Judith Curry picks a cherry in her motivated recycled denial

UPDATE: (Note - I'm going through the video at the moment and making updates. I'll let you know when I've finished. Done.)

Judith Curry: "we are fooling ourselves to think that CO2 control knob really influences climate on these decadal or even century time scales,” (See update below)

Judith Curry has dived deeply into denialism. On her blog she has promoted an article about her by Marc Morano (infamous for his role in the "swiftboat" attack on John Kerry) on his CFACT blog, writing:

Marc Morano has written up a summary that includes some of the discussion [link], although I’m a bit puzzled by the headline.

If the headline is the only bit she's "a bit puzzled about", one assumes she endorses the rest. The rest includes a lot of twaddle such as:

“Even on the timescale of decade or two, we could end up be very surprised on how the climate plays out and it might not be getting warmer like the UN IPCC says,” Curry noted.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen. All other things being equal – yes — more carbon dioxide means warmer, but all other things are never equal,” she emphasized. 

And in response to someone who observed that snow packs are lessening and glaciers are disappearing and the world is changing so quickly "right before our eyes", Judith came up with some trite denier nonsense (Video 38:30).

She said: "Climate is always changing." Oh my!

As a scientist she should have said something like this, "Yes,  Inertia toward continued emissions creates potential 21st-century global warming that is comparable in magnitude to that of the largest global changes in the past 65 million years but is orders of magnitude more rapid."


Judith gave a plug to "what she happens to think" based on nothing at all, nothing she's published and nothing anyone else has published, and she contradicts known science, opining that "the anthropogenic effect is about half of what the IPCC says". (Video: 50:05) But the IPCC science is based on tangible observations and measurements, not random "I thinks" of a disinforming blogger. Gavin Schmidt rebutted Judith's gut feel very well. (Good scientists use their brain for thinking, more than their gut.)

Remember when Judith Curry said, less than a year ago:

I have long stated that scientists advocating for public policy can lead to distrust of scientists and their scientific findings.

She's recanted, with a vengeance. Not only is she advocating public policy, she's putting herself forward as an economic and governmental relations "expert", too, despite her warnings that when scientists advocate it can lead to distrust (my bold italics) Video at 1:06:48:

Relying on global international treaty to solve the problem — which I do not think would really solve the problem even if it was implemented – is politically unviable and economically unviable. 

Actually, I don't think that picking this out the way Marc Morano did gave justice to the context. I disagree that a global agreement is politically and economically unviable (think Montreal Protocol) and I'd go further to saying it's essential. If she'd said it's not by itself sufficient I would have agreed. However, Judith was also arguing for local initiatives here. She talked about being "stuck between a rock and a hard place" and "trying to find new ways of approaching the problem" like "regional, local, experimenting kind of approaches". (Which are already happening.) She doesn't want any more investment in climate models.

On the other hand she misrepresents the broad scientific findings, implying there is equal weight between the opinions of a small minority of contrarians and the findings of the majority of scientists. Notice how she slips in a policy dot point at the bottom, too. An issue that is not just for physical scientists but for economists and others to address:

Judith Curry misrepresenting the broad scientific consensus. Source: Video at 10:59

She also attacks Cook13 (video 11:10), a rigorous study of the actual literature supported by a survey of scientists who published that same literature, and says it was "deeply flawed" based on no evidence whatsoever. It wasn't. Judith just makes a bald statement. What a rotter. Parrotting a mantra of deniers like Marc Morano, Anthony Watts and Christopher Monckton (what company does Judith keep these days, one wonders). And she complains about being alienated. Is it any wonder? Her sole "evidence" are "two recently published" opinion surveys, which she doesn't identify, but which obviously lumps in non-expert with expert opinion and claims there is a lower "consensus" than 97%.  I'm guessing that one of them was the survey of American meteorologists, where a lot of weather forecasters, tv announcers and so forth, were not familiar with climate science. The other might have been the survey by Bart Verheggen et al with the "al" including John Cook. Which interestingly found that disinformers like Judith Curry get a disproportionate time on the airwaves compared to honest scientists. She neglected to mention other studies that all find that almost all scientific papers on the subject prove or build on the knowledge that humans are causing most if not all recent global warming.  Probably more than all, because some of what we pollute the air with (some aerosols) has a cooling effect.

