The Atlas Society Asks Dr. Judith Curry Transcript

For the 200th episode of The Atlas Society Asks, our CEO Jennifer Grossman interviewed the president and co-founder of Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN), Dr. Judith Curry. A leading global thinker on climate change, Dr. Curry is the author of the book Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response and was targeted by the cancel culture mob for research at variance with the conventional narrative on matters related to weather and climate. She is professor emerita at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she served as chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences for 13 years. Watch the entire video HERE or check the transcript below. 

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JAG: Jennifer Grossman

JC: Dr. Judith Curry

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JAG: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a very special 200th episode of The Atlas Society Asks. My name is Jennifer Anju Grossman. My friends call me JAG. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. We are the leading nonprofit introducing young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand in fun, creative ways. Music videos, animated videos, graphic novels. I'm coming to you from Philadelphia, so apologies for the less than glamorous digs here in my hotel room. We're going to be joined by Dr. Judith Curry, coming to us from Reno, Nevada. Before I even begin to introduce our guest, I want to remind all of you who are joining us on Zoom, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube that you can use the comment section to type in your questions, and we will get to as many of them as we can. Dr. Judith Curry is president and co-founder of Climate Forecast Application Network. She's a leading global thinker on climate change. Dr. Curry is author of the book Climate Uncertainty: And Rethinking Our Response. Highly recommend it. Also has an excellent audio version. Now, Dr. Curry was targeted by the cancel culture mob for research at variance with the conventional narrative on matters related to the weather and climate. She is a professor emerita at the Georgia Institute of Torque Technology, where she served as the chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences for 13 years. Judith, thank you for joining us.

JC: Well, thank you, Jennifer. Delighted to be joining you this afternoon.

JAG: So, we were chatting a little bit before we went live. Among the reasons that you were excited to come and join us here at The Atlas Society was that you had an experience as a young person on a couple of your breaks reading Ayn Rand. So, if you'll just tell us a little bit about that to set the stage.

I bought The Fountainhead to read over Thanksgiving break, and I read it from cover to cover without coming up for air, without sleeping, without talking to my family. And I was just stunned. It was just mind opening about so many things.

JC: Okay, well, when I was a sophomore in college, one of the girls on my dorm floor was just raving about Ayn Rand’s books, The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged. So I bought The Fountainhead to read over Thanksgiving break, and I read it from cover to cover without coming up for air, without sleeping, without talking to my family. And I was just stunned. It was just mind opening about so many things. Then, the follow up act was to read Atlas Shrugged over Christmas break, cover to cover, nonstop, 30 hours without sleeping. I read it so fast, I knew I had to read it again more slowly. So, as soon as I finished it, I immediately started rereading, only this time more slowly. So it was, and the whole thing, it just helped me strengthen the courage of my convictions. It was very influential to me as a young person and I recently reread The Fountainhead, coming at it with a very different perspective, and I had a very different reaction. It was really cool to go back, think about how I was reacting 50 years ago when I was reading it the first time. So, I reread The Fountainhead, it was about nine months ago. When I was contacted by The Atlas Society, I was just really excited to join you for this interview.

JAG: Well, you talked about some of the favorite characters from the literature, Hank Rearden, and of course, perhaps most importantly, Howard Roark. Whether consciously or unconsciously, when you came to these junctures in your career and you were being told to conform and to just kind of repeat what the conventional wisdom, what others wanted you to say, that, like Howard Rouak, your integrity wouldn't let you do it. So I thought that that was just interesting. Now, in terms of my first encounter with your story, you landed on the radar thanks to a recent interview that we did with Katherine Brodsky. She's the author of No Apologies: How to Find and Free Your Voice in the Age of Outrage, Lessons for the Silenced Majority. 

The book contains several profiles of people from all walks of life who experienced various attempts at canceling them or marginalizing them and how they dealt with it. But the chapter for me that really stood out was about you because the evolution of your thinking about climate science really illustrates what I think is a true academic temperament and intellectual integrity. What you suffered as a result of that illustrates the polar opposite. So, maybe you can take us back to how that really started for you. If I understand correctly, this began around 2005, when you began engaging with blogs run by climate skeptics that were critical of your work and you wanted to understand their criticism that it was about a paper that you co-authored in Science. Maybe talk a little bit about that paper and what the fallout was and how one thing led to another.

