck it out and they've been able to manage. If they have friends in high places, the ones who speak up are people who are retired, who are in the private sector because universities have become idiots and they punish people who tell the truth. It's pretty ugly.
I felt the hostility when I was at Georgia Tech, and Georgia Tech is by no means the worst place to be in this regard. And I just said, no, I'm not going to do this. I resign. Still not getting why. Push, dubious, extremism personal politics.
They're environmentalists. They want fossil fuels to go away. Anti capitalist, antidemocratic the whole thing. University disease. Well, the whole university disease.
Universities are very liberal places for the most part, and there's a few bastions of sanity. University of Chicago, my alma mater, leads the pack in terms of sanity on all these kinds of issues. So it's not every university, but if you're a state university in a blue know, of course you're going to be doing that. To get paid? No, to get university funding.
The board of trustees. There's all these politics in play in universities that determine standing. If they want big donations for some big climate institute, a new building, a new whatever, they want to toe this party line. If all their donors are of that persuasion, CNN large parts of the world could become uninhabitable. They're quoting climate scientists.
Climate scientists say all sorts of crazy things. First off, the most prestigious journal, publications like Science and Nature, they only send a small fraction of papers out for review. They reject a majority of them before they even go out for peer review. So if you're coming in with a paper that's challenging any part of the consensus, it's not going to even be sent out for review. The editor of the journal Science, she wrote this political rant about we need to stop emissions.
Now that was published in Science and she was the chief editor of the Journal of Science. So what kind of message does that give to the editors? Promote the alarming papers and don't even send the other ones out for review. So you can see how this gatekeeping works. You can always get your paper published somewhere, but it's not going to be in a prestige journal, one that helps you with your career or one that gets publicity or anything like that.
The website the Smog writes, Judith Curry says her consulting company includes petroleum companies. You're doing this for the money. Okay. Back when I was a faculty member at Georgia Tech, I was extremely well paid. My salary was matter of public record well into six figures.
My salary since I've gone private sector rarely even approaches half of what I was receiving from Georgia Tech. So if I was doing this for the money, I would have stayed at Georgia Tech. I can see why other academics don't want to speak out. Joe Rom of Climate Progress. Judith Curry abandoned science.
I think he called me the most debunked climate scientist on the planet. But the really funny thing is, there's a backstory with Joe Rom. Joe Rom just loved the hurricane. My stuff following Hurricane Katrina, joe Rom and I even did a little mini tour in Florida, going around talking to people. I would talk about the problem.
He would talk about the solutions. Joe Rom, if you look back before Climate Gate, he was publicizing me all over the place, even during Climate Gate, when he know what's she doing here, what's she doing here. He even published one of my essays on Climate Gate on his Climate Progress blog. Okay, within about three or four months, the important people sort of told him, okay, we need to abandon Judith Curry and just call her a denier. But up until that point, joe Rom was actually a promoter of mine.
I even wrote a blurb for his i, you know, I reviewed it for him and everything. So we know quasi friend. And then after that, he turned, and I then became the most debunked climate scientist on the planet. So you can see what drives these people. It's not science.
Are you the most debunked climate scientist? I'm probably the most irritating.
The reason they hate me so much is because I criticize them, and I criticize michael Mann calls you a serial climate disinformer, and he called me a denier and a misinformer. I mean, this is how much I had gotten under his skin. I'm the number one enemy in certain circles. Certainly. Michael Mann.
He takes it personally. You told me you had to develop the hide of an know, things were just uncomfortable for me at Georgia Tech. And so I get invites from headhunters all the time to apply for this, that, or the other position. And I started applying for some of these positions. I wanted to be out west, so I was looking at things out west and some pretty big positions, and I got invitations to interview, and I did interview and the headhunters know, wow, you're a great candidate.
You have brilliant ideas on how to move this university forward, and you interview very well, but at the end of the day, nobody will hire you, because if you Google Judith Curry, everything that shows up with Judith Curry, denier, judith Curry serial climate disinformer, all dismoglike. Ten years ago, it was awful. It's not so bad anymore, but ten years ago, if you Googled me, the first hundred things that you would show up would be Judith Curry denier stuff. I was dead in academia at that point. I started making my plans to transition 100% to the private sector and work on my company full time and best thing I ever did in my life.
Why had things become uncomfortable at your school? Well, some of my faculty members were complaining because I criticized the IPCC. I criticized the hockey stick. They were complaining there was a bad situation where one of my faculty members had a relative who was in the higher administration at Georgia Tech who was feeding all this stuff to this person. The provost was very into the narrative of climate alarmism and saw this as a way to get more money to Georgia Tech, and on and on it went.
I was just unpopular with the higher administration for my stand, and when I stepped down as chair, I could see the writing on the wall that I would be marginalized at the university, even just as a regular faculty member. No teaching assignments, small office, never going to get a salary. I could just see the writing on the wall, so I left. I mean, I could have stayed there and sucked up my big salary. I would have made a whole lot more money doing that than from my paltry sums that my clients in the petroleum sector pay me.
I could have made a lot more money at Georgia Tech, but that's not who I am. My personal and professional integrity would not allow me to play that game. Good for you. I'm a lot happier. I'm on top of the world right now.
I'm so glad to be out of all that. Thank you. Judith Curry.
