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Freedom Research

𝐑𝐞𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐢𝐬𝐭 𝐃𝐫. 𝐉𝐮𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐲 𝐝𝐞𝐛𝐮𝐧𝐤𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐲𝐭𝐡 𝐨𝐟 𝐚 𝐜𝐥𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐬, 𝐫𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜 𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐚𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐢𝐬𝐬𝐮𝐞𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐚𝐮𝐬𝐞𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠.

“Your funding, salary increase, and tenure case are tied to agreeing with the ‘consensus.’ It’s really about careerism and resources. They all have to dance to that same drum beat to get professional recognition and professional advancement,” says Dr. Judith Curry, professor emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology, describing the state of climate science and research in recent years.

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 (part of the Anthem Environment and Sustainability series), provides a comprehensive overview of what we can say with certainty about the 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.

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Autogenerated transcript. May contain errors.

Interviewer: The media wanted, you know, something, you know, a sensational story. Every hurricane, every flood, every wildfire was caused by, you know, fossil-fueled warming. Let’s turn now to three extreme climate events around the globe, which many believe are linked by man-made climate change. The Western drought and dozens of major forest fires, as well as flooding in the East, are all painful demonstrations of the reality of the climate crisis. But they’re all in agreement that global warming is causing more extreme weather events. Back up there with, are every major storm, flood, or wildfire truly evidence that human behavior has triggered a catastrophic climate crisis? Children swept away by monsoon rains, families running from the flames. For scientists, it is unequivocal: humans are to blame. Can we even claim that the extreme weather events are increasing?

Dr. Judith Curry: Oh, they’re not increasing. This is the issue. They’re not increasing, and you’d never believe that to be the case based on the reports in the media.

Interviewer: Dr. Judith Curry, a renowned climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology, has had a distinguished academic career. If you sometimes get the impression from news reports that all scientists agree rising CO2 levels are driving the climate or disaster, Professor Curry assures you this claim is false. Okay, 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? [Music] In this interview, Professor Curry clarifies what we know about climate change for certain and debunks misleading and false narratives. There’s 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. So, many interpret this to mean there’s no room for any discussion left. But where does this claim actually come from?

Dr. Judith Curry: Okay, well, where it comes from 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. Well, most of them didn’t have, you know, that they just didn’t directly confront the issue, and they counted as for global warming papers that included cookstove technology being used in India. 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 spectrum that, all other things being equal, acts to warm the planet. Okay, 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 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, not only is it bad for science, but it misleads policymakers. So, it’s not good for anybody other than for the activist scientists who want, you know, attention, fame, fortune, whatever—who knows what drives them.

Interviewer: In your book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk, which I have read, by the way, and I find it a very good book, you write that in 2017 you resigned from your faculty position at the Georgia Institute of Technology because academia increasingly felt like “wrong trousers,” well, due to climate consensus enforcement and free speech issues. Well, could you please elaborate on this? What do you mean?

Dr. Judith Curry: Well, there were people—scientists—who did not vocally support the IPCC consensus; they were heavily ostracized, not just in the media but also by what I would call establishment climate scientists, those who participated in the international and national assessment reports and had an outsized media presence. Anybody who criticized their behavior—I mean, 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. And 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 where I feel I can be more productive.

Interviewer: What I’m thinking is, how on certain topics, such as climate, how can this debate be killed that easily?

Dr. Judith Curry: It’s about careerism. I mean, if your funding, 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. I mean, so that’s what it’s all about. I mean, the incentives are all pointing in one direction, and, you know, people—the people who are speaking out—are either people who have retired or left academia for whatever reason but who are now either retired, 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, where 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. I mean, this is how we move things forward—by, you know, 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 you have a politically relevant issue—I mean, 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, you know, they lose funding. In some cases, you know, academics even lose their job. So, you know, it’s not a good thing. So, it’s mixing politics and science. Whenever you do that, what you get is politics, not science.

Interviewer: What’s the state of science under these conditions, or climate science in particular?

Dr. Judith Curry: It’s not science anymore; it’s become a pseudoscience. You know, the hardcore, physics-based climate dynamics, you know, such as what we had in the 1980s or whatever, I mean, 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, you know, critically evaluating these models or how they should be used. I mean, it’s just sort of nonsense, and it’s received so much funding. And also, the journalism has been—you know, like 15 years ago, there were only a handful of journalists who specialized in climate or even the environmental beat, so to speak. Now, you know, 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 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.

