INTERVIEW. Dr. Judith Curry on Global Warming: Where Is the Danger?
Renowned climatologist Dr. Judith Curry says it is very tough to make the case of warming becoming dangerous.
“People used to call the warm periods the optimums, the climate optimums, because ecosystems and people thrived in these warmer climate optimums,” says Dr. Judith Curry, professor emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We talk about two degrees of warming, things like that, but the part that they don't tell you is that the baseline is the period between 1850 and 1900. Since that period, we've already seen 1.3 degrees of warming,” she says. And each of us can see for ourselves if human life on planet Earth has gotten better or worse during that time, while the population has been increasing along with agricultural productivity. “The lives lost per 100,000 people from weather and climate extremes have dropped by two orders of magnitude. So, you know, we've managed to do quite well during the first 1.3 degrees of warming. So if we were to see another 1.3 degrees of warming, which is the current best estimate from the UN climate negotiators by 2100, is there any reason to think that would be any worse than the first 1.3 degrees of warming?” Curry asks a simple question.
Many widely held beliefs, such as the notion that a climate crisis or global warming is causing more extreme weather, are simply false. The sea level rise is insignificant. “So where is the danger?” Curry asks.
Curry also points out that until we better understand natural climate variability, we can't be very confident about stating how much of the warming is human-caused. According to her we don't have a good enough understanding of a number of issues, e.g. how big is the Sun’s influence on climate, or what is the effect of ocean circulations etc. Therefore the widely used narrative of 97% of scientists agreeing that we are facing a man-made climate crisis is, according to Curry, simply a joke. “Scientists do not agree on the most consequential issues,” she explains.
There is a popular claim. It is still alive, pretty much. I think that there is a scientific consensus that 97% of scientists agree that human-caused climate change exists. Many interpret this to mean there's no room for any discussion. But where does this claim actually come from?
Well, where it comes from is that there was an activist scientist who had a blog, and he had some of his blogger buddies do a search of scientific abstracts, and they classified the abstracts as either for or against human-caused global warming. Most of them didn't directly confront the issue. And they counted papers that included cook stove technology being used in India, for example. And they counted that as in favor of the global warming narrative. So, it's actually a big joke.
What climate scientists actually agree on is very little. Everyone agrees that it's been warming since about the middle 19th century. Everyone agrees that we're adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And everyone agrees that carbon dioxide has an infrared emission spectra that, all other things being equal, acts to warm the planet.
But scientists do not agree on the most consequential issues, such as how much of the recent warming has been caused by humans. How much warming can we expect for the remainder of the 21st century? Is warming dangerous? Will humanity and human welfare overall be improved by a rapid transition away from fossil fuels? There's a huge debate, scientific and political debate on these issues, and pretending that we shouldn't have this debate and pretending that there's some sort of agreement by all scientists on these issues where there's a lot of disagreement is not only bad for science, but it misleads policymakers. So it's not good for anybody other than for the activist scientists who want attention, fame, fortune, whatever – who knows what drives them.
In your book Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response (2023), you write that in 2017, you resigned from your faculty position at the Georgia Institute of Technology because academia increasingly felt like “wrong trousers” due to climate consensus enforcement and free speech issues. Could you please elaborate on this? What did you mean?
Well, scientists who did not vocally support the IPCC (the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - HS) consensus were heavily ostracized. Not just in the media, but also by what I would call the establishment climate scientists – those who participated in the international and national assessment reports and had an outsized media presence. Many of these scientists were behaving as political advocates, and they were trying to stifle any disagreement, not just about the science, but even about the proposed policy solutions. Scientists who weren't going along with that were not only marginalized, but things became very uncomfortable for them in the universities. So I said, you know, I don't really need this. There's no way I can really fight this at this point. I'm just going to leave and go into the private sector, where I can speak my mind and feel I can be more productive.
How can debate on certain topics, such as climate, be killed that easily?
