I apologize to everyone at home. Climate alarmists claim there’s an: Overwhelming scientific consensus. But: It’s a manufactured consensus. Researcher Judith Curry says climate scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk. Why? What’s in it for them? Fame and fortune. [Laughs] She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change.
And the media loved her when she published this study saying there was an increase in hurricane intensity. We found that the percent of Category four and five hurricanes had doubled. [Hurricane wind blowing] Really? Doubled!? And so this was picked up by the media. The alarmists said, “Oh, here is the way to do it.” “It” being:
Get the public alarmed. Climate change is making hurricanes stronger and more destructive. Tie extreme weather events to global warming. So this hysteria is your fault! Well, sort of. Not really. They would have picked up on it anyways. But Curry’s more intense hurricanes gave them fuel. I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists,
And I was treated like a rock star. What does that mean? Treated like a rock star? Oh, my God. I was flown all over the place to meet with politicians and to give these talks and lots of media attention. But then some researchers pointed out gaps in her research. Years with low levels of hurricanes.
So like a good scientist, I went in and investigated all that stuff. She realized her critics were right. Part of it was bad data. Part of it is natural climate variability. So you’re the unusual researcher who looks at criticism of your paper and actually concluded, “they had a point.”
They had a point for sure. Then the Climategate scandal taught Curry that many researchers aren’t so open-minded. Leaked emails showed university climate scientists conspiring to hide data. It showed a lot of really ugly things. Avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests. Trying to get journal editors fired from their job. One email read:
“If you think this Yale professor is in the skeptics camp… get him ousted.” Seeing emails like that made Curry realize that climate change fanatics had corrupted the science because there’s a climate change industry set up to reward alarmism. The origins go back to the 1980s and the U.N. environmental program. Some U.N. officials had a
Specific agenda. Anti-capitalism. They hated the oil companies and they seized on the climate change issue as one to move their policies along. The U.N. created what is called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC wasn’t supposed to focus on any benefits of warming. The IPCC’s mandate was to look for dangerous human-caused climate change.
Obviously, if you’re only looking for risk, that’s what you’ll find. Then the national funding agencies directed all the funding in the field. If you say “we’re all going to die” and we got to spend a ton of money on this, you get funding. If you say “we don’t know,” you don’t get funding?
No, it’s more subtle than that. The announcements of opportunity for funding are really tied to assuming that there are dangerous impacts. So the researchers aren’t stupid. They know what they need to say to get funding. Exactly. This is how “manufactured consensus” happens. Then, even if a skeptic does get funding, it’s harder to publish,
Because journal editors are alarmists. About ten years ago, the editor of the journal Science, she wrote this political rant about we need to stop emissions now, that was published in Science. So what kind of message does that give Promote the alarming papers and don’t even send the other ones out for review.
Getting published is crucial to researchers because that’s how they advance in academia. If you wanted to advance in your career, like be at a prestigious university and get a big salary, have big laboratory space, get lots of grant funding, be director of an institute, Well, there was clearly one path to go. So alarmist researchers
Control the discussion. They publish lots of scary papers, and alarmist media jump on those. Time Magazine says climate is everything! Good Morning America agrees. Climate change is impacting everything from conception to pregnancy. Transportation congestion, the size of frogs, you know, everything. Airplane turbulence. Expect turbulence like this to become more frequent due to climate change.
Childhood obesity. Climate change is making our children more obese. Experts say that we have until 2030 to avoid catastrophe. Activists hear the media and freak out. Children are starving. The potential extinction of the human race. Why don’t other scientists who recognize the nonsense push back? If they work at a university,
It’s going to be very uncomfortable for them. Universities have become idiots, and they punish people who tell the truth? I mean, I felt the hostility. Curry was a department chair at Georgia Tech until she concluded that fossil fuels aren’t so terrible. They want fossil fuels to go away. When they made life uncomfortable for her,
She looked for other university jobs, but was told Nobody will hire you, because if you Google Judith Curry, you know everything that shows up with Judith Curry, denier Judith Curry, serial climate dis-informer. At that point, I started making my plans to transition 100% to the private sector. She started this weather forecasting company. Now climate alarmists
Smear her as a climate denier, doing it for the money. But she made more money at Georgia Tech. If I was doing this for the money, I would have stayed at Georgia Tech and sucked up my big salary. But that’s not who I am. My personal and professional integrity would not allow me to play that game.
Good for her. It’s unfortunate that many university departments now shut down debate, and reward alarmism. Curry agrees that climate change is a problem. But she says it’s not a crisis. In a few weeks I’ll post our full interview, with a more complete discussion about climate and what scientists really agree about. [Swoosh] Thanks for watching.
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