JC: Okay, well, prior to 2005, I was comfortably ensconced in the ivory tower just doing my research. I was aware of the whole climate change debate. I just thought, “Oh, that's politics.” I dismissed it. I didn't take it seriously. In 2005, I was co-author on a paper that for the first time assembled a data set on global hurricane intensity. We analyzed it and we found a rather shocking result: that the percent of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had increased dramatically since 1970, just by sheer fluke. This paper was published two weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. So, the message of our paper and even our initial press conference was really not a global warming message, but said, as you think about rebuilding New Orleans, just don't look at Category 3 protection. You may need to think about Category 4 and 5. That was the main message we wanted to get across. But everybody just took the whole global warming implications and ran with it. The significance, people were saying, “Oh, one or two or even three degrees of warming, who cares? That kind of warming, temperature changes, abstract.”

JAG: Hard to think about it.

We had CNN and all the television cameras in my office, sometimes two different stations a day. This went on for weeks. Our 15 minutes went on for weeks and months.

JC: Yes, it happens from day to day. But if a couple of degrees of warming can cause a lot more Category 4 and 5 hurricanes, then for the first time, it became concrete and people became worried. So this was a major global warming focusing event and the media attention was just overwhelming. This was before the era of Zoom. We had CNN and all the television cameras in my office, sometimes two different stations a day. This went on for weeks. Our 15 minutes went on for weeks and months.

JAG: You said you became kind of like a rockstar. You became one of climate science.

JC: Yes, yes. The whole idea that you can use extreme weather events to amp-up the alarm about climate change, global warming. Wow. Okay. This is really cool. So, the whole environmental movement, the climate alarmists, advocates and whatever, really picked up on this and shepherded me around. At some point, I backed off. You know, I felt it was my responsibility to communicate with people about this. But at some point, I just didn't like this whole scene. I stopped giving interviews and I backed off and I even published a paper trying to understand the craziness of what happened. It's called “Mixing Politics and Science and Addressing the Hypothesis,” whatever. When that was published in 2006, it wasn't newsworthy in terms of the mainstream media, but it was picked up by tons of blogs. 

So I went around to every blog that was talking about the paper. I engaged with them and I landed on a blog called Climate Audit. The people were asking me all sorts of questions, “Can we see the data? What about this or that statistical significance kind of thing?” I thought, “Wow, there's some really sharp people here,” and I asked, “Why haven't I heard of this blog before?” Then I realized that I was on the blog of Steve McIntyre, who's the archenemy of what I would say is the alarmist wing of the climate thing, because he had been criticizing the hockey stick, the climate hockey stick, if you know what that is. It's a paleoclimate reconstruction back for 1000 years that showed no variability until, boom, it started shooting up in the 20th century. This was the blog where people were criticizing this, and the mainstream climate community regarded Climate Audit and Steve McIntyre as the Antichrist. But I thought these guys are really smart. They dig deep and I started engaging with them. There were criticisms made of our paper which I felt were valid, but I continued engaging with them in a low-level way. I even wrote some guest posts on Climate Audit. Now, a lot of this was below the radar screen. But all this changed in November 2009. For the younger viewers, you may not have ever heard about Climategate.

JAG: So, I think we do need to.

What these emails revealed were scientists trying to evade Freedom of Information Act requests, trying to rig the peer review process, bypassing the regulations for the UN Climate Assessment Reports, and generally trying to sabotage anyone who disagreed with them.

JC: Yes, they need to hear about Climategate. Okay, so in November 2009, this is about a week before Thanksgiving, hackers or somebody got into the emails at the University of East Anglia in England. These were a bunch of authors of the UN Climate Assessment Reports. And what these emails revealed were scientists trying to evade Freedom of Information Act requests, trying to rig the peer review process, bypassing the regulations for the UN Climate Assessment Reports, and generally trying to sabotage anyone who disagreed with them, particularly Steve McIntyre. So, this was cancel culture in action at a very early stage in the first decade of the 21th century. This was all behind the scenes. Nowadays, cancel culture goes out in the open under Twitter. But they were working behind the scenes in a cancel culture sort of way. When this was made public, it had a huge impact. It derailed climate legislation. In the US, the Waxman-Markey bill that was pending? They didn't even bring it forward after this happened. And it was major egg on the face. I was really concerned by this. I mean, I was appalled, but I was worried about the implementations for the UN climate negotiations. I was worried about the appearance of the integrity of climate science. But most importantly, I was worried about the students. What are the students to make of all this? So, I wrote a series of three essays addressing those topics, and one of them was even picked up by the New York Times. What I was trying to promote was to make the data publicly available, be completely transparent in your methods, pay careful attention to the uncertainties, don't be overconfident in your conclusions. Finally, be respectful of people who disagree with you and maybe even listen to them. You know, this sounds like motherhood and apple pie, right?