It's about careerism. I mean, if your research funding is tied to agreeing with the consensus, if your salary increase, if your tenure case… It's really about careerism and resources. That's what it's all about. The incentives are all pointing in one direction.
The people who are speaking out are either people who have retired or left academia for whatever reason, working for the private sector, or working for non-governmental organizations. These are the people speaking out and challenging the consensus and really behaving the way scientists should behave, as opposed to in the universities. They all have to dance to that same drumbeat if they want to get professional recognition and professional advancement. It's a very bad state of affairs.
Disagreement is the spice of academic life. This is how we move things forward – by arguing and disagreeing and trying to respond to the challenges and better understand the whole thing. And that's how science moves forward. However, when politics is put into play, when it becomes a politically relevant issue… And climate is just one issue. We certainly saw the same issues in public health during Covid, and there are other fields where they have the same problem. The minute it becomes policy relevant, there's an insistence by certain people in power that people go along with and agree with the prevailing view. Otherwise, they lose funding. In some cases, academics even lose their job. So, it's not a good thing, it's mixing politics and science. Whenever you do that, what you get is politics, not science.
What's the state of science under these conditions, or climate science in particular?
It's not science anymore. It's become a pseudoscience. You know, the hardcore physics-based climate dynamics, such as what we had in the 1980s, that's just a small sliver of what we now define as climate science. I mean, what the students are getting their PhDs in... They analyze the output of these climate models, looking for some sort of catastrophe that they can identify and write a paper on without ever even critically evaluating these models or understanding how they should be used. It's just sort of nonsense, and it has received so much funding.
And also the journalism has been… 15 years ago, there were only a handful of journalists who specialized in climate or even the environmental beat, so to speak. Now, until recently, you had like 35 people in the Climate Bureau at a major media outlet. And there were some that were funded by these billionaire donors. Carbon Brief and some of these other things that were publishing had huge staffs and were publishing a lot of material, and it was funded by activist donors. It's not what I would call honest or investigative journalism. It's journalism that's designed to advocate for a particular political position.
Has the situation improved or has it gotten worse?
It was getting worse and worse and worse. And the election of President Trump was really a seismic event. He wants to stop the cancel culture and discrimination at universities. And so things are very much in flux right now. But the university administrators, faculty members, and even the current cadre of PhD students really want to keep the old way. They don't want to change. So we're in a transition period right now. We'll have to see how it plays out.
You mentioned climate models. What do these models actually show us? Can they be used to predict that we are going to be in a very bad situation, environmentally, climate-wise?
The global climate models are very sophisticated models. And they've been very useful to climate scientists for research to try to test various ideas and change parameters and things like that in the models. However, they do not adequately treat natural climate variability, for starters. They do not adequately resolve extreme weather events. So, the things that we're most interested in, how much warming is being caused by humans, we don't know. There's uncertainty by a factor of three in terms of how much warming these different climate models produce. The so-called climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide varies by a factor of three among these different models. This is the most basic parameter, and we don't really understand what it should be. And so climate models produce a range of predictions. If the climate sensitivity is on the low end, then we don't need to worry about it very much. If the climate sensitivity is on the high end, we could be approaching a catastrophe. But as I understand it, the evidence supports it being a climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide on the low end. But these climate models just are not fit for most of the purposes for which they're used.
About climate sensitivity – there have been efforts for a long time to actually know it for certain what the scope of it is. Why cannot we be certain?
We just don't know. It's a very complex system. The database is inadequate. The computers aren't big enough to put everything into the climate models that we'd like to. We don't know how to predict how the Sun is going to vary. We don't know how to predict when the major volcanic eruptions are going to occur.
We don't adequately simulate the large-scale ocean circulations and how they shift. I mean, there's all sorts of things that aren't going into those models. And some of this is simply unpredictable. We just have to acknowledge that we're dealing with deep uncertainty. We're not going to be able to predict the climate in a meaningful way on the timescales that we're interested in, like decades to centuries.
Where does demonizing of carbon dioxide come from?
