{"id":2817,"date":"2010-04-27T07:32:34","date_gmt":"2010-04-27T11:32:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/collideascape\/?p=2817"},"modified":"2010-04-27T07:32:34","modified_gmt":"2010-04-27T11:32:34","slug":"curry-the-backstory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.keithkloor.com\/?p=2817","title":{"rendered":"Curry: The Backstory"},"content":{"rendered":"

By now, many people must be wondering of Judith Curry<\/a>: what’s her story<\/em>? How did the respected Georgia Tech climate scientist go from global warming = more intense hurricanes<\/a> to darling of climate skeptics<\/a>?\u00a0 How did she go from staunch<\/a> IPCC booster to harsh<\/a> IPCC critic?<\/p>\n

And why, in heaven’s name, is Curry engaging in multiple conversations about the credibility of climate science on a blog?<\/p>\n

https://ramedicare.com/auto-draft/ Well, the quick answer to that last one is that it all started last week, when Curry agreed to a Q & A<\/a> for this site, which then morphed into a rollicking dialogue<\/a> that is still going on. Yesterday Joe Romm took note<\/a>:<\/p>\n

https://www.balimadetour.com/contact-us/ Everyone who follows climate science should read what is easily the most revealing interview<\/a> I’ve ever seen a scientist give. Be sure to read all the comments, since they are even more revealing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

https://dentalprovidence.com/implants/ Rest assured, this speaks more to Curry’s frankness than my powers of inducement. But back to that original question I posed, because Romm said something else that I found intriguing:<\/p>\n

I used to know Dr. Judith Curry pretty well “\u201d heck, she even gave me a jacket quote for Hell and High Water<\/a><\/em> <\/em>!<\/a> Now I obviously don’t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Purchase Ambien Online This is obviously a personal judgment on Romm’s part. Taken to its extreme, it infers what some climate advocates have been saying<\/a> elsewhere:<\/p>\n

Apparently Judith Curry has completed her transition to the Dark Side.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Before this gets any more bizarre, maybe it’s time we learned Curry’s backstory. So here’s a one-question Q & A that I hope brings some humanity to the debate she has triggered this past week.<\/p>\n

Xanax Buy Without Prescription Q:<\/strong> The implication in Romm’s puzzled statement is that your post-Climategate critique of climate science has changed you so radically that he doesn’t recognize the Judy Curry from 2007. He seems honestly shocked. How would you characterize your transformation in the last three years? Is it as radical as Romm implies?<\/p>\n

Tramadol Online Purchase JC:<\/strong> Well, I have been doing my best to make this about integrity in science and how we can do a better job, and not make it personal (in terms of myself, or any other particular individual).\u00a0 Looks like Joe Romm wants to make it about me.\u00a0 So here goes.<\/p>\n

Lorazepam Buy Online Here is my history with Joe Romm.\u00a0 We met in 2006 when he attended a congressional briefing that I was involved in on hurricanes and global warming.\u00a0 He was very interested in this subject and thought it was very important in terms of raising awareness about the risk of global warming.\u00a0 I was impressed with Joe’s knowledge of energy technologies and policy. During 2006 Joe made comments on one of my papers, and I made comments on a draft of his book “Hell and High Water.”\u009d\u00a0 We even participated in a joint seminar tour in Florida.\u00a0 When I started writing essays on Climategate, Joe was sharply critical, both in his blog postings and even more so in emails that he sent me.<\/p>\n

Lorazepam Buy Online So here is the story on my “transformation(s)”\u009d.\u00a0 Circa 2003, I was concerned about the way climate research was treating uncertainty (see my little essay<\/a> presented to the NRC Climate Research Committee).<\/p>\n