JAG: What's so controversial about that?

JC: People felt that single handedly I was about to destroy this whole big consensus on global warming that the scientists, the activist-scientists had worked to develop for the past 20 years, like little old me, can demolish this whole climate consensus. So I was regarded -- I got a lot of media attention, and the important people were very upset. They were trying to marginalize me. They were trying to figure out how to attack me. The first strategy: she's not a good scientist. She's a female sleeping her way to the top and all these innuendos like that. That didn't really take off. Then they had the idea to just call me a denier, put her in the camp with the crank scientists and the oil companies, and that way we can just dismiss her. That took off like wildfire. All the activists, journalists: climate-denier, Judith Curry; even The Washington Post and outlets like that, if they were mentioning me: well known climate-denier, Judith Curry.

JAG: Oh, my goodness.

JC: By 2013, my reputation had been completely smeared by these people calling me all sorts of names.

JAG: So, what was the denouement for you at Georgia Tech, where, again, you served as chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences for more than a dozen years?

I can play the game and recant and try to join the club again. I could just be quiet and try to suck up my salary at Georgia Tech for as long as I could before they tried to figure out a way to get rid of me. Or I could just leave. 

JC: Well, there was an op-ed in the Huffington Post, and this was in, I guess it was 2013. It was written by Michael Mann, and it was about climate deniers. What? It referred to me as serial climate-disinformer, Judith Curry. Georgia Tech had this daily news feed. Anytime anyone was mentioned in the media, this would be added to the newsfeed in an email. This email would be sent out to all the faculty, students, staff, administrators, alumni, donors, the works. Very prominently on this daily news feed was Judith Curry, serial climate-disinformer. Okay, to everybody: my faculty members, my students, not to mention the administrators. At the time, I was under consideration for a post in the higher administration at Georgia Tech. Now, after that came out, it was game over, you know? I was just shocked. I reflected. I said, “Wow.” I googled my name, Judith Curry. The first ten entries, it's all: Judith Curry, climate denier; climate heretic, Judith Curry. The whole first ten entries were all this stuff and I think, “Wow, this is really bad for Georgia Tech's brand.” Then, not only that, but it made me essentially unhirable at any other university. So I thought, okay, the writing's on the wall. I have two choices. One, I can play the game and recant and try to join the club again. I could just be quiet and try to suck up my salary at Georgia Tech for as long as I could before they tried to figure out a way to get rid of me. Or I could just leave. 

JAG: You could shrug.

JC: Go shrug. There you go. A few years ago, I started my company, Climate Forecast Applications Network. I said, “I'll go full time with the company.” I took a big salary hit, but it was the best decision I ever made. I'm off doing my own thing. I don't have any peers to placate. I just have my clients to work with, and they want the real deal. They don't want any politicized games or whatever. They want the real deal and they want to know, well, what are the uncertainties? How confident should I be in that? So, I'm in a much happier place than I was at the university. You're right. I didn't think about it, I shrugged. Yes, I shrugged. I shrugged off my academic appointment.

JAG: You went Galt. Or another way of thinking about it is, like Howard Roark, you spent time in the rock quarry, you suffered various attempts to cancel you. You bombed the building.

JC: Yes, I bombed the building when I went to the climate right.

JAG: But at the end, you find that you're up on the edifice that you yourself have created. You're finding the clients who want what you are providing, which is, in this case, fact-based research and reporting. So, you're in a better place. I want to turn to this, again, magnificent achievement of your book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response. The political debate on implementing climate policies has become extremely contentious, to say the least. It's often framed as between those who want to move us aggressively to net-zero emissions and those who, as they are caricatured, want to let the world burn. So let's talk about some of these policy recommendations. How impactful would they be if we were to move away from fossil fuel and, for example, meet the aggressive goals that Biden or Governor Newsom and various people have set out? Would they be impactful? Is this even the debate we ought to be having?