It goes back to the 1980s. There's a worldview that didn't like fossil fuels. They wanted to get rid of fossil fuels, didn't like capitalism. Sort of the early ideas, which are now encapsulated in the World Economic Forum, for example. The globalist view that we need non-governmental world control for these big environmental climate, and health problems. So it's a certain worldview, and at the end of the day, it's an attempt at a power grab. And so with the United Nations, with the collusion of some well-positioned activists, climate scientists, this whole thing got kicked off in the late 1980s. And it picked up steam, and 10 years ago, even five years ago, human-caused climate change was at the top of the international political agenda. Then Covid came along, and then President Trump came along. And the irony is you're not hearing about the climate issue right now. A lot of people have just moved on, even Greta Thunberg. She's no longer engaged with the climate issue. She's moved on to the Palestinian issue, for example. And some of the things that President Trump has been doing in the US would have sparked absolute outrage only a few years ago. Now, these are going pretty much unremarked in the media and even by the activist scientists. And this tells me that the fundamental conviction was a millimeter deep. They were just in this for careerist objectives and playing the political game while it was the dominant game in town. And now they're trying to figure out how to reposition themselves. It's a very strange situation. We'll see how it plays out. But like I said, particularly in the US, things are very much in flux.
You mentioned journalism. You mentioned media. So, what would you say about the treatment of climate issues in the media in a broader sense?
The media wanted a sensational story. And so, at least in the US, they really locked onto these extreme weather events. Every hurricane, every flood, every wildfire was caused by fossil-fueled warming. And this was the headline. And this was just the main shtick for many of these journalists. There was no critical evaluation. And the rationale for this, apart from getting the headlines, was trying to amp up the pressure to support the Net Zero policies. And people are starting to realize that the Net Zero policies are economically, technologically, and politically infeasible. So this is a solution that doesn't make sense. And as people are starting to realize this, reality is stepping in. But the journalists are still on this rampage about every extreme weather event as caused by global warming. But people are just paying less attention to that now. And a lot of the climate journalism, at least in the US, a lot of this has shut down. Some of the big media outlets have just terminated their climate desk. So there's just a lot less coverage than there used to be. And all of this is just happening on the timescale of a few months. I mean, that's how quickly the politics in the US have shifted. It's pretty amazing.
Let me ask you about those extreme weather events. As I understand, in 2005, you were a co-author of a research paper about increasing global proportion of category four and five hurricanes. This paper led to you being labeled even a global warming alarmist for the time being back then. What was the context for all of this?
I was a co-author on this paper, and my colleague Peter Webster assembled for the first time a global hurricane data set. So you could look at all the global hurricanes, not just in the Atlantic or the Western Pacific. And he looked at the hurricane data since 1970, which is when we have some satellite observations. And he found that since 1970 to 2004 the percentage of category four and five hurricanes had doubled over this period. And that's an astonishing finding. But the really hot potato was that this paper was published two weeks following Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans. So everybody thought this was global warming. We weren't pushing a global warming explanation in our paper, but this was, you know, the story: this must be global warming.
So this paper was a lightning rod for both sides of the climate debate, and also the hurricane researchers joined in. They criticized the paper because they said the data back in the 1970s from the satellites just wasn't good enough to do this, and that's fair enough. And they also said, well, natural climate variability has a lot to do with these variations that we're seeing, and that's also fair enough.
It was fairly contentious because the media was all over this. But both sides of the hurricane and climate change debate decided: okay, well, you know, we agree to disagree, and we learn from each side, and we decide to work together productively to assess the problem. And we even issued a joint press release about the rebuilding of New Orleans. And the biggest concern that we could all agree on was that the United States is increasingly vulnerable to landfalling hurricanes because of the increasing population and property that's near the coast. And so it was a fairly collegial outcome to all this.
