The FULL Judith Curry Interview: Climate Scientist Says World Won't End

People are dying!

People are dying!

The planet's on ******* fire!

We must do more to fight climate change,

we're told, because:

This is an actual crisis!

But is it really a crisis?

Thanks to better technology,

climate related deaths are actually falling.

Still, the media tell us:

Experts say that we have until 2030

to avoid catastrophe.

Climate scientist, Judith Curry,

once was one of those alarmists.

Hurricane Katrina happened.

That changed everything.

Well, yes it did and I'm partly to blame for that.

Curry spoke about a link between

big storms and global warming.

I was co-author on a paper published in Science

that was actually published two weeks

following Katrina's devastation of New Orleans.

And in the paper, we analyzed

global hurricane intensity since 1970

and we found that the percent of

category four and five hurricanes

had doubled over that period.

Okay, we didn't really blame it on global warming.

We just put it out there,

"Here's what the data says."

And so this was picked up by the media

as a global warming catastrophe

and for the first time

the propagandists and the alarmist said

"oh here's the way to do it."

Tie extreme weather events to global warming.

Okay, it was very hard for people to say

"Well, one or two or even four degrees, who cares."

People couldn't really relate to why we should

even care about that much warming.

Just from day-to-day and day-to-night,

the temperature changes by more than that.

But now, if it's associated

with more intense killer hurricanes,

[wind]

now we have something to be worried about.

So this hysteria is your fault!

Well, sort of, not really.

They would have picked up on it anyways,

but I was there right at the beginning of this hysteria.

And this is the point when I entered the

public debate on climate change.

Of the four co-authors, I was the one

who was most familiar with the climate change debate

and so I became the spokesperson

for the team on climate change issues.

And 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 whatever

and lots of media attention and this, that, and the other.

And within about two months of that,

besides being exhausted,

I mean the main message

we wanted to get across is

if you're going to rebuild New Orleans,

you need to think about protecting it

from a category five.

Just don't rebuild what you already have.

That was a message that we wanted

to get out there, but no.

It became this big global warming.

Nobody was interested in that other argument.

I felt it was sort of my responsibility to be out there.

It's not a comfortable place for me.

I'm not somebody, I'm much happier

behind my desk at my computer

than talking to people.

And being part of this big political debate,

we were called terrible things by people

on the other side of the debate.

"You're in it for the money." You know,

"You're in it for personal fame and publicity."

And so I was demonized by

the people on the other side.

What do you mean the other side?

The people who didn't like the whole idea

of global warming, didn't buy it,

didn't think we needed to reduce fossil fuels.

Now called the deniers.

Now called the deniers.

Okay, so after a few months of this,

scientists were criticizing our study.

"Well the data wasn't any good in the 70's and 80's"

and "Oh this is natural variability."

And so like a good scientist,

I went in and investigated all that stuff.

Oh gosh!

You mean the data is no good in the 1970's?

I better check that out.

So I was taking these criticisms very seriously

and in all honesty,

I mean there are a lot of stupid criticisms,

but in all honesty,

a few of them stuck.

Like the data wasn't any good in the 1970's.

And I was really reflecting on all this.

And after being misquoted a couple times,

badly, in the news,

I said I'm done with interviews.

I am just done with this.

I am just done with this.

But in the meantime I was invited

to give a lot of lectures and I would do that,

but people would ask me questions.

Oh the hockey stick, and the ice sheets,

and sea level rise, and things that

I didn't know that much about.

And so I started, well, I need to learn

about all these other things.

So I started learning broadly about the whole thing

not just going beyond my own personal research expertise.

And then when Climategate struck.

Climate gate threatens to overshadow the work ahead.

And this was in 2009 with the

unauthorized release of the emails

from the University of East Anglia,

if you remember this, by IPCC authors.

And it showed a lot of really ugly things.

Avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests,

trying to keep data out of the hands of people

who are questioning their results.

And bullying, trying to get

journal editors fired from their job.

Trying to bypass the rules of the IPCC.

And on and on, all this skullduggery.

And I thought, and then it clicked in my head,

it says, well I can't take their word for it,

you know, this is what goes on

behind the scenes of the IPCC.

All this skullduggery and bullying and cherry picking

and trying to keep these papers

who challenge what you want the message to be

out of the literature and out of the IPCC.