JC: Okay, let me go back. You mentioned the word “framing,” and that's a key issue. This whole debate was framed back in the 1980s before we had any idea what we're doing. That climate change was driven by fossil fuel emissions and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that warming was dangerous and that we needed to eliminate fossil fuels. This was a very narrow framing; it neglected natural climate variability. It presupposed that warming is dangerous. There are actually benefits to warming, to greater CO2 in the atmosphere. And it presupposed that the preferred policy was to urgently get rid of fossil fuels. So this was framed in a very bad way from the very beginning. The correct framing is that we have three separate problems. One is extreme weather, which climate warming has very little to do with. Then we have climate change, which is a slow creep of warming, and relates to the slow creep of sea-level rise and some glacier melting. Then we have energy policy. 

We're between a rock and a hard place, with UN officials and President Biden saying, “Code red, highway to climate hell, existential threat.” But the policies that they put out are not technologically, economically, or politically feasible.

The presupposition that energy policy should be dictated by this very narrow framing of the climate change problem is a huge mistake. Energy is the foundation of everything that we're doing. We wouldn't even be having this conversation on Zoom if it weren't for electricity. So it was just a very big mistake to frame the whole climate change issue in this way. The proposed policies, even if we were to somehow reach net zero by 2050, we wouldn't notice any change in extreme weather or even the slow creep of sea-level rise and glacier melting until the 22nd century. The time scales in the ocean, the ice sheets are very long. So, even if we were able to accomplish this, and even if this would be as impactful as they think it might be, we wouldn't feel any difference until the 22nd century. The whole thing doesn't make any sense because it doesn't make any sense. We're between a rock and a hard place, with UN officials and President Biden saying, “Code red, highway to climate hell, existential threat.” But the policies that they put out are not technologically, economically, or politically feasible. So what are we supposed to do? You know, shrugging would be a good thing to do.

JAG: You mentioned the UN. When it comes to climate change and human impact, the science has largely been defined by assessment reports from the United Nations and the US government. What are those reports? How are they compiled and how reliable are they?

JC: The most impactful and prestigious one is the International Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC. This is under the auspices of the UN and it's an internationally prepared document every five or six years. In fact, there's three separate documents. One is on the physical basis, the second one is on impacts, and the third one is on mitigation. The working group reports on the physical science basis. There's a lot of good material, deep in the reports, but it's narrowly framed. They don't pay enough attention to natural climate variability, and they cherry-pick. But the real problem is with the summary for policymakers. This is the one that everybody reads, and what they do is the lead authors from the IPCC get in a room with the policymakers and the international climate negotiators and they go over it line by line and the policymakers often put pressure on them, “Oh, we need it to be like this.” 

You've heard of science-driven policy. Well, this is policy-driven science. The policy cart has been way out in front of the scientific horse from the very beginning.

The worst case of this was in the Second Assessment Report in 1995, when the scientists found that they'd not seen anything beyond natural variability. But the policymakers were saying, “No, no, we need more to support these treaties that we're putting into place.” So, they agreed to add the word “discernible,” that we're seeing a discernible impact of fossil fuel emissions on the climate. Then they had to go back and change the rest of the report, the body of the report, to be consistent with that. You've heard of science-driven policy. Well, this is policy-driven science. The policy cart has been way out in front of the scientific horse from the very beginning. So yes, there is some good material in there, but the bottom line is that the main conclusions are cherry-picked and amped-up, and then they're made extremely alarming by UN officials and then the activists, and mainstream media just takes it and runs with it and you end up with a lot of alarms. So, what the public consumes is carefully crafted, alarmists’ spin by the time the public sees any of this. It's perverting the science and it's leading to bad policy decisions. Not a good place to be.

JAG: All right, we have a lot of questions that are coming in for Dr. Curry from all corners of the Internet. I'm going to grab a couple of those here on Facebook. Jean Meyer asks, what do you suggest to people interested in studying weather and climate, but avoid all the politics and global-warming talk? I'm not sure if she means interested in the university or, if you're interested as a civilian in studying it, read Dr. Curry's book.

JC: But, okay, avoid anything like a degree program with the word climate in it. Look to the core disciplines, geology, oceanography, atmospheric science, geophysical sciences, and then you can get a good education in the basic understanding of what drives climate. If it's climate studies or something like that, you're going to learn very little science at most. You'll learn how to recite IPCC talking points, but then you'll go on to alarmist impacts and all of this stuff that's very softcore. Too many of the people that call themselves climate scientists really know very little about actual climate science. Email me if you want some specific recommendations for university programs that I would recommend. There are some good ones out there that are hardcore.