I mean, if you compare that to the so-called hockey stick debate, Michael Mann, that's still raging 25 years later (Michael E. Mann is a professor at University of Pennsylvania, a climatologist, and the author of the so-called hockey stick graph, which misleadingly shows that temperatures remained stable before the 20th century but then rose sharply, resembling the shape of an hockey stick – HS), because of the behavior of Michael Mann who sues anybody who disagrees with him. And it's just been a horrible, horribly contentious situation, his attempt to defend the indefensible for some decades now.
So, the hurricane scientists behaved the way scientists are supposed to behave. And progress was being made in that area. And nobody was ostracized for being on one side or the other of the hurricane and climate change debate. But that's definitely not true about the other aspects of science.
It is being still told, at least by activists, that extreme weather events have been increasing due to climate change or global warming.
They're not increasing. This is the issue. They're not increasing. Even the most recent IPCC assessment report, the only thing that they found that was a detectable change that was above and beyond natural variability was more heat waves and fewer cold waves. That's the only thing that they found with any kind of confidence. Nothing about floods, nothing about droughts, nothing about hurricanes, nothing about tornadoes, nothing about any of these things. They vary, but it's really within the bounds of natural climate variability.
Even with regard to heat waves, there have been detailed studies in the US looking at long-term data. They see heat waves increasing in the eastern part of the US, but decreasing in the western part of the US. Even though the average temperature is increasing, the extremes aren't increasing in the West. So, you know, none of these things are simple. The US is one of the places where they have long data records that you can look at. But in a lot of places in the world, the data records are pretty sparse or short-term. So, it's very hard to determine whether there's been any change and whether that change is above the magnitude of what you would expect from natural variability.
And even in the IPCC sixth assessment report, they just didn't find anything beyond heat waves and cold events that they could attribute to global warming. And you'd never believe that to be the case based on the reports in the media.
If you look at a short data record, say since 1970, you might find a trend, and then you can say: oh, it must be fossil-fueled warming. But if you go back to the 1950s or the 1930s, you can see the extreme events were even worse. So it's cherry-picking the data, the period that you look at.
The other thing is that policymakers and the media view this attribution of extreme events to fossil-fueled warming as a key tactic in the strategy for amping up the alarm and for building political support for Net Zero. They're just using it. Certain scientists have made their careers: I'm doing this, get a lot of funding for doing it. And so they just keep perpetuating this.
You mentioned already the hockey stick graph by Michael Mann, and this has been demonstrated to be flawed many, many years ago. And yet it is still being presented as an argument for catastrophic warming or something like that. Maybe it would be good if you explained once more what is wrong with this graph?
Oh, there's so much that's wrong with it. I mean, it was the data – it was cherry-picked. Inappropriate data sets were used, out-and-out errors were made. The statistical analysis approaches were inappropriate and designed to give a hockey stick shape, no matter what. On and on it goes.
The fact that some guy published a paper in 1998 that turned out not to stand the test of time, that's not unusual in science. What's unusual is that this result was highlighted in the third IPCC assessment report published in 2001, and it was made iconic by Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth (2006 – HS). And then this really became an icon for global warming. And Michael Mann, very ambitious guy, he played this into building himself a huge amount of big media following, lots of well-paying gigs, if you will, being awarded all these climate communicator awards. He was lauded for attacking and destroying the careers of various scientists who challenged either him or the broader climate narrative. He single-handedly is why I left Georgia Tech, my academic position. If you want the details of that, I can tell you. He basically published an op-ed in The Huffington Post. It's an online journalistic thing in the US. It was about a ‘serial climate disinformer’ Judith Curry. And this was picked up by the Georgia Tech daily news buzz, where every day they would send out an email with all the mentions of Georgia Tech in the media. I was department chair at the time. It not only went to my faculty and my students, but it went to the deans and the president, and the higher administrators. It went to all the alumni. It went to all the donors. The lead thing was: serial climate disinformer Judith Curry. And that's the point when I knew my academic career was over. I was a hot potato at Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech didn't want me mentioned in the media. I couldn't issue a press release through them anymore. They wanted me to step down as department chair. I became completely marginalized at Georgia Tech. And it further became apparent to me that it was not like I could move anywhere else, because if you Google Judith Curry, all of this stuff would show up. Judith Curry, climate denier, Judith Curry, climate heretic, Judith Curry, serial climate disinformer. That's all that would show up if you googled Judith Curry. I mean, nobody's going to hire me with that kind of profile.
