Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns On Her Colleagues

[Moontanman]

Climate Heretic: Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues

Why can't we have a civil conversation about climate?

 

In trying to understand the Judith Curry phenomenon, it is tempting to default to one of two comfortable and familiar story lines.

 

For most of her career, Curry, who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has been known for her work on hurricanes, Arctic ice dynamics and other climate-related topics. But over the past year or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates, many of her scientific colleagues. Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit, the Air Vent and the Black­board.

 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=climate-heretic&sc=WR_20101027

[CraigD]

I think the body of this 11/10 SciAm is excellent, but the headline exaggerated and sensational. One like “Judith Curry – Climate Science Peacemaker or Dupe?” would, IMHO, have been better.

 

Curry is not, in the usual sense, a “climate heretic”, in that she doesn’t disagree significantly with the mainstream climatologically on the Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming hypothesis or the basic science underlying it. From the article:

 

Climate skeptics have seized on Curry’s statements to cast doubt on the basic science of climate change. So it is important to emphasize that nothing she encountered led her to question the science; she still has no doubt that the planet is warming, that human-generated greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are in large part to blame, or that the plausible worst-case scenario could be catastrophic. She does not believe that the Climategate e-mails are evidence of fraud or that the IPCC is some kind of grand international conspiracy. What she does believe is that the mainstream climate science community has moved beyond the ivory tower into a type of fortress mentality, in which insiders can do no wrong and outsiders are forbidden entry.

 

Curry’s heresy is over how best to communicate this to the public and policy makers, so that they agree with the scientific consensus. Recent polls (eg: this 2009 November Washington Post poll) show that about 25% of Americans dissagree even in the basic observation that “the world's temperature ... have been going up slowly over the past 100 years”, while even some members of the US Congress describe the hypothesis as “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”.

 

Clearly, efforts to date to communicate the science of climatology are not succeeding as well as once could hope.

 

“Peacemakers” like Curry feel they can address this problem by taking a gentle, respectful approach in discussing the issues with climate skeptics, and IMHO have some astute ideas of how to do it (eg: explaining that the statistical term “uncertainty” is not synonymous with the common-sense concept “doesn’t know what it’s talking about and is almost certainly wrong”). From the article:

 

In at least one respect, however, Curry is in harmony with her colleagues. The public needs to understand that in science uncertainty is not the same thing as ignorance; rather it is a discipline for quantifying what is unknown. Curry has sought to begin a conversation on one of the most important and difficult issues in climate policy: the extent to which science can say something valid despite gaps in knowledge. “If we can’t talk the language of probability theory and probability distributions,” says Chris E. Forest, a statistician at Pennsylvania State University, “we have to resort to concepts like odds, rolls of the dice, roulette wheels.” And because climate is complex, he adds, the terms “likely” and “very likely” in the IPCC reports represent lots of wheels or lots of dice rolling at once, all interacting with one another. When scientists translate statistical jargon into comprehensible language, they necessarily oversimplify it, giving the impression of glossing over nuance. The public gets cartoon versions of climate theories, which are easily refuted.

 

I wish Curry and others trying to respectfully communicate with climate skeptics success. :thumbs_up