JAG: Glad to know that there still are. Okay. On LinkedIn, Kristen Wright is asking, “Do you think science has become politicized? If so, do you think it is new or has it been happening for a long time?

You've got scientists playing power politics with their expertise, and both of those can lead you down a very bad path. This is what we've seen with climate change and also most recently with the whole COVID situation.

JC: Well, climate science became politicized in the 1980s. It's basically the health fields and environmental fields that have the ones that have been politicized for the longest time. These are the ones that have public policy impacts. So, you're obviously going to interface with politics. The science is policy relevant. But mixing science and politics can be a very, very bad recipe with both the policymakers and the scientists being culpable, with the policymakers really asking and wanting scientists to support particular policies and directing funding in that direction, et cetera. Then, on the other hand, you've got scientists playing power politics with their expertise, and both of those can lead you down a very bad path. This is what we've seen with climate change and also most recently with the whole COVID situation.

JAG: Well, I want to segue into that. Again, don't worry, folks; I see all of your questions. But you talk a little bit about COVID and the science of COVID in your book. Did you see parallels—you've been very critical of manufactured consensus—that you need to be able to not reach a consensus before listening to people who are bringing different research and different perspectives? The rush to consensus is really in part an effort to favor one narrative and exclude other views. Did we see that? It sounds pretty similar to me when I'm thinking about the FOIA requests. We need the devastating takedown of people like Jay Bhattacharya and Ioannidis and all people that were questioning the consensus or the science?

JC: Okay, well, there's a difference between a scientific consensus, something that's essentially a fact—the earth orbits the sun; you don't even need to talk about a consensus there—versus a consensus of scientists, which is a manufactured consensus where a group of scientists come together and agree on something either under their own steam or at the behest of policymakers. The IPCC consensus on climate change is explicitly a manufactured consensus as part of their charter. But the interesting one in COVID, this was in spring of 2020, just when this was all starting to happen. There were two papers published, one in the New England Journal of Medicine and I think the other one in Journal of Science, where groups of health scientists, epidemiologists, got together to declare a consensus that this was natural origin, that anybody talking about lab origin was a conspiracy theorist, anti-Chinese and racist. On and on it went, and this became immediately accepted. Anybody who said, “Wait a minute” became deplatformed from Twitter and Facebook. A few of them even lost their jobs. About ten months later, an investigative journalist said, “Wait a minute, let's look at this.” Apparently, the lead authors on these papers? One of them was actually funding the research in the Wuhan lab and he really wanted to squash anything related to a lab origin. Okay? We have some conflicts of interest here. They kept digging and digging. 

Everybody was speaking with one voice about totally wrong things, that it was touching surfaces and masks and that lockdowns were needed, and on and on it went, even beyond when there was objective evidence that these things just are not working, are not necessary, have adverse impacts.

Once this came out, then all the epidemiologists said, “Of course, we never believed that it was natural, that we could rule out a lab origin,” but nobody wanted to speak up because they didn't want to lose their funding, their jobs or be deplatformed or whatever. Two things are amazing. How quickly a consensus was declared, and how quickly it then unraveled and the detrimental impact that that had on this. Everybody was speaking with one voice about totally wrong things, that it was touching surfaces and masks and that lockdowns were needed, and on and on it went, even beyond when there was objective evidence that these things just are not working, are not necessary, have adverse impacts. They were all speaking with one voice, saying, we had to do this. They knew what side their bread was buttered on. If they wanted funding from the National Institute of Health, I mean, this is what you have to go along with. So, it was a very bad situation. And it was very interesting to watch the COVID thing unravel on a timescale of months, whereas the whole climate thing is unrolling over decades. So, it was this little microcosm of everything that went wrong in the climate debate smashed into a year or two in the COVID debate.

JAG: Yes. I think that we have seen some of that manufactured consensus unravel with regards to COVID origins. There does seem to be people coming around recognizing that, yes, there were trade-offs and actually the lockdowns did marginal, if any, maybe negative benefits in terms of their reported purposes with disease mitigation. But they have these terrible consequences in terms of learning and economic damage and mental health and all of that. I'm not sure we are seeing the consensus unravel with regards to the efficacy of masks and mask mandates, but perhaps we just have to wait a little bit longer.