Interviewer: Having been a journalist all of my career, then, if somebody pays you to write something, then it’s not going to be pretty much honest. This is for sure. What do you think, currently? I know you’re not affiliated with any universities right now or with academia, but by looking from your position, where you currently are at, has the situation improved, or has it gotten worse?

Dr. Judith Curry: Well, it was getting worse and worse and worse, and the election of President Trump was really a seismic event. He wants to stop, you know, 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, you know, we’re in a transition period right now. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

Interviewer: But you mentioned the 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?

Dr. Judith Curry: Okay, the global climate models are very sophisticated, you know, very sophisticated models, and they’ve been very useful to climate scientists for research to try to, you know, test various ideas and change parameters and things like that. The models, however, 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—you know, how much warming is being caused by humans—we don’t know. There’s a factor of three uncertainty in terms of how much warming these different climate models produce. Okay, the so-called climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide varies by a factor of three among these different models, and so 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. So, 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, yeah, it could be, you know, approaching catastrophic. 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.

Interviewer: About the climate sensitivity, because, as I understand, there have been efforts for a long time to actually, you know, know it for certain. But why cannot we be certain that it’s low or it’s high or how much it is? What’s the case there?

Dr. Judith Curry: Well, I mean, we just don’t know. Like, 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, and 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, you know, aren’t going into those models, and it’s—I mean, some of this is simply unpredictable, and we just have to acknowledge that, you know, we’re dealing with deep uncertainty. You know, we’re not going to be able to predict the climate in a meaningful way, you know, on the timescales that we’re interested in, like decades to centuries.

Interviewer: Where does this come from, the demonizing of carbon dioxide?

Dr. Judith Curry: Okay, well, you know, it goes back to really the 1980s. You know, 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, you know, we need non-governmental world control for these big environmental, climate, and health problems. So, I mean, it’s just that—I mean, it’s a certain worldview, and at the end of the day, it’s an attempt at a power grab. Okay, and so the United Nations and, you know, with the collusion of some well-positioned activist climate scientists, this whole thing got kicked off in the late 1980s, and, you know, 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, you know, now this is—and the irony is that people who are so passionate about the climate issue, you’re not hearing about the climate issue right now. A lot of people have just moved on, like, even Greta Thunberg. I mean, she’s no longer engaged in the climate issue; she’s moved on to the Palestinian issue, for example. And there have been, you know, some of the things that President Trump has been doing in the US would have sparked absolute outrage, you know, only a few years ago; now these are going pretty much unremarked in the media and even by the activist scientists. Now that they, you know, and this tells me that the fundamental conviction was a millimeter deep, you know. They were just in this for careerist objectives, you know, 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. Okay, and, you know, it’s a very strange situation. We’ll see how it plays out, but it’s, like I said, particularly in the US, things are very much in flux.

Interviewer: You mentioned journalism; you mentioned media. So, what would you say about the treatment of climate issues in the media in a broader sense? Is there any useful information in the mainstream media about climate, or what is your take on it?

Dr. Judith Curry: The media wanted, you know, something, you know, a sensational story, and so, at least in the US, they really locked on to these extreme weather events. Every hurricane, every flood, every wildfire was caused by, you know, fossil-fueled warming, and this was a headline, and this was, you know, just the main stick for many of these journalists. There was no critical evaluation, you know, and the rationale for this, apart from getting headlines, was trying to amp up the pressure to support the net-zero policies. And, you know, 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, you know, reality, you know, is stepping in. But the journalists are still on this rampage about every extreme weather event is caused by global warming, but people are just paying less attention to that. And a lot of the climate journalism, at least in the US, a lot of this is shut down. You know, they’ve—some of them have, you know, just terminated their climate desk, some of the big media outlets. 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.

Interviewer: Let me ask you about those extreme weather events because what I want to point out is that, as I understand—and you can correct me if I’m wrong here—that in 2005, you were a co-author of a research paper about an increasing global proportion of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, and, as I understand, this paper led to you being labeled even a global warming alarmist for a time being back then. So, what was the context of all this?