I can't trust the IPCC.

So what did Climategate have to,

that's one university?

The IPCC is bigger.

Okay, but they were emailing all the other

IPCC authors all over the world.

You have to understand the origins of all this.

The origins go back to the 1980's

and the UN environmental program had this

big environmental agenda, anti-capitalism.

They hated the oil companies

and they seized on the climate change issue

as one to move their policies along.

The 1992 Climate Treaty of the U.N.

to prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate change.

196 countries, including the U.S., signed this.

This was in 1992, before there was any evidence

that humans were impacting the climate

and they went ahead with this treaty.

So you can see that the policy cart

was way out in front of the scientific horse

from the very beginning.

So the IPCC's mandate was to look for dangerous,

human-caused climate change.

The IPCC wasn't supposed to focus

on any benefits of warming.

They weren't supposed to focus on

natural climate variability.

They were just supposed to look for the signal of

dangerous, human-caused climate change.

That was their mandate.

And then the national funding agencies

directed all of the funding in the field

to look for dangerous, human-caused climate change,

so anybody who wants--

If you're a scientists and you say

"Well, we don't know that this is a problem."

You don't get funded.

Well you can, I was getting funded even after I stopped

to do things that weren't directly related to global warming,

to analyze NASA satellite data sets,

something like that.

I could get funding to do that.

But to do something big

that would relate to the broader issues?

No. All the big center and Institute fundings

was going to people who were establishing

these programs to support dangerous,

human-caused climate change.

Mostly the impacts,

not even looking at the causes of all this.

Why?

There's a couple of things in play.

Once this whole thing was in motion,

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,

get big awards by professional societies,

well there was clearly one path to go.

Why?

It was tied in with the funding, politics.

It wasn't until like the 2000's, maybe 2003-2004,

where a climate scientists in a university

would be called a denier.

And then after Climategate,

then it became really bad.

I've been called a denier.

Not so much that I deny mainstream climate science,

my perspective on the science is very defensible.

I'm called a denier because other people,

who they've called deniers,

including Republicans mostly,

seem to pay attention to me.

And I've been invited to present congressional testimony

by Republicans maybe 10 or 11 times.

So I'm regarded as enabling the deniers,

so I must be a denier myself.

I mean this is the peculiar logic.

I mean this is all part of cancel culture

and I think the climate scientists might have

invented cancel culture

because we were the first ones

who were really out there doing this,

even 20 years ago.

Whereas in other fields, it's a lot more recent.

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 funding agents send out

an announcement of opportunity for grants.

Okay, we're looking at how global warming

is changing water resources in the United States.

Okay, that's the topic.

So if you want to get funded, you say

"Well, I'm going to look at California, Nevada

and I'm going to do this, that, and the other."

And they'll probably get funded if it's technically credible.

But if you come in saying

"Well, I don't see that there's any reason

to think that fossil fuel emissions

are changing water resources

and I'm going to go at this in such and such a way."

You're probably not going to get funded.

So it's more subtle than that

because 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.

Many people now act as if climate is everything.

I know.

There was a Time Magazine cover

"Climate is Everything"

and there's this whole cottage industry

of climate scientists who are trying to correlate

migration,

the price of wine,

the quality of wine,

floods,

extreme weather events,

transportation congestion,

the size of frogs,

everything.

Airplane turbulence blamed on changing air currents.

Scientists expect turbulence like this to become

more frequent due to climate change.

Childhood obesity through inactivity caused by heat.

A new study showing how climate change

is making our children more obese.

Oh, you've seen some good ones.

You've seen some good ones.

The issue is, this is a way to get,

you can always get a paper published

that says that.

You can get money to do that.

You're going to get a good press release.

I mean this is playing into that whole professional game.

If this was just an academic, a silly academic game,

it wouldn't be so bad,

but the real issue is that blaming everything

on climate change detracts from the real,

underlying problems which get ignored.

People just throw up their hands

"Well, it's climate change."

What's the real underlying problem?

Well, poverty, lifestyle, poor governance,

poor land use, poor city planning,

on and on it goes.

There are all sorts of underlying problems

behind all these things that get ignored.

"Oh, it's climate change."

So we need to solve our real problems

rather than trying to solve fake problems.

People are dying!

