Judith Curry adopts a pet ostrich, Kip Hansen, promoting the Dozen Bright Minds Climate Workshop

After attacking scientists who push for open data, Judith Curry now wants to muzzle climate scientists. She promoted another article from a science-denying WUWT-er, who wants to restart climate science research (archived here).

Kip Hansen wants to ban monitoring of at least the following:

• global mean surface temperature
• ocean heat content
• global sea level.

He doesn't say why, but I expect that he's tired of hearing about the "hottest year on record" and the rest, and thinks that if he doesn't know what's happening it can't hurt him.

In a meandering article with much long-winded detail about how he sometimes does a clean install of his computer, Kip Hansen proposes a four day conference, attended by "the right people". A " dozen or two bright, open minds" who would "get together" to decide how to investigate Earth's climate starting from scratch. Kip proposes they would:

...get together and develop an outline which could then be compared to what is currently being done. This might lead to some insight in how to break the current Climate Science deadlock. It might lead to some new ways of thinking about the subject. It might open up new research directions.   It might just help direct the next generation of climate scientists in new directions.

Notice the strawman - "break the current Climate Science deadlock". What deadlock is that? Kip doesn't say.

Kip admits he has no idea of where to start or what questions to ask. What seems clear also is that he has no idea of what research is being and has ever been done that forms the foundation of our current understanding of climate, weather and the Earth system.

Neither does his patron, Judith Curry. She lumps climate science and policy together and says they are in a "really big rut". She also built a straw man and falsely claimed:

Specifically with regards to climate scientists, there is a large number of scientists, including those in influential positions, that regard 100% of the warming to be anthropogenic, and the only scientific challenges are to refine our estimates of radiative forcing and refine climate model parameterizations.  Think Gavin Schmidt, among many others.

What a load of crap. (Gavin Schmidt called her on it.)

Judith went further, and wrote:

What might trigger pushing the reset button?  Well in the U.S., election of any of the Republican presidential candidates might do it.  Funding priorities for scientific research and energy policy would change. Many scientists would be relieved, I’m sure others would be horrified.   If the U.S. climate change funding were to be redirected to be predominantly for natural climate variability, would the rats desert the sinking funding ship and start focusing on natural variability? 

Judith doesn't read science any more, or she'd know that there is a lot of climate research on natural variability. (Perhaps her sole purpose in life these days is to create and promote myths for deniers.) Here are some journals she could open, if she wanted to:

• Journal of Climate
• BAMS
• Climate Dynamics

I find it interesting, too, that she advocates that climate research priorities should be politicised and set by the President of the USA. I doubt that past US Presidents have interfered in the way Judith proposes.

I've no idea what was going on in her mind when she wrote:

What research findings, following the current trajectory, might trigger a rethink?  Apart from continuation of a slow rate of warming, I am thinking that failing to close the carbon cycle in a simplistic way might prove to be very illuminating, as well as the satellite observations of atmospheric CO2.

In that, Judith shows she knows nothing about climate. The rate of warming is not slow, it is faster than ever in civilisation and heading for ten times faster than in the past 65 million years. What she means by closing the carbon cycle in a simplistic way I have not the faintest clue. Perhaps she thinks it makes her sound "sciency" to her dim denier fans. Notice how she threw them a bone with her "satellite observations" reference. Deniers love satellites, but I can't see how OCO-2 is going to help their anti-science campaigns.

Then Judith wants to see how hot it can get in ten years by increasing carbon emissions, writing:

From the policy perspective, failure to implement meaningful reductions in carbon emission and to change/improve the climate in a material way could promote a rethinking of this whole thing, but it will be a decade at least before any meaningful evaluation can be made. 

Finally she launches into advocacy, touting her own lack of ethics, implying that being concerned for humanity is unethical, writing:

I think the only practical thing that can be done in the very near term is paying much more attention to research ethics, the traditional norms of science, and the problems generated by scientists that become activists, particularly the journal editors and professional societies.

In Judith's world, the only scientists and ex-scientists who are allowed to be activists are herself, of course, and maybe others who can't wait for the world to burn, such as Richard Lindzen and Willie Soon.

You'll have noticed that Judith was incapable of answering any of Kip's questions. She couldn't even come up with an agenda for his four day bright spark gabfest. So I'll make a suggestion. Here's a program for Kip and Judith and Judith's Republican "allies against science".

The "Dozen Bright Minds" Climate Research Workshop

Day One: Where we are

• Agreeing workshop objectives and criteria by which to judge it's success
• Mapping we are now - what we know, what we partly know, knowledge gaps

Day two: Where we want to be

• Priorities for future research, filling knowledge gaps - looking ahead five years, ten years and twenty years and beyond
• Priorities for ongoing research - what research is essential to maintain, what areas would suffer significant set-back if research were slowed or stopped (babies and bathwater)
• Priorities for monitoring changes in climate - what existing metrics must be maintained and what data is needed that we aren't collecting at present
• Rationale for the above

Day three: How we plan to get there

What is required to deliver the research priorities:

• Resources - personnel, agencies, equipment, funding
• Alliances with other disciplines, agencies, research teams and organisations around the world
• Information - data and its collection, analysis, storage, retrieval, and dissemination

Day four: Tying it together

Consolidating the plan:

• Finalising the plan framework, objectives, results to be achieved, who does what, criteria by which to judge success
• Agreeing the next steps (see Post-Workshop)

Monitoring and reporting framework, agreeing:

• how progress in the plan will be monitored and reported, 
• by whom and to whom
• timetable and mechanism for reviewing progress, and revising and amending the plan over time

Post Workshop

Getting buy-in and support:

• disseminating the plan and getting feedback from the broad research community as well as all the various groups with an interest in the outcome (ultimately, all of humanity)
• process for revising the plan based on feedback

Implementation pathway:

• Agreeing the finalised plan (after incorporating feedback) and the implementation pathway

A lot of funding bodies would already be doing all the above, so I don't know that the wheel needs to be reinvented. At the international level, there is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. However if Judith's Republican deniers do decide to disrupt climate science research, they might consider a workshop along the lines of the above, or something similar, before they burn all the books.

One concern I have is whether or not a "dozen bright minds" will be sufficient. I've no doubt that there are a dozen bright minds who could do the job, the problem I foresee is how to ensure ownership from and commitment to the resulting plan by all the other dozens of bright minds in the world. For example:

• Which "dozen" disciplines and sub-disciplines would be represented at the expense of all the other research?
• What about scientists and scientific research organisations in fields related to climate?
• Should people who have a stake in climate research be invited to participate?
• If stakeholders are not to be invited, how will the Dozen Bright Minds be informed about their concerns and priorities?
• Even if stakeholders are to be invited, which ones, and what about all the other stakeholders who aren't. How will their interests be discovered and factored in?

There's more. It's one thing to plan and organise research within an institution, but is it wise or even possible to put strict boundaries around what research can and can't be done by anyone anywhere? What happens when something new is discovered that has important implications for humanity or the world at large? Is it not allowed to be pursued because it doesn't fit Judith Curry's notion of what is important? Should the President of the USA dictate what climate research is allowed and what is not?

As for Kip Hansen's initial suggestion that the world stops monitoring changes and stops collecting data on weather, sea level and ocean heat content - that would set the world on a certain road to disaster.