JAG: MyModernGalt on Instagram is asking, “Do you think it is easier or harder to push back against the climate change activists today?” In the past, maybe we could combine that question with some of the positive things that have made it easier to debate.

JC: Yes, well, prior to 2007, people weren't paying that much attention. It was really Al Gore's movie, The Inconvenient Truth, and also the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, which came to stronger conclusions. That really took this to the top of the international agenda. So, before 2007, it was easier to ignore. I would say since President Obama's second term, in the US it is harder to ignore. You know, it's out there. It's a very big deal. Journalism: there's been so much money put into journalism on the climate issue funded by people with an alarming, alarmist perspective, that it's all you get in the media, the alarmist perspective. If you're a researcher and you want to advance in your career, it's very obvious what you need to do. You just can't criticize the establishment. But, to the extent that you advocate for the mainstream narrative, you will be rewarded with being directors of big centers and with professional recognition. So, the career path is very much easier for somebody who's of the alarmist persuasion. It can be pretty much cut short if you overtly challenge the mainstream narrative. So, the biggest change was when Elon Musk took over Twitter. I was shadow banned on Twitter and Facebook.

JAG: Really?

God bless Elon Musk for opening all this up. Giving people with alternative perspectives an opportunity to engage in the dialogue and reach a broader audience is really critical.

JC: Oh, yeah. Yeah. For a long time, I was tweeting into the void when I wasn't getting any new followers. Hardly anyone would view hardly anything. Within a week after Elon Musk took over, tons of new followers’ engagement, people were saying, “Oh, I didn't realize Judith Curry was still on Twitter. I haven't seen anything from her in ages.” But still on Facebook and YouTube, some of my stuff is banned in terms of interviews and whatever; they will still ban me on YouTube and Facebook. So, God bless Elon Musk for opening all this up. Giving people with alternative perspectives an opportunity to engage in the dialogue and reach a broader audience is really critical. I can't understate how important it is what Elon Musk is doing with Twitter.

JAG: All right, this is kind of a technical question that is over my head, but I will ask it anyway. If you want to take a crack at it, great. Or if not, we can return to some of what you covered in your book on Zoom. Bruce Brown asks, “Is it true that NOAA fabricates climate temperature data for 30% of the 1200 USHCN climate stations that no longer exist, but that NOAA estimates temps from the stations now not functional state stations?”

JC: Okay, not quite as simple as that. Weather observations at certain locations come and go. You know, that they may be there for 30 years, and then they stop collecting right there. In processing the temperature data, NOAA does this homogenization thing to try to extend the record in sensible ways. Am I a fan of what NOAA is doing? Not particularly, but they're not deliberately fabricating. They're trying to use statistical methods to get better space and time coverage for the surface temperature observations. Is this very accurate or reliable, or do I like it? Well, not really, but there are better approaches. So it's not quite as some of the headlines make it seem, but I don't particularly like it either.

JAG: You would design it better. Okay, so one of the things that you covered in your book was the two-degree target. The international climate policy goal of limiting global warming to two-degrees celsius compared to pre-industrialization levels. How did this target evolve, and how valid is it?

JC: Well, it's just a political choice. The choice of referencing things to the pre-industrial period is an interesting one in itself. Like the 18th century. This was in the little ice age. It was the coldest period of the last thousand years. Think Valley Forge and George Washington and the horrible winters that he endured. The weather and climate were horrible during that period. It was much worse being colder, and trying to make out like that was some Goldilocks climate is rather a joke. I think a warmer climate that we have now is actually better. Which brings us to the whole issue of Goldilocks. What climate do we really want? But, okay, so the two-degrees centigrade. We've already warmed since pre-industrial times by 1.2 degrees centigrade, so we're already more than halfway there. Over that period, humans have thrived. Population has increased by five times. The percent of people in poverty is way down. Agricultural productivity is way up. A far smaller percentage of people lose their lives from weather and climate disasters. So, overall, things are much better than they were even 100 years ago. 

Thinking that warming is dangerous, it's really a little bit hard to justify. The whole idea of two degrees, it's politics.