The potential extinction of the human race.

The planet's on fire.

The planets on ****** fire!

That's Bill Nye.

Okay. In terms of lives lost,

over the past 100 years,

the number of lives lost from extreme weather

or droughts or whatever has dropped by 97%.

It's a paltry sum.

97%. More people are living

with slightly warmer temperatures.

Yeah.

In terms of extreme weather,

you have better infrastructure.

The biggest thing is advanced warning.

In 1970, there was this really bad hurricane

that struck Bangladesh.

Estimated 500,000 people were killed.

Simply the worst of the many cyclones

the two million people who live here

have ever experienced.

And this is what precipitated

East Pakistan splitting off from Pakistan.

I mean it was that event.

So that was a case of weather causing real changes.

Yeah.

And another tropical cyclone of similar

magnitude hit Bangladesh.

The Super Cyclone bringing torrential rain

and 150 mile-an-hour winds.

3,000 people died.

And the difference was?

Better warnings.

And people had advanced...

Which is much cheaper than trying to reengineer--

People were able to evacuate.

More than 600,000 people were evacuated.

Advanced warning is affordable.

It's really cheap.

A fraction of the price of what we're spending,

pretending to fight climate change.

Totally. Totally.

The whole issue of danger,

I mean this is the weakest part of their case.

Even the IPCC, the U.N. climate assessment reports,

the more credible one, the Physical Science Basis,

they don't use the word "danger,"

they use "reasons for concern"

and that's a better way to describe it.

Yeah, any kind of climate change,

whether it's natural-cause or human-cause,

is an ongoing predicament

that we need to understand and

we need to adapt to

and we need to try to manage the impacts.

How we came to the point where we think

that we're going to prevent

bad weather from happening

by eliminating fossil fuels

is just about the most

nonsensical,

illogical thing that I can imagine

and the whole world is caught up in this nonsense.

I mean we laugh at Tulip Mania,

back in the Netherlands many centuries ago,

but this is really on that same level.

Years ago with lousy technology,

Holland adjusted to rising sea levels.

Okay, this is really a pretty amazing story.

Holland has worked on this for centuries.

Parts of the country are as much as

seven feet below sea level.

It's not that hard to manage

a small amount of sea level rise.

Seven feet under water, that's not a little.

I know, it's a lot.

The technology is amazing and people

over in the U.S. and around the world

are consulting with Holland to figure out

how to manage their sea level rise issue.

This is something that's manageable.

The John Oliver segment.

[Shouting]

I apologize to everyone at home.

My thanks to Bill Nye and the

overwhelming scientific consensus.

The overwhelming scientific consensus.

That's what people still believe.

Okay, this whole climate consensus,

and this is chapter two in my book about the consensus,

when you talk about a scientific consensus,

like the Earth orbits the Sun,

you don't need to say there's a consensus

that the Earth orbits the Sun.

It's a well-known fact.

When you're talking about consensus,

it's usually on a topic where there is disagreement

and a government has asked a group

to come to some sort of an agreement

on what's what.

You see it in science,

you see it in like medical boards,

when they're deciding what drug gets reimbursed

for insurance for whatever disease.

So it's a manufactured consensus.

It's a consensus of scientists which is different

than a scientific consensus.

So it's been politicized.

Something as complex as the earth's climate

is crazily complicated, complex, ambiguous, uncertain,

and there's a true scientific consensus on very little of this.

That the temperatures have been increasing

for over a hundred years,

that burning of fossil fuels

emits CO2 into the atmosphere.

And CO2 has a radiation spectrum that

sort of keeps the Earth's surface warm,

all other things being equal.

Beyond that,

there's no real big consensus on anything.

The most consequential issues

we don't have consensus on.

How much of the recent warming

is caused by fossil fuels?

Still don't know.

Is fossil fuel and is warming dangerous?

This is the weakest part of the argument.

There's no agreement as to whether warming is dangerous.

That's a weak part of the argument?

I thought that, that was assumed.

Okay well, this is, you're conflating the extreme.

This is the Hurricane Katrina argument.

Hurricane Katrina wasn't caused by global warming.

It was caused by--

But your paper said there's more hurricane activity.

Okay, associated with warming temperatures.