Dr. Judith Curry: Okay, I was a co-author on this paper, and my colleague Peter Webster assembled, for the first time, a global hurricane dataset, so you could look at all, you know, not just in the Atlantic or the Western Pacific, but you could look at all the global hurricanes. And he looked at the hurricane data since 1970, which is when we have some satellite observations, and he found that, from 1970 to 2004, the percentage of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled over this period, and that’s an astonishing finding. But the really hot-potato factor was, this paper was published two weeks following Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans. So, in this paper, I mean, 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, you know, 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 satellites just wasn’t good enough, you know, to do this, and that’s fair enough. And they also, you know, said, well, natural climate variability has a lot to do with these variations that we’re seeing, and that’s also fair enough. And, you know, 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 learned from each side, and we decided to work together productively to, you know, assess the problem. And we even issued a joint press release about the rebuilding of New Orleans, and, you know, the biggest concern that we could all agree on is 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, you know, a fairly collegial outcome to all this. I mean, if you compare that to the so-called hockey stick debate, you know, Michael Mann—I mean, that’s still raging 25 years later, okay, because of the behavior of Michael Mann, who sues anybody who disagrees with him, okay, and it’s just been a horrible, horribly contentious thing, a situation of his attempt to defend the indefensible for some decades now. You know, so the hurricane scientists behave the way scientists are supposed to behave, okay, and progress is being made in that area, and there is, you know, nobody’s really ostracized for being on one side or the other of the hurricane and climate change debate, but that’s definitely not true about other aspects of the science.

Interviewer: It is being still told that, at least by activists, that extreme weather events have been increasing due to climate change or global warming. So, they’re not increasing; this is the issue.

Dr. Judith Curry: They’re not increasing, okay. 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. I mean, that’s the only thing that they found, you know, with any kind of confidence—nothing about floods, nothing about droughts, nothing about hurricanes, nothing about tornadoes, nothing about any of these things. I mean, these vary, but it’s really within the bounds of natural climate variability. And even with regard to heat waves, like, 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, okay, even though the average temperature is increasing, the extremes aren’t increasing in the West. So, you know, none of these things are simple. And it’s hard—in 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, you know, to determine whether there’s been any change and whether that change is above the magnitude of what you would expect from natural variability. So, there’s very—and this, even, you know, the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, I mean, they just didn’t find, 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.

Interviewer: If you look at a short data record, say, since 1970, you might find a trend, okay, 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, you know, the data, the period that you look at. And the other thing is, 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. So, they’re just using it, and certain scientists have made their careers, okay, on doing this, get a lot of funding for doing it, and so they’re, you know, just keep perpetuating this. You mentioned already the hockey stick graph by Michael Mann, and this has been, as I understand, this has been demonstrated to be flawed many, many years ago, but still, it is kind of presented as an argument that there is catastrophic warming or something like that, well, compared to, I don’t know, the last thousand years or—you can absolutely correct me here. So, well, maybe it’s good if you explain once more what is wrong with this graph.

Dr. Judith Curry: Oh, it’s—there’s so much that’s wrong with it. I mean, it was the data; it was cherry-picked, inappropriate datasets were used. I mean, out-and-out errors were made; the statistical analysis approaches were inappropriate and designed to give the, you know, a hockey stick shape no matter what. I mean, it was just on and on it goes. The fact that some guy published a paper in 1998 that turned out not to, you know, 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. Okay, and then this really became an icon for global warming, and Michael Mann, I mean, a very ambitious guy, you know, he played this into, you know, building himself a huge amount of big media following, lots of well-paying gigs, if you will, yeah, and even to being awarded all these climate communicator—I mean, he was lauded for attacking and destroying the careers of various scientists who challenged either him or the broader climate narrative. I mean, he single-handedly is why I left Georgia Tech, my academic position. If you want the details of that, I can tell you. But he basically published an op-ed in the Huffington Post—it’s an online journalistic thing in the US—and he was about serial climate disinformer Judith Curry, okay. And this was picked up by the Georgia Tech Daily News Buzz, you know, where every day they would send out an email with all the mentions of Georgia Tech in the media. This went—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. There’s the lead thing is Judith, serial climate disinformer Judith Curry, and that’s the point when I knew my academic career was over. I mean, and that, you know, I just became, you know, Georgia—I was a hot potato at Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech didn’t want 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’s 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 Google Judith Curry. I mean, nobody’s going to hire me, you know, 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.

