“Climatology is becoming an increasingly dubious science, serving a political project… the policy cart is leading the scientific horse.”

– Judith Curry, City Journal, Winter 2019.

MasterResource has followed the science when it comes to climate change by profiling the work of Judith Curry, former head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and currently a private researcher. Once in the alarmist camp, she checked her premises post-Climategate and realized that “the cause” was corrupted at the expense of sober science, not to mention public policy.

Previous MasterResource posts on Curry, emphasizing bottom-line quotations, have been:

• On the Falsity of Climate Consensus: Judith Curry’s March 29, 2017, Testimony (April 3, 2017)
• Mitigation Math: Is Climate Activism Futile? (Judith Curry thinks so) [March 27, 2017]
• Judith Curry’s Climategate ‘Open Letter’ Revisited (December 7, 2015)
• The Brave Judith Curry (Part II) [August 25, 2015]
• The Brave Judith Curry (one plus the truth equals a majority) [May 6, 2015]
• Judith Curry vs. Climate Alarmism (Jon and Jerry–are you listening?) [April 16, 2015]
• Scientific Communication: Preach or Engage? (Judith Curry vs. AGU climate bias) [ December 16, 2011]
• Judith Curry Looks for Middle Ground in the Contentious Climate Debate (Jerry North, can you help her?) [August 27, 2010]

And here we are today. City Journal, a publication of the Manhattan Institute, recently published an interview by Guy Sorman, Climate Science’s Myth-Buster,” subtitled “It’s time to be scientific about global warming, says climatologist Judith Curry.”

Eight salient quotations from Curry in this article follow.

“There is warming, but we don’t really understand its causes. The human factor and carbon dioxide, in particular, contribute to warming, but how much is the subject of intense scientific debate.”

“Sea level is rising, but this has been gradually happening since the 1860s; we don’t yet observe any significant acceleration of this process in our time.”

“Climate change is a complex and poorly understood phenomenon, with so many processes involved…. some find it reassuring to believe that we have mastered the subject…. nothing upsets many scientists like uncertainty.”

“Climatology has become a political party with totalitarian tendencies. If you don’t support the UN consensus on human-caused global warming, if you express the slightest skepticism, you are a ‘climate-change denier,’ a stooge of Donald Trump, a quasi-fascist who must be banned from the scientific community.”

“… politics, money, and fame [drive climate scientists who] … must not like capitalism or industrial development too much and should favor world government, rather than nations.”

“Climatology is becoming an increasingly dubious science, serving a political project… the policy cart is leading the scientific horse.”

“We’re always being told that we are reaching a point of no return—that, for instance, the melting of the Arctic ice pack is the beginning of the apocalypse. But this melting, which started decades ago, is not leading to catastrophe.”

“… volcanic eruptions in the Antarctic region … would break up the ice, and these cannot be predicted.”