So I said, okay, I'm done. And I went into the private sector, which is a much more honest place to be, surprisingly enough.
I must say I'm so sorry to hear that. So many things are wrong with it that I don't even know where to start.
But you mentioned already that there were weather extremes 100 years ago and so on. And you have said that people actually suffer from weather amnesia. What I want to ask you about is whether we also suffer from weather amnesia when we look even further back? Because if we talk about the human-caused climate change today or human-caused global warming, we kind of dismiss that there has been natural climate variability all the time, even as recently as 200, 300 years ago, when there was this cold period. Before that was the medieval warm period. How does this current warming trend compare to the historical climate variability?
The modern warming really started from about 1977. Between 1945 and 1976, the temperature was actually decreasing a little bit. So to claim that warming started in 1950 when the fossil fuels picked up, well, it wasn't really warming during that period. There was really a shift around 1976, 1977, and that's when the warming took off. So we're looking at a warming spike that's less than 50 years. But if you look back in the record, especially the paleoclimate record, far enough back, you don't have good resolution. It's maybe 300 or 500 years. So if there was some sort of spike, 2,000 years ago or 3,000 years ago, like this, we wouldn't know it because we can't resolve it from the paleoclimate proxies. So we don't know if this is an unusual rate of change.
In the first part of the 20th century, say from about 1905 to 1945, you saw a rate of change, 40 years, that was comparable in rate to this warming since the 1970s. And that had almost nothing to do with CO₂ emissions. It was mostly the Sun and large-scale ocean circulations, and a lack of volcanic eruptions. There's no reason to believe that this rate of warming is somehow unprecedented in the current interglacial period. I would be very surprised if it was.
Many people do believe that if the planet warms one, two degrees, maybe three, it will come with severe consequences. Can we actually say that?
This is the weakest part of the argument if the warming was actually dangerous. People used to call the warm periods the optimums, the climate optimums, because ecosystems and people thrived in these warmer climate optimums.
So we've seen the extreme events – that doesn't really hold up. Then we have the slow creep of sea level rise. It's risen about nine inches (23 cm – HS) in the last 120 years, which isn't a heck of a lot. So where's the danger?
We talk about two degrees of warming, things like that, but the part that they don't tell you is that the baseline is the period between 1850 and 1900. Since that period, we've already seen 1.3 degrees of warming. And over the last century, we've seen an explosion in human well-being. We've had population increase by many times. Agricultural productivity has increased substantially. The lives lost per 100,000 people from weather and climate extremes has dropped by two orders of magnitude. So, you know, we've managed to do quite well during the first 1.3 degrees of warming. So if we were to see another 1.3 degrees of warming, which is the current best estimate from the UN climate negotiators by 2100, is there any reason to think that would be any worse than the first 1.3 degrees of warming?
So it's very tough to make the case that warming will be dangerous, especially at the rates we're talking.
The other game that they played was to use this extreme emissions scenario to force these climate models with a huge amount of CO₂ to get a huge amount of warming. And the UN climate negotiators have now dropped the extreme emissions scenario, saying it's not plausible. You'd have to increase coal burning by 600%, these kinds of scenarios. And so they've dropped the extreme emission scenario, and they're only looking at the medium emissions scenario. But nevertheless, climate scientists still love the extreme emissions scenario. It's like crack cocaine for them because if you just use the intermediate emissions scenario, you don't get these dramatic impacts. You have to really crank up the warming with this very extreme emissions scenario to get anything that's particularly noticeable.
So it's just this narrative that's been spun that has very weak justification and people haven't been challenging it, and they should have been.
What do you think of the IPCC's current output?