Interviewer: I’m so sorry to hear that. So many things are wrong with it that I even cannot, you know, know where to start with it. 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. And what I want to ask about that is, also, we kind of suffer from weather amnesia if we look even further back, as I understand, because if we talk about 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, you know, 200, 300 years ago when there was this cold period, which was, you know, before that was the Medieval Warm Period. How does this current warming trend compare to these historical climate variabilities?

Dr. Judith Curry: Well, the modern warming really started about 1977, so we’ve really got, you know, between 1945 and 1976, the temperature was actually decreasing a little bit. So, to claim that since warming started in 1950 when the fossil fuels picked up, well, it wasn’t really warming during that period. I mean, there was really a shift around 1976, 1977, and that’s when the warming took off. So, we’re looking at less than 50 years, you know, a warming spike that’s less than 50 years. But if you look back in the record, especially the paleoclimate record, you know, far enough back, you don’t have good resolution; it’s maybe 300 or 500 years. So, if there was some sort of spike, you know, 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, a rate of change over 40 years, that was comparable in rate to this warming since 1970, and that had almost nothing to do with CO2 emissions. It was, you know, mostly the sun and large-scale ocean circulations and a lack of volcanic eruptions. So, there’s no reason to believe that this rate of warming is somehow unprecedented, you know, in the current interglacial period. I would be very surprised if it was.

Interviewer: Many people do believe that if the planet warms one, two degrees, something like that, so maybe three, I don’t know, so if it will, will it actually—well, can we say that this will come with severe consequences to our way of life, to planet Earth, or can we say—

Dr. Judith Curry: This is the weakest part of the argument, you know, is warming dangerous? People used to call the warm periods the optimums, the climate optimums, because, you know, ecosystems and people thrived in these warmer climate optimums, okay. So, you know, we’ve seen the extreme events; that doesn’t really hold up. Then we have the slow creep of sea level rise, you know, it’s risen about nine inches in, you know, the last 120 years, which isn’t a heck of a lot. So, so, so where’s the danger? I mean, we talk about, like, 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. So, since that period, we’ve already seen 1.3 degrees of warming, and over the last century, we’ve seen, you know, an explosion in human well-being. You know, 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, okay. 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? I mean, so, you know, it’s very tough to make the case that warming will be dangerous, you know, especially at the rates we’re talking about. The other game that they played was to use this extreme emission scenario to force these climate models with a huge amount of CO2 to get a huge amount of warming, okay. And the UN climate negotiators have now dropped the extreme emission scenario, saying it’s implausible, like, you’d have to increase coal burning by 600%, you know, these kinds of scenarios. And so, they’ve dropped the extreme emission scenario, and they’re only looking at the medium emission scenario. But, nevertheless, climate scientists still love the extreme emission scenario; it’s like crack cocaine for them because if you just use the medium emission scenario, you don’t get these dramatic impacts. You have to really crank up the warming with these very extreme emission scenarios to get anything that’s particularly noticeable. So, you know, 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.

Interviewer: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN IPCC, what do you think of their output, their current output?

Dr. Judith Curry: Well, it’s mixed. The most recent report, the Working Group I on the physical science basis, I thought they did a relatively good job, better than recent reports. The Working Groups II and III reports in the last cycle—Working Group II is on impacts, Working Group III is on mitigation—I thought they did terrible jobs. So, it’s mixed. In the previous cycle, I thought the Working Group II report on impacts was the best one. So, a lot of it depends on which authors they pick, and even if there’s, like, 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. But, you know, 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 Mr. Guterres can come and say that all scientists agree humans are to blame, and what was it, the planet is boiling, so, highway to climate hell. He has some very—I don’t know who writes his stuff, but there’s some pretty colorful expressions that he comes up with.

Interviewer: Yeah, and they are kind of alarming, even to people who are, you know, rational themselves, but if an important person, a world leader, comes and says this, absolutely. What is your view on energy transitions? We are kind of dependent on fossil fuels, but should we be dependent on them, or should we reduce them?

