Posted on 11/26/2015 7:06:29 AM PST by markomalley
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.
Some consider her a heretic. According to Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, a vociferous advocate of extreme measures to prevent a climatic Armageddon, she is ‘anti-science’. Curry isn’t fazed by the slur.
‘It’s unfortunate, but he calls anyone who doesn’t agree with him a denier,’ she tells me. ‘Inside the climate community there are a lot of people who don’t like what I’m doing. On the other hand, there is also a large, silent group who do like it. But the debate has become hard — especially in the US, because it’s become so polarised.’ Warming alarmists are fond of proclaiming how 97 per cent of scientists agree that the world is getting hotter, and human beings are to blame. They like to reduce the uncertainties of climate science and climate projections to Manichean simplicity. They have managed to eliminate doubt from what should be a nuanced debate about what to do.
Professor Curry, based at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, does not dispute for a moment that human-generated carbon dioxide warms the planet. But, she says, the evidence suggests this may be happening more slowly than the alarmists fear.
In the run-up to the Paris conference, said Curry, much ink has been spilled over whether the individual emissions pledges made so far by more than 150 countries — their ‘intentional nationally determined contributions’, to borrow the jargon — will be enough to stop the planet from crossing the ‘dangerous’ threshold of becoming 2°C hotter than in pre-industrial times. Much of the conference will consist of attempts to make these targets legally binding. This debate will be conducted on the basis that there is a known, mechanistic relationship between the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and how world average temperatures will rise.
Unfortunately, as Curry has shown, there isn’t. Any such projection is meaningless, unless it accounts for natural variability and gives a value for ‘climate sensitivity’ —i.e., how much hotter the world will get if the level of CO2 doubles. Until 2007, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) gave a ‘best estimate’ of 3°C. But in its latest, 2013 report, the IPCC abandoned this, because the uncertainties are so great. Its ‘likely’ range is now vast — 1.5°C to 4.5°C.
This isn’t all. According to Curry, the claims being made by policymakers suggest they are still making new policy from the old, now discarded assumptions. Recent research suggests the climate sensitivity is significantly less than 3°C. ‘There’s growing evidence that climate sensitivity is at the lower end of the spectrum, yet this has been totally ignored in the policy debate,’ Curry told me. ‘Even if the sensitivity is 2.5°C, not 3°C, that makes a substantial difference as to how fast we might get to a world that’s 2°C warmer. A sensitivity of 2.5°C makes it much less likely we will see 2°C warming during the 21st century. There are so many uncertainties, but the policy people say the target is fixed. And if you question this, you will be slagged off as a denier.’
Curry added that her own work, conducted with the British independent scientist Nic Lewis, suggests that the sensitivity value may still lower, in which case the date when the world would be 2°C warmer would be even further into the future. On the other hand, the inherent uncertainties of climate projection mean that values of 4°C cannot be ruled out — but if that turns out to be the case, then the measures discussed at Paris and all the previous 20 UN climate conferences would be futile. In any event, ‘the economists and policymakers seem unaware of the large uncertainties in climate sensitivity’, despite its enormous implications.
Meanwhile, the obsessive focus on CO2 as the driver of climate change means other research on natural climate variability is being neglected. For example, solar experts believe we could be heading towards a ‘grand solar minimum’ — a reduction in solar output (and, ergo, a period of global cooling) similar to that which once saw ice fairs on the Thames. ‘The work to establish the solar-climate connection is lagging.’
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?’
Or, was she booted off the island due to rising ocean levels. Happy Thanksgiving.
Tossed about in an ocean of lies, we.
About 1,000 years ago, Leif Erickson & his gang sailed westward and landed on a large island. They found the temperature warm & moderate and the island was lush with greenery.
They named the island Greenland.
Did those evil SUVs burning oil-based fuels cause such a climate change to make the island so warm and green?
In addition, where I’m sitting (SW Ohio) the land was covered by a 2-mile thick (10,000 feet) glacier. Eventually, the planet became so warm the glacier melted back to the Artic.
Were there SUVs even back then?
Humans exhale CO2.
CO2 is a nutrient for plants & trees.
Solar activity controls all temperatures on Earth.
Anyone who believes CO2 is harmful should put their money where their mouth is and stop exhaling.
Excellent post!
btt
Eric the Red found Greenland. His son, Leif, went to Newfoundland. Weird - my second viking-related response today.
She is standing in the way of trillions of dollars for these “scientists”.
Pray America wakes
But will be proclaimed bu tthe Government and its horde of Lysenkos to have increased far more when in reality it will have decreased due to the progressing solar minimum. When there is snow in June in Alabama and blizzards in the north and the crops have bad years it will be blamed on Climate Change. And that will be true. The climate does change, incessantly. It always has and always will. The real thing to fear is that the science and technology is approaching the point where something can actually be done to counter the imagined horrors of global warming and thus we plunge the earth into a real Ice Age and the concomitant famine and radical human die-off.
Out here in Los Angeles area, the “King Tides” are being used to “study/illustrate” what the climate change will do to sea levels.
Today’s extremes will be tomorrow’s norms.
It’s too bad Eric Bloodaxe didn’t discover North America, that’s a much cooler Viking name than “Erikson.”
The new religion needs a Judas, and Judith is it. Al Gore: you’ll need a martyr also. Please lead.
Hint: If one model wins the battle, does that mean all the wrong scientists have to return their grant money? It definitely would shut down future gravy train funding of this charade.
Judith’s thought that the scientific community (global warmers) will ameliorate is unlikely for one very big reason: Thought Control. Globally enforced PC.
What’s going on today, and accelerating by the minute, is the exclusion of those who really think.
One FReeper nailed it: Our media and the protesters have adopted the palestinian tactic of crying disenfranchisement (snowflakes) as a justification for blowing up free speech and civilization... the rule of law subverted by phony feelings... phony causes... and insanely justified violence.
Bookmark
OK!! Everybody pay attention!
Lesson for today:
1. The sun is 1,300,000 times as big as the earth.
2. The sun is a ball of fire that controls the climates of all its planets.
3. The earth is one of the sun’s planets.
4. The earth is a speck in comparison to the size of the sun.
5. Inhabitants of the earth are less than specks.
Study Question: How do less-than-specks in congress plan to control the sun?
Algore is high priest of this tribe.
There is no science anymore, it is nothing but politicians promoting Marxism.
The group of “Self Proclaimed Scientists” is only 79they have lost 5 now brings the number down to 90% but they still use 97% anyway the number of “Scientists” is now 71 world wide.
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