Two issues, part of it was bad data,

part of it is natural climate variability,

and the most recent assessment

of the category four/five issue is that

it's maybe a 13% increase since 1980

and all of that increase is in the North Atlantic

and the North Indian Ocean.

You don't see it in the Pacific

which is where most of the hurricanes are.

And in the Atlantic,

the recent increase is known to be

associated with the large-scale,

multi-decadal ocean oscillation.

So it's natural climate variability.

And the worst U.S. land falling hurricanes

were actually in the 1930's.

So there's really no evidence

that hurricanes are getting worse.

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

and I figured it out very early on about the data.

But for saying that, you're evil.

Oh yeah.

You know, people pay attention to my science.

The reason I really got knocked over

into the denier camp was

I was critical of the Climategate scientists,

who I thought behaved unethically,

and I was critical of the IPCC.

That was my cardinal sin

for getting me dumped into the denier camp.

Because I was critical of their behavior

and I think my criticisms of the IPCC

were echoed a few years later after Climategate,

when there was an inter-academy council

appointed by the U.N.

to investigate what the IPCC was doing.

And they agreed,

they weren't paying enough attention

to uncertainty and that a lot of their conclusions

were overconfident.

And this is exactly what I was saying.

But it's even, the IPCC is one thing,

but then you get the U.N. officials

that cherry pick and over hype this.

Climate change is quite simply

an existential threat for most life on the planet

including and especially the life of humankind.

And then this gets even further hyped in the media.

Global warming poses an existential

and a real threat.

Which then gets further amplified

by the advocacy groups.

We are now facing the existential crisis.

In the old days, you know, Greenpeace

and Natural Defense Council,

these were fairly sane advocacy groups.

Now, we have Extinction Rebellion

and Just Stop Oil and and all of these groups

that are just completely off the rails.

What is worth more?

Art or life?

Is it worth more than food?

Worth more than Justice?

Greenpeace and the NRDC.

The Sierra clubs.

Are reasonable?

Oh compared, compared relatively.

[Drums]

Compared to Extinction Rebellion.

But they're all basing their scary claims

"Give us more money we're going to stop it."

on U.N. predictions.

Okay, now this is where it gets interesting.

So exactly what is the U.N. predicting?

Well, over the last two years the IPCC,

the U.N. climate assessment team,

has published a series of reports

and they put out a range of projections

for the 21st century that are tied to

how much greenhouse gases

CO2 that we emit in the atmosphere.

And there's some alarming predictions

tied to the extreme emission scenario.

In these IPCC reports, they really emphasize

the simulations from the extreme emission scenario.

It's more than half of what they talk about

in these reports is tied to the extreme emission scenario.

Well, in 2021 the U.N. climate negotiators

dropped the extreme emissions scenario

and they're working off of the medium emissions scenario

as a baseline. And right now we're tracking

slightly below the medium emission scenario.

And so this gives a much more

moderate amount of warming than

the extreme mission scenario.

Even the Biden Administration just issued

a new report on the social cost of carbon.

The extreme emission scenario is nowhere to be found.

So you can see that the climate scientists

are so addicted to the extreme emission scenario

that what they're doing has become divorced

from the actual policy makers.

Why did the U.N. drop it?

Because the economists say

"look this is so not happening."

In order for the extreme emissions scenario to happen,

we'd have to increase our use of coal by six times,

which is, some have estimated

that's more than the non-recoverable reserves of coal.

This is just not the path that we're on.

It's just totally unrealistic.

In order to get to the extreme emissions scenario,

you have to make crazily unrealistic assumptions

and the U.N. climate negotiators

"okay, well, we need to get real here."

To their credit.

But well don't give them too much credit.

But they get credit for that one thing.

But the climate scientists remain addicted to that scenario.

But does this stop the U.N. climate negotiators

from saying "Wow, this is good news?"

No. They say:

"Well, the warming isn't as bad as we thought,

but the impacts are worse

so we need to double down on the alarm."

Rather than two degrees is the target,

we need to knock it back

to 1.5 degrees as a threshold of danger.

And the only way they get the impacts to be worse,

is if they're assuming that the extreme weather events

are all caused by CO2 emissions,

which of course they aren't.

In New York City you've had the smoke

from the Canadian wildfires.

Because the temperature is warmer in Canada.

Well actually, the trend in Canadian wildfires

is actually down.