Eszopiclone Lunesta Buy Online I was considered somewhat quixotic but not really outside of the mainstream (p.s. the CRC didn’t pay any attention to my essay, they went off in a different direction that focused on communicating uncertainty and decisionmaking under uncertainty).\u00a0 During this period,\u00a0 I was comfortably ensconced in the ivory tower of academia, writing research papers, going to conferences, submitting grant proposals.\u00a0 I was 80% oblivious to what was going on in terms of the public debate surrounding climate change.<\/p>\n

https://prosthodontistlasvegas.com/smile-gallery/ This all changed on September 14, 2005, when I participated in a press conference on our forthcoming paper<\/a> that described a substantial increase in the global number of category 4 and 5 hurricanes. The unplanned and uncanny timing of publication of this paper was three weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.\u00a0 While global warming was mentioned only obliquely in the paper, the press focused on the global warming angle and a media furor followed. We were targeted as global warming alarmists, capitalizing on this tragedy to increase research funding and for personal publicity, a threat to capitalism and the American way of life, etc.<\/p>\n

At the same time, we were treated like rock stars by the environmental movement.\u00a0 Our 15 minutes stretched into days, weeks and months.\u00a0 Hurricane Katrina became a national focusing event for the global warming debate. We were particularly stung by criticisms from fellow research scientists who claimed that we were doing this “for the money”\u009d and attacked our personal and scientific integrity.\u00a0 We felt that one scientist in particular had crossed the line and committed a series of fouls, and this turned the scientific debate into academic guerrilla warfare between our team and the skeptics that was played out in the glare of the media.\u00a0 This “war”\u009d culminated in an article<\/a> published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, “Debate shatters the civility of weather science”\u00a0 on Feb 2, 2006 (note the timing of my email exchange with Mann, .ca Jan 2006).\u00a0 This article became a catharsis for the hurricane research community, that engendered extensive email discussion among scientists on both sides of the public debate. We did an email version of a “group hug”\u009d and vowed to stop the guerilla warfare.<\/p>\n

Buy Valium 10 Mg Online I had lost my bearings in all of this, and the Wall Street Journal article had the effect of a bucket of cold water being poured over my head.\u00a0 I learned several important lessons from this experience: just because the other guy commits the first “foul”\u009d doesn’t give you the moral high ground in protracted academic guerilla warfare. Nothing in this crazy environment is worth sacrificing your personal or professional integrity.\u00a0 After all, no one remembers who fired the first shot, all they see is unprofessional behavior.<\/p>\n

I took a step back and tried to understand all this craziness and learn from it. I even wrote a journal article<\/a> on this, “Mixing Politics and Science in Testing the Hypothesis that Greenhouse Warming is Causing a Global Increase in Hurricane Intensity.”\u009d\u00a0 This paper got quite a bit of play in the blogosphere upon its publication in Aug 2006, and at this time I made my first major foray into the blogosphere, checking in at all the blogs where the paper was being discussed.\u00a0 See esp realclimate<\/a> and climateaudit<\/a> (but I can no longer find the original thread on climateaudit).<\/p>\n

https://forgive123.com/events/ At climateaudit, the posters had some questions about statistics and wanted to see the raw data.\u00a0 I was pretty impressed by the level of discussion, and wondered why I had not come across this blog before over at the realclimate blogroll.\u00a0 Then I realized that I was on Steve McIntyre’s blog (I had sort of heard of his tiff with Mann, but wasn’t really up on all this at the time).\u00a0 I was actually having much more fun over at climateaudit than at realclimate, and I thought it made much more sense to spend time at climateaudit rather than to preach to the converted at realclimate.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Back in 2006 spending time at climateaudit was pretty rough sport (it wasn’t really moderated at the time).\u00a0 When I first started spending time over there, the warmist blogs thought it was really funny, and encouraged me to give “\u02dcem hell.<\/p>\n

Ambien No Prescription I was continuing my overall thinking on how to better deal with skeptics and increase the credibility and integrity of science.\u00a0 I gave an invited talk<\/a> at Fall 2006 AGU meeting, entitled “Falling out of the ivory tower:\u00a0 Reflections on mixing politics and climate science.”\u009d This is where I first started talking about circling the wagons, etc.\u00a0 I don’t think this was quite what the convenors had in mind when they invited me to give this talk, but at the time I still had pretty solid status as a survivor of vicious political attacks during the hurricane wars and was a heroine for taking down Bill Gray.<\/p>\n