Thinking that warming is dangerous, it's really a little bit hard to justify. The whole idea of two degrees, it's politics. It's trying to balance that if it's too stringent, then people will throw up their hands and say we can't reach it, and if it's too lenient, people will say we don't have to worry about it now. So it was a political decision trying to maximize the alarm and the political pressure. It was a political decision made not all that long ago, like less than ten years ago. So all this talk about dangerous climate change in the UN never really defined it, until maybe 2015 when they declared it to be two-degrees centigrade. Now that it looks like we could maybe stay within two-degrees centigrade, they've lowered the goalpost to 1.5-degrees centigrade. “Oh, no, we're almost there.” It's all politics. These deadlines and thresholds are just pure politics. There's no objectively objective way to decide what temperatures are warmer in the US. People are migrating from New York and California to Florida and Texas. People don't like cold winters. So, this whole idea that warmth is bad, it's very hard to objectify. Science doesn't have much to say about it. It's about people's preferences and it's about politics, not about science.

JAG: I think there are probably some other reasons why people are moving from New York to Florida and Texas. Probably not just the weather.

JC: They don't need to move south. They could move to—

JAG: —California, and they're not doing that.

JC: To the Great Plains, where the politics might be better, but the temperatures are still cold.

JAG: That's true.

JC: That's true.

JAG: So, a lot of the climate predictions we hear are based on computer modeling. We've seen firsthand some of the failures of computer modeling recently. The models of the British Imperial College driving COVID lockdown policies with devastating economic and social results and questionable benefits. What is computer modeling and what's its role in climate science? How reliable is it?

There's a lot of inadequacies in these climate models. They should not be used as prediction machines.

JC: Climate models start with basic laws of physics, Newton's laws of motion, thermodynamics. They simulate the temperature, the humidity and the winds over the globe, where they discretize the grid of the globe. So, there is physics that goes into this. They're huge, big computer models. But there's a lot of the most important things for climate, clouds being one of them. These are all subgrid scale and they're highly parameterized. So there's not really physics that goes into some of the most important parts of this. Climate models are useful tools for research, so we can tweak them and play games with them to understand how the climate model works. They are not fit for the purpose of predicting future climate. I mean, there's huge uncertainties even about how sensitive the climate is to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Not to mention they don't deal with natural climate variability adequately. So there's a lot of inadequacies in these climate models. They should not be used as prediction machines.

JAG: All right, I'm going to take another couple of people asking the same question on Facebook and YouTube. I'll take Georgie Alexopoulos asking, “What do you think will happen with the Mann versus Steyn case? And what does it say for the future of people speaking out?”

JC: Oh, my gosh. So, some backstory. In 2012, Mark Steyn wrote an op-ed basically criticizing Penn. This was the time of the football scandal at Penn State: the molesting of little boys, Jerry Sandusky, and whatever. Mark Steyn was writing about what we saw Penn State do to try to whitewash and hide that one. What about they're probably doing the same thing with the inquiry into Michael Mann? This is a follow-on to Climategate, and the hockey-stick issue: was that a whitewash too? He said words like “fraudulent hockey stick.” So Michael Mann sued him. Michael Mann has sued other people and threatened to sue other people, trying to intimidate people from not speaking up. Well, this languished for more than a decade in the courts. I was one of the witnesses for Mark Steyn. There was a trial in Washington, DC, last January. And, Michael Mann had no case. Suing Mark Steyn for $20 million in libel, largely punitive, damages, Michael Mann didn't have a case. His lawyers put on a pathetic case. Mark Steyn and his co-defendant Rand Simberg did an excellent job and they had real scientists. They did an excellent job. But this was in Washington, DC, very heavily democratic. When I heard that Mark Steyn was questioned and said that he had guest-hosted for Rush Limbaugh and appeared on Fox News, I knew it was game over with the DC jury: “Wow, this guy is a bad guy.” 

Even worse, Michael Mann's lawyer in the closing statement says, “You need to help stop these climate deniers from harassing real climate scientists. These are climate deniers, just like election deniers. He played the Trump card and this had these jurors so riled up. So, it took them a very short time to come to a verdict. They awarded $1 in real damages and a million dollars in punitive damages just because Mark Steyn's “a bad guy”: guest-hosted for Rush Limbaugh. So, this was an absolute travesty of justice. This will go on for another decade, but it's a horrible precedent. I mean, this is all about politics. It's politics all the way down. The jury that the judge allowed was enormously biased. He just wasn't up to the task. I think the judge might have been well-meaning. He just wasn't up to the task and he allowed all of it. Once the closing statement with election denial and playing the Trump card, I mean, it was just game over with a Washington, DC, jury. And you can venue-shop. You can shop around for a state or a city where you can expect to find a friendly jury. The precedent being set here is just horrifying. Absolutely horrifying.