So blaming this one on global warming is sort of hard.

It was actually a fluke of a dry period and some lightning,

out of season lightning which caused those fires

and it's not warming.

Back in the 1930's, the weather in the U.S. was

way, way worse than what we've seen

in the last couple of decades.

We had, far and away, the worst heat waves,

the worst droughts, the worst wildfires.

Actually, the worst wildfires were even earlier

in the 20th century in the late 19th century.

That's what John Steinbeck wrote about in

The Grapes of Wrath.

Don't know which way to turn.

Oh exactly! What caused the Dust Bowl

and all of that.

That was horrible and the worst land falling hurricanes,

U.S. land falling hurricanes were in the 1930's.

So what was going on then?

Well, it was natural climate variability.

There was a bunch of El Niños

and the Atlantic and the Pacific circulations

were in a certain phase and you got a decade

of really awful weather.

And it was over most of the United States,

not just the Dust Bowl region.

It shows up in New York.

It even shows up in New York.

The worst heat waves in New York were back then also.

But wait a second.

I see all these record high temperatures.

Oh, but there's also record low temperatures.

You're always going to be setting records somewhere,

high and low.

Do you remember back to Christmas

when you had the crazy cold weather

that came down in the...

Extreme variability caused by man-made climate change.

Well actually, if you really look at the climate dynamics,

if you're warming, and you're warming

the Arctic faster than the lower latitudes,

that's actually going to reduce the variability.

There's so much arm waving

whenever there's an extreme weather event

to try to tie it to global warming.

Sure, fossil fuel emissions did have an impact,

but there was a lot of other stuff going on

in the 20th century that were

influencing our climate and to think that

all of this is global warming,

human-caused global warming,

fossil fueled warming, is just a fairy tale.

And yet, that's a minority opinion

if you read the media.

Oh, I know.

The people who understand this

are a subfield of climate scientists called

climate dynamicists and this is a relatively small group

who have their roots in physics,

not in ecology, not in sociology,

not in economics, not in whatever,

but have their training in physics. And back in the old days,

and this is why a lot of people on the older side,

in their 50's, 60's, and 70's,

tend to be more skeptical of the mainstream narrative,

is because they got this very rigorous education

in geophysical fluid dynamics and climate dynamics.

So they understand the circulation patterns and

what's going on.

I mean, nowadays you get your degree in climate studies

and the only thing you know

about what is actually causing climate change

is how to recite IPCC talking points.

There's no understanding there.

So when you hear experts talking about all this,

there's three categories.

One, is people who are fluent

in reciting IPCC talking points.

Bill Nye would be an example.

You're adults now and this is an actual crisis.

He can talk about this stuff,

but he doesn't have really any real understanding.

He doesn't have a graduate degree

and his undergraduate degree is mechanical engineering,

but he's the expert.

Right, and then the second class,

is people who actually have some understanding,

who can read the full U.N. climate report,

the full one, and actually understand it.

And then there's the third class,

people who are genuine experts,

who can critically evaluate all that.

And, unfortunately, that third category

is shrinking proportionally

because the rest of the climate field is exploding.

You have a preponderance of this category one people,

like Bill Nye, who are judged to be experts,

who are talking about all this.

What's in it for them?

Fame, fortune.

It may be, their personal politics probably plays a role,

but you know fame and fortune.

[Laughs]

So the IPCC has several scenarios

and the extreme one they've dropped.

And as a result of this more moderate reference scenarios,

the amount of warming predicted for the 21st century,

relative to the extreme emissions scenario,

has been cut in half.

So we're looking at half the amount of warming

than what we expected even.

It could still do lots of damage.

It could, it could, maybe.

But I still think those projections are too high

because they haven't adequately

accounted for natural climate variability.

But that leads us to the point is "what's dangerous?"

Might be dangerous.

The slow creep of global warming

is associated with two main impacts.

One is the slow creep of sea level rise,

and the other one is melting of glaciers and ice sheets,

and those are slow processes.

And again, the modern sea level rise

and the modern Glacier melt-off started in the mid-1800's.

Remember we're coming out of the little ice age.

Right now, sea level rise is rising

at three millimeters per year.

To put that in perspective, three millimeters,

you stack two pennies on top of each other,

that's three millimeters.

That's how much sea level is rising each year.