When the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report was published in 2007, I joined the consensus in supporting this document as authoritative; I was convinced by the rigors of the process, etc etc.\u00a0 While I didn’t personally agree with everything in the document (still nagging concerns about the treatment of uncertainty), I bought into the meme of “don’t trust what one scientist says, listen to the IPCC.”\u009d\u00a0 During 2008 and 2009, I became increasingly concerned by the lack of “policy neutrality”\u009d by people involved in the IPCC and policies that didn’t make sense to me.\u00a0 But after all, “don’t trust what one scientist says”\u009d, and I continued to substitute the IPCC assessment for my own personal judgment.<\/p>\n

November 19, 2009: bucket of cold water #2.\u00a0 When I first saw the climategate emails, I knew these were real, they confirmed concerns and suspicions that I already had.\u00a0 After my first essay<\/a> “On the credibility . . .”\u009d posted at climateaudit, I got some emails that asked me to be sensitive to the feelings of the scientists involved.\u00a0 I said I was a whole lot more worried about the IPCC, in terms of whether it could be saved and whether it should be saved.\u00a0 I had been willing to substitute the IPCC for my own personal judgment, but after reading those emails, the IPCC lost the moral high ground in my opinion.\u00a0 Not to say that the IPCC science was wrong, but I no longer felt obligated in substituting the IPCC for my own personal judgment.<\/p>\n

https://growthjourneytherapy.com/specialties/immigration-anxiety/ So the Judith Curry .ca 2010 is the same scientist as she was in 2003, but sadder and wiser as a result of the hurricane wars, a public spokesperson on the global warming issue owing to the media attention from the hurricane wars, more broadly knowledgeable about the global warming issue, much more concerned about the integrity of climate science, listening to skeptics, and a blogger (for better or for worse).\u00a0 So should Joe Romm be puzzled by this?\u00a0 Probably, but I think part of his puzzlement arises from assuming that I and all “warmist”\u009d climate researchers share his policy objectives.\u00a0 People really find it hard to believe that I don’t have a policy agenda about climate change\/energy (believe me, Roger Pielke Jr<\/a> has tried very hard to smoke me out as a “stealth advocate”\u009d).\u00a0 Yes, I want clean green energy, economic development and “world peace”\u009d.\u00a0 I have no idea how much climate change should be weighted in these kinds of policy decisions.\u00a0 I lack the knowledge, wisdom and hubris to think that anything I say or do should be of any consequence to climate\/carbon\/energy policy.<\/p>\n

So back to discussing the integrity of climate research and the IPCC assessment process.<\/p>\n

*** https://growthjourneytherapy.com/methods/ Postscript<\/strong>***<\/p>\n

A good indication of Judith Curry’s stature in the climate science community is the huge amount of attention Friday’s Q & A<\/a> has generated in the climate blogosphere. Numerous climate bloggers (on all sides) have offered their own commentary on it, triggering in some cases, very lively comment threads at their sites. Notably, Realclimate has remained mum–so far.<\/p>\n

Later in the week, I plan on posting a short rundown of the blogs that have posted on the Curry dialogue, for those who might like to see how her views have been discussed elsewhere. Again, I thank Judy for agreeing to participate in the virtual round the clock discussion. I know it has taken up much of her spare time this past week–and then some.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By now, many people must be wondering of Judith Curry: what’s her story? How did the respected Georgia Tech climate scientist go from global warming = more intense hurricanes to darling of climate skeptics?\u00a0 How did she go from staunch IPCC booster to harsh IPCC critic? And why, in heaven’s name, is Curry engaging in…Continue Reading…<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2561,2791],"tags":[851,1234,1254],"class_list":["post-2817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-climate-science","category-judith-curry","tag-climate-science","tag-joe-romm","tag-judith-curry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.keithkloor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.keithkloor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.keithkloor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithkloor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithkloor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithkloor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2817\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.keithkloor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithkloor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithkloor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}