JAG: We're seeing other examples in other fields of people using right-to-try to force political outcomes. It's really an abuse of our judicial system.

JC: The implications for free speech are horrifying, not to mention the implications for the climate debate and policy and all that. But the free speech implications are horrifying. I would expect this to go to the Supreme Court, frankly, because of the freedom implications.

JAG: Yes. Last week, I interviewed John Ellis about his book on the breakdown of higher education, in which he catalogs declining levels of academic rigor in the training of academics. Given how many young, many of the scholars raising alarm about the faulty science driving today's alarmism, people of your generation, people in their fifties, sixties, seventies, do you think that the politicized and degraded quality of academic scholarship may be part of the problem here?

Science has been subsumed in all these climate studies and environmental studies programs.

JC: Science has been subsumed in all these climate studies and environmental studies programs. Like I said, previous question. There are some hardcore programs where you can go to get a really rigorous education on the topic, but in terms of the sheer volume of people that are being graduated, particularly with master's degrees in climate studies and environmental studies, these are dominating the field. They're becoming journalists. They're going to work for advocacy groups, they're working in the private sector, they're congressional staffers. They're just infiltrating everywhere. What they received is just a very politicized softcore education. But they call themselves climate scientists. So, what we're getting is just a continuing politicized spin rather than real science.

JAG: One of the things that struck me about your book is that it wasn't just about climate science. It was also about the science of philosophy. There was psychology in it. It was really about how to think about risk, how to think about uncertainty. I mean, it definitely would appeal to a lot of objectivists who are concerned about critical thinking and epistemology. So, maybe talk about that process in terms of your evolution. Were there things that in working on the book you learned or changed your mind on issues that you hadn't previously examined?

JC: Well, I'm glad you picked up on that part of it. In 2010, following Climategate, I started my own blog, climatejudithcurry.com. The idea was not just to open up the discussion to people from all fields and across the spectrum, but I really wanted to explore all of these uncomfortable issues, not just about hard science, but, ethics and social psychology and bias and philosophy of science and all these kinds of things. It seems that climate was such a multidimensional issue with all these things hidden. So, my idea was to bring these things out and I began exploring all these different topics. I developed a network of people from legal studies, philosophy of science, on and on. It goes all over the world. Some of them were contributing guest posts on my blog. So, I began as it was climate, etcetera, and I was spending a lot of time on the et cetera part of it, not just science. I saw that my blog was a series on climate science and the uncertainty monster, and this was really a philosophy of science series. So, all of this framed my thinking on the book. Then the other more applied part, risk science, which is something that I was picking up as part of my company. 

I mean, what I'm fundamentally trying to do is to help my clients better manage their weather and climate risk. So, I was getting more and more steep, not just in the practical aspects of this, but into risk science. All these different threads came together in my book in a way that I don't think any other person on the planet would have combined this combination of things in the way that I did. It's a pretty unique perspective, but this book sort of chronicles my journey in the post-Climategate era. as I stated. Okay, we need to do something different here. What's wrong with what's going on? I started grappling with all of this. This book describes my journey and culminates with what I came up with in terms of changing my mind. I learned something on a daily basis. So, in my mind, everything is all pretty fluid. Since I've written the book, there are some things I would have added, changed, whatever. It's just a process of exploring so many different things and weaving all that into my mental model, which is continuing to expand. In terms of changing my mind, I would say it's more expanding my mind and growing my mental model.

JAG: Well, thank you, Dr. Curry, for this time with you, for your insights, for the magnificent achievement of your book. Again, I highly recommend it to this audience, particularly objectivists who want to not only educate themselves about the history and some of the context of the climate debate, but also how to think critically about these issues that are coming up. Also, thank you for, of course, your example of academic integrity and of courage in the face of those who wanted you to conform. It's definitely no matter what field you're in, I think it's an example that we all should follow.

JAG: So, thank you.

JC: Well, thank you. I enjoyed talking with you.

JAG: I want to thank everyone who joined us today who asked such great questions. Of course, if you enjoyed this video, any of our other materials and programming, please consider making a tax deductible donation@atlasesociety.org. Next week I will be in Australia. I am still going to want to encourage you to join Antonella Marty and Rob Tracinski. They are going to be hosting a special current events webinar discussing Javier Milei and what is currently happening in Argentina. So, I hope you'll join that. Thanks everyone.

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