So, I mean, if you--

Per a year, per year, it adds up.

It adds up, but it adds up to maybe eight inches,

eight or nine inches. Less than a foot.

If you think about what the tides are from day to day,

it's a lot more than a foot.

And a storm surge from a hurricane

can be more than 10 feet.

So we're talking about the slow creep

that we can easily normalize and adapt to.

But I hear that we could be approaching

the tipping point where everything gets worse.

There have been abrupt climate changes in the past

and around 10,000 years ago,

there was a hugely abrupt climate change

tied to a change in ocean circulation patterns

where 10 degrees over a century.

And this was just tied

to internal circulation patterns in the ocean.

Scientists are still trying to sort this out,

but we don't know.

But there can be these abrupt shifts in the climate.

They talk about collapse of the Atlantic Ocean circulation

and the Gulf Stream and all these crazy

possibilities.

Even the IPCC puts these

at low likelihood or low confidence.

The only one that they give high confidence to

is the disappearance of summertime Arctic sea ice

and by disappearance, they mean 80% of it.

They don't mean a hundred percent of it.

And in any event, the Arctic sea ice

would reform again in the winter.

So I don't know exactly what kind of a catastrophe

that would cause.

The most scary of these scenarios

is the potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet.

The West Antarctic ice sheet is very unstable.

If you took away the West Antarctic ice sheet,

that part of the continent would actually be

well underwater. So it's

what we call, a marine ice sheet.

The glacier sits above the water level,

but the continental part is well below sea level.

As a result, it's unstable

and the ice sheet moves a lot faster

than you would expect a glacier to move

and icebergs break off.

You hear in the news:

"Oh, one just broke off the size of Rhode Island."

And you hear this, and that happens

in the normal course of events.

It is an unstable ice sheet.

And if this were to collapse,

it would take some centuries for all this to melt,

but it would be a lot of sea level to rise.

So to me, that's the one scary thing that could happen

on the time scale of three or four centuries.

It would raise sea level rise six, seven feet globally

on the time scale of centuries.

But that's something that we can adapt to

on the time scale of several centuries.

But the likelihood of that happening,

I mean it's one of these big wild cards.

The odds are very low of anything like that happening

in the 21st century.

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.

There's a young geologist

who recently left the University of Alabama,

actually before his tenure decision,

saying "I don't want to play this game.

I know what it takes.

Just to see it here, I don't want to play this game. I'm out."

There's a lot of young scientists, PHD's,

who would love to work at a university

say "Well, which university should I go to?"

Or try to go to where they would accept people

who do this kind of research

and I give them a list of a few places that I know of.

I said but the jobs are very competitive

and you're going to have a tough time getting funding.

And then people have retired prematurely, like myself.

And then a few have stuck it out

and they've been able to manage

if they have friends in high places.

The ones who speak up are people who are retired,

who are in the private sector.

Because universities have become idiots

and they punish people who tell the truth?

It's pretty ugly.

I felt the hostility when I was at Georgia Tech,

and Georgia Tech is by no means

the worst place to be in this regard,

and I just said "No, I'm not going to do this."

I resigned.

I'm still not getting why push dubious extremism?

Personal politics, they're environmentalists, they want

fossil fuels to go away.

Anti-capitalists, anti-democratic, the whole thing.

The whole university disease these days.

Well, the whole university disease.

Universities are very liberal places for the most part

and there's a few bastions of sanity,

University of Chicago, my alma mater,

leads the pack in terms of sanity on all these kinds of issues.

So it's not every university,

but if you're a state university in a blue state,

of course you're going to be doing that.

To get paid?

No, to get university funding.

and it's the board of trustees,

there's all these politics in play in universities

that determine standing.

If they want big donations for some big climate institute,

a new building, a new whatever,

want to toe this party line.

If all their donors are of that persuasion.

CNN –

Large parts of the world could become uninhabitable.

They’re quoting climate scientists.

Climate scientists say all sorts of crazy things.

First off, the most prestigious

journal publications like Science and Nature,

they only send a small fraction of

papers out for review.

They reject a majority of them,

before they even go out for peer review.

So if you're coming in with a paper

that's challenging any part of the consensus,

that's not going to even be sent out for review.

The editor of the journal Science,

she wrote this political rant

about we need to stop emissions now,

that was published in Science.