Dr. Judith Curry: Okay, my first comment is that energy policy should be decoupled from climate policy. Okay, right, decouple them. Okay, 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 be transitioning away from fossil fuels, particularly coal and petrol—I mean, oil, I think, 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. You know, 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 going to come from? We need to figure it out, and it sure as heck is not from wind and solar, okay. 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. You know, whether advanced geothermal will become a reality or even some new ideas, who knows, but we need more research and development into, you know, 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. So, I suspect, okay, in the US, President Trump is really trying to get more energy, you know, everything, all, you know, everything, 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, you know, his administration is trying to grapple with that. I mean, I think nuclear power is a big part of the answer, and for the European countries who’ve invested in nuclear power, I think are 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; I mean, they have good wind and solar resources, but the grid is unstable. I mean, you need to have it totally backed up with, you know, a stable power supply, you know, like natural gas; otherwise, you’re going to be facing bigger problems than what we saw in Spain and Portugal.

Interviewer: I’m sure I understand you correctly that, well, this pursuit for net zero is something that is, you know, non-achievable; it is kind of not achievable?

Dr. Judith Curry: No, yeah, it’s not achievable. Not only that, okay, 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. I mean, there’s huge inertia in the system. The carbon cycle is very complex, and there are long timescales. I mean, we can’t unring this bell quickly. You know, even if you believe the climate models, it would be, you know, 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. It’s really, to me, this is really an issue for the 22nd and the 23rd century. I mean, 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 this transition, in my opinion, you know, decades. We’ve spent trillions of dollars on this; I mean, it’s harmed the environment, is 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—it’s just been a very poor investment. So, you know, I think there is a place for rooftop solar, but these big solar farms, I don’t think that those are going to—maybe they will. I think the wind farms, really, their days are numbered. The wind turbines only have a lifetime of maybe 15, 20 years, and 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, no, I don’t think this is the way to go.

Interviewer: 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?

Dr. Judith Curry: 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, like, 430 parts per million. People figure that we might max out, like, around 520 parts per million, okay. But, you know, at some point, the radiative effects become saturated out. But, you know, even if we were to stop emitting fossil fuels right now, the timescales in the ice sheets and the oceans are long enough that we would still keep seeing sea level rise well into the 22nd century. So, you know, exactly how this would play out if we kept business as usual, you know, again, there’s disagreement. But the main point I want to make is that we can’t stop it. There’s a lot—even if net zero was successful, there’s just a lot of long timescales in the system, and it would take a long time for us to notice any change against a background of natural climate variability. And the human impacts are not, you know, it’s land use and urban heat island effects and deforestation and agriculture. So, there’s a lot of other human impacts on climate. You know, thinking it’s roughly half natural, half human-caused at this point, you know, is sort of the way I think about it. I mean, it’s hard to just, you know, it’s hard. 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, you know, about stating how much of the warming is human-caused.

Interviewer: But what I think, and maybe I agree, I don’t know what I think, is that instead of fixating on the climate, well, of course, instead of fixating on carbon dioxide, we should be thinking about the environment and how we treat that. Or what is your view?

Dr. Judith Curry: I agree with that. I mean, the whole climate change movement sort of disappeared the traditional environmental objectives. I mean, to me, the most striking example, like, Greenpeace got its start in the 1970s with the Save the Whales campaign, okay. Now, off the mid-Atlantic coast of the US, wind turbines are killing whales, directly or indirectly, and Greenpeace is silent, okay. So, I mean, it’s just—and the, especially the wind turbines and the land use and the habitats that are being destroyed, and you can’t recycle these used turbines; there are these big wind turbine graveyards in Texas. I mean, how is any of this good for the environment? So, yeah, I think we need to get back to the traditional environmental values, okay, and we need to worry about how to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events, you know, better infrastructure, better warning systems, you know, things like that. We need to pay more attention to that rather than every time one of these disasters hits, we throw up our hands and say, “Oh, it’s fossil fuel warming; nothing we can do about it.” That distracts from people taking responsibility to actually reduce their vulnerability through infrastructure, better governance, better warning.

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