Well, it's mixed. The most recent report, the working group one on the physical science basis, I thought they did a relatively good job, better than recent reports. The working groups two and three reports in the last cycle – working group two is on impacts, working group three is on mitigation – I thought they did a terrible job.
In the previous cycle, I thought the working group two report on impacts was the best one. So a lot of it depends on which authors they pick. And even if there are good things in the body of the report, the summary for policymakers, which may be the only thing that most people read, is very political. It's designed to cherry-pick things to support a narrative. Even though you can dig deep into the bowels of the report and find some good stuff, that stuff never makes it to the summary for policymakers because it's designed around a specific narrative.
And then (UN Secretary-General António – HS) Guterres can come and say that ‘all scientists agree’, ‘humans are to blame’. And what was it? ‘The planet is boiling.’
Highway to climate hell. I don't know who writes his stuff, but there's some pretty colorful expressions that he comes up with.
And they are alarming even to people who are rational themselves. But if an important person, a world leader, comes and says this….
Absolutely.
What is your view on energy transition? We are dependent on fossil fuels, but should we be dependent on them, or should we reduce them?
My first comment is that energy policy should be decoupled from climate policy. Decouple them. Let's say the climate issue wasn't on the table. We would be in the process of a 21st-century energy transition, I believe that would anyhow be transitioning away from fossil fuels, particularly coal and oil. I think oil is too valuable just to keep burning it for the next hundred years. It's going to eventually get expensive to extract. I think natural gas has a long, long time to play, but we need vastly more energy than we're currently producing, not just to electrify Africa and get them grid electricity and make sure everybody in the world has access to enough electricity. Not just for household consumption, but so they can support an industrial economy. But also to move humans forward. All the artificial intelligence and blockchain, and quantum computing, and all of this stuff that we want to move humankind forward in the 21st century. The data centers are going to require orders of magnitude more electricity. Where is that gonna come from? We need to figure it out. And it sure as heck is not from wind and solar. Nuclear power seems to be the obvious choice. I think natural gas will be a player for a long time. And I think there's a place for rooftop solar. Whether advanced geothermal will become a reality or even some new ideas, who knows? But we need more research and development into better technologies, so we can rapidly increase the amount of electricity that's available to people, not just for households, but for industry and advancement.
In the US, President Trump is really trying to get more energy, even reopening coal plants. But in particular, he's trying to get more nuclear power. And he wants to see new plants built in six years, not 16 years. And this requires a change to the regulatory environment and permitting in the US. And his administration is trying to grapple with that. I think nuclear power is a big part of the answer. And for the European countries who've invested in nuclear power, I think they’re going to be in a much better position moving forward in the 21st century than those who are boycotting it or rejecting it, or shutting down their nuclear power plants. So ironically, I think the people who are looking for energy abundance will end up reducing emissions more rapidly than the people trying to push wind and solar, because that isn't going to work. You need to have natural gas or coal backups. Otherwise, you're facing what we saw in Spain. I mean, they just have so much wind and solar. They have good wind and solar resources, but the grid is unstable. You need to have it totally backed up with a stable power supply, like natural gas. Otherwise, you're going to be facing bigger problems than what we saw in Spain and Portugal (Spain and Portugal suffered a huge blackout at the end of April due to grid instability caused by wind and solar – HS).
So Net Zero is something that is non-achievable?
It's not achievable. And not only that. Here's the part that they don't tell you. Even if we did achieve Net Zero by 2050, we wouldn't notice any change in the climate until well into the 22nd century. There's huge inertia in the system. The carbon cycle is very complex, and there are long time scales. We can't unring this bell quickly. Even if you believe the climate models, it would be a century before we really notice any difference in the climate against the background of natural climate variability. So it's not like we're going to fix the climate by rapidly achieving Net Zero. This is really an issue for the 22nd and the 23rd century. We don't want to get really high concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere that we could see if this kept going on for centuries. But, you know, this urgency of trying to reach Net Zero and the only thing we have time to do is wind and solar has really set back the transition, in my opinion, for decades. We've spent trillions of dollars on this. It's harmed the environment. It's causing instability in the grids. There's no way wind and solar can support the order of magnitude increase in electric power that we need. So it's something that's just been a very poor investment. I think there is a place for rooftop solar, but these big solar farms, I don't think that those are going to last. I think the wind farms, really, their days are numbered. The wind turbines only have a lifetime of maybe 15-20 years before they have to be replaced, and I don't think too many of them are going to go through a replacement cycle. People are going to figure out that no, we don't think this is the way to go.