If you need convincing, read this, which Marc highlighted up top and repeated in the main text (my bold underline). I couldn't believe what I read, so I checked. Yes Judith really did say out loud in front of lots of people. (Video 51:09):

“We just don’t know. I think we are fooling ourselves to think that CO2 control knob really influences climate on these decadal or even century time scales.” 

Judith has swung away from science and into utter nuttery. She is reported as saying:

We get called ‘deniers’. This is a very sad state of affairs,

Update 2: In the comments below, Joshua has pointed out that Judith has (very slightly) wound back her ridiculous statement above, writing in the comments: "This was an unscripted response to a question. Should have been ‘dominates’ not influences".  That's still absurd. Three points. Does she really need a script to remind her of the difference between "dominates" and "influences"? Secondly: Look at the chart below and tell me, what else could possibly be dominating the rise in temperature of the past 65 years. Why are temperatures today not the same as they were in the 1950s, 1960s or even 1970s? Thirdly: read Gavin Schmidt's response to Judith's denialism. Sou 21 September 9:32 am AEST.


Back in May this year, Judith admitted that on a "skeptic/orthodox" spectrum she had shifted from a 7 (mainstream scientist end) to 3 (denialist). Her dive into denialism has shifted further. Here is the updated graphic:

A sad state of your own making, Judith.


Sou Thurs 18 Sept 2014

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Judith Curry spoke to the much-reviled George C. Marshall Institute yesterday. She spouted her usual nonsense (pdf here). You know the sort of crackpottery she comes up with these days. Having read her article, I bet most of the audience fell asleep while she was talking. It was boring, tedious and wrong.

My prediction was a bit off. She didn't spatter her handout with "wickeds". There was only one mention and that was "wickedness".  Not a single monster or stadium wave washed across the text. And she didn't mention Michael Mann once - or not in her written blurb anyway.

(Update: It wasn't in her handout, but in her talk she did talk about Marcia Wyatt's stadium wave, and there were lots of "wickeds" so I wasn't so wrong after all.)

I was right about some things though. There were 16 "uncertainties" or variations of same. Twenty-one IPCCs, full of disinformation. Her claims about the IPCC are nonsense needless to say, as Gavin Schmidt explains. And she doesn't want to reduce CO2 emissions. Her close to closing para was:

Motivated by the precautionary principle to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change, attempts to modify the climate through reducing CO2 emissions may turn out to be futile. The stagnation in greenhouse warming observed over the past 16+ years demonstrates that CO2 is not a control knob on climate variability on decadal time scales. Even if CO2 mitigation strategies are successful and climate model projections are correct, an impact on the climate would not be expected for many decades, owing to the long lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere and thermal inertia driven by the ocean; solar variability, volcanic eruptions, and natural internal climate variability will continue to be sources of unpredictable climate surprises.

Utter rubbish. Judith does believe in the precautionary principle when it suits her. When there's a 30% chance she'll be inconvenienced, Judith advocates shutting down a city. When there's a 100% chance that the world will suffer serious hardship, Judith doesn't want to lift a finger.

Judith wants the world to get hotter and hotter and hotter. What does she care? She will, though.  She mightn't get swamped by rising seas if she stays inland but she's young enough to feel the real heat when it comes.

By the way, if that passage looks familiar it's because you've read something like it before, in Judith's testimony to the  US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works back in January this year.

Motivated by the precautionary principle to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change, attempts to modify the climate through reducing CO2 emissions may turn out to be futile. The stagnation in greenhouse warming observed over the past 15+ years demonstrates that CO2 is not a control knob on climate variability on decadal time scales.

She's recycling the lies she told to the US Government. Isn't there a crime in that somewhere on the books? Does she think she's covered herself by using the word "may"? How many decades does she think it takes for CO2 warming? It's already been happening for decades. You'll notice that she added a year for some reason. Why would that be?

Cherry picking classic

Will you look at that. Sixteen years ago is 1998, the year of the super El Nino. The classic denier cherry pick. Craig Rucker of CFACT would be proud!

Data Source: NASA GISS