And she was the chief editor

of the Journal of Science.

So what kind of message does that give to the editors?

Promote the alarming papers

and don't even send the other ones out for review.

So you can see how this gatekeeping works.

You can always get your paper published somewhere,

but it's not going to be in a

prestige journal,

one that helps you with your career

or one that gets publicity or anything like that.

The website DeSmog writes,

"Judith Curry says her consulting company

includes petroleum companies."

You're doing this for the money.

Okay. Back when I was faculty member

at Georgia Tech,

I was extremely well paid.

My salary was a matter of public record,

well into six figures.

My salary, since I've gone private sector,

rarely even approaches

half of what I was receiving from Georgia Tech.

So if I was doing this for the money,

I would have stayed at Georgia Tech.

I can see why other academics

don't want to speak out.

Joe Romm of Climate Progress.

“Judith Curry abandons science.”

I think he called me the most debunked

climate scientists on the planet.

But the really funny thing is

there's a back story with Joe Romm.

Joe Romm just loved the hurricane, my stuff

following Hurricane Katrina.

Joe Romm and I even did a

little mini tour in Florida,

going around, talking to people.

I would talk about the problem.

He would talk about the solution.

Joe Romm, if you look back before Climategate,

he was publicizing me all over the place,

even during Climategate,

when he thought, you know, what's she doing here?

What's she doing here?

He even published one of my essays

on Climategate on his Climate Progress blog.

Within about three or four months,

the important people sort of told him,

okay, we need to abandon Judith Curry

and just call her a denier.

But up until that point,

Joe Romm was actually a promoter of mine.

I even wrote a blurb for his book Hell and High Water.

I reviewed it for him and everything.

So we were, you know, quasi-friends.

And then after that,

he turned and I then became the most

debunked climate scientist on the planet.

So you can see what drives these people.

It's not science.

Are you the most debunked climate scientist?

I'm probably the most irritating.

The reason they hate me so much

is because I criticize them and I criticize...

Michael Mann calls you a serial climate disinformer.

He called me a denier and a misinformer.

This is how much I had gotten under his skin.

I'm the number one enemy in certain circles,

certainly Michael Mann, he takes it personally.

You told me you had to develop

the hide of an armadillo.

Uh huh.

Things were just uncomfortable

for me at Georgia Tech.

And so, I’d get invites from

headhunters all the time to apply for this,

that or the other position.

And I started applying for some of these positions.

I wanted to be out west.

I was looking at things out west

and some pretty big positions,

and I got invitations to interview,

and I did interview

and the headhunters said,

"Wow, you're a great candidate."

You have brilliant ideas on

how to move this university forward

and you interviewed very well.

But at the end of the day,

nobody will hire you,

because if you Google Judith Curry,

everything that shows up with

“Judith Curry denier.

Judith Curry, serial climate disinformer,”

All DeSmog, like.

Ten years ago it was awful.

It's not so bad anymore.

But ten years ago, if you Googled me,

the first hundred things that you would show up

would be Judith Curry denier stuff.

I was dead in academia.

At that point I started making my plans

to transition 100% to the

private sector and work on my company full time.

And best thing I ever did in my life.

Why had things become uncomfortable at your school?

Well, some of my faculty members

were complaining because I criticized the IPCC.

I criticized the hockey stick.

They were complaining. There was a bad situation

where one of my faculty members had a relative

who was in the higher administration,

Georgia Tech, who was feeding all this stuff to this person.

The provost was

very into the narrative of climate alarmism

and saw this as a way to get more money to Georgia Tech.

And on and on it went.

I was just unpopular

with the higher administration for my stand.

When I stepped down as chair,

I could see the writing on the wall

that I would be marginalized at the university,

even just as a regular faculty member,

no teaching assignments, small office,

never going to get a salary increase.

I could just see the writing on the wall.

So I left. I could have stayed there

and sucked up my big salary.

I would have made a whole lot more money doing that

than from my paltry,

paltry sums that my clients

in the petroleum sector pay me.

I could have made a lot more money at Georgia Tech,

but that's not who I am.

My personal and professional integrity

would not allow me to play that game.

Good for you.

I'm a lot happier.

I'm on top of the world right now.

I'm so glad to be out of all that.

Thank you. Judith Curry.