You mentioned that the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere might be a problem in the next century or the next one after that. Did I understand you correctly?
Okay, here's the issue. There are sinks, both land sinks and ocean sinks, for carbon. Okay, right now those sinks are growing, so they're taking up more carbon dioxide as we emit more. And so what the balance will be... Like we're currently at something like 430 parts per million.
People figure that we might max out like around 520 parts per million. But at some point, the radiative effects become saturated out. Even if we were to stop emitting fossil fuels right now, the time scales and the ice sheets and the oceans are long enough that we would still keep seeing sea level rise well into the 22nd century. So, exactly how this would play out if we kept business as usual, again, there's disagreement. But the main point I want to make is that we can't stop it. Even if Net Zero was successful, there's just a lot of long time scales in the system, and it would take a long time for us to notice any change against the background of natural climate variability. And the human impacts: it's land use and urban heat island effects and deforestation, and agriculture. So there's a lot of other human impacts on climate. Thinking it's roughly half natural, half human-caused at this point is sort of the way I think about it. We don't have a good enough understanding of how the Sun influences the climate. Until we better understand natural climate variability, we can't be very confident about stating how much of the warming is human-caused.
But what I think is that instead of fixating on the climate or instead of fixating on carbon dioxide, we should be thinking about the environment and how we treat that. Or what is your view?
I agree with that. I mean, the whole climate change movement sort of made the traditional environmental objectives disappear. To me, the most striking example is that Greenpeace got its start in the 1970s with Save the Whales campaign. Now, off the coast, the mid-Atlantic coast of the US, wind turbines are killing whales directly and indirectly, and Greenpeace is silent.
Especially the wind turbines and their land use causes habitats to be destroyed. And you can't recycle these used turbines. There are these big wind turbine graveyards in Texas. How is any of this good for the environment?
I think we need to get back to the traditional environmental values. And we need to worry about how to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events. Better infrastructure, better warning systems, things like that. We need to pay more attention to that, rather than every time one of these disasters hit, we throw up our hands and say: oh, it's fossil-fueled warming, nothing we can do about it. That distracts from people taking responsibility to actually reduce their vulnerability through infrastructure, better governance, better warning.
Dr. Judith Curry is a renowned U.S. climatologist. Until 2014, she chaired the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Curry left the university in 2017 due to pressure from the so-called climate consensus and because of restrictions on freedom of speech.
Before joining Georgia Tech, Curry was a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder and before that held academic positions at several other universities. She received her Ph.D. in geophysical sciences from the University of Chicago (1982).
Curry has published approximately 190 scientific papers and co-authored several significant publications on climate science. Her 2023 book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response (a part of Anthem Environment and Sustainability series), provides a comprehensive overview of what we can say with certainty about climate and balances widespread fears about a climate crisis with a realistic perspective.
Throughout her career, Curry has received several prestigious scientific awards, including the Georgia Tech Graetzinger Moving School Forward Award (2011), Georgia Tech Sigma Xi Best Faculty Paper Award (2006), NASA Group Achievement Award for CAMEX-4 (2002), University of Colorado Green Faculty Award (2002), the American Meteorological Society’s Henry G. Houghton Award (1992), and the National Science Foundation’s Presidential Young Investigator Award (1988). She is also an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2007), American Geophysical Union (2004), and American Meteorological Society (1995). She has also served as a Councilor for the American Meteorological Society, elected in 1997.
Currently, she is in the private sector and serves as the president of Climate Forecast Applications Network, LLC.