By by Rhoda Wilson | The Exposé
The climate system is extremely complex and our understanding is deeply uncertain. There is a whole lot that we don’t know and even more that we can’t know.
When in the 1980s, the United Nations (“UN”) picked up on climate change as a tool to push forward a Globalist agenda, it became an assumption that global warming was dangerous.
However, over the last 100 years, temperatures have risen by 1oC and agricultural productivity has skyrocketed, the global population has increased by 400%, fewer people live in poverty and there are fewer deaths from extreme weather and climate events.
Since 2021, the UN is predicting that global temperatures will rise by another 1oC by 2100. Based on the effects of the last 100 years, is this really a problem?
The public doesn’t get to hear of these things because the information given to the public is carefully laundered spin which is amplified by corporate media. And climate scientists who speak against the prevailing climate change narrative are marginalised, demonised and dismissed as “climate deniers,” often using accusations of being funded by petroleum companies.
The above are some of the points Judith Curry made during an interview with Afshin Rattansi, host of Going Underground, last week. She joined Rattansi to discuss her book ‘Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response’ which was released last year.
Judith Curry, formerly a professor at and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is an award-winning climatologist and president and co-owner of Climate Forecast Applications Network.
As supplementary reading to the video above, we recommend an article she published titled ‘Annual GWPF lecture: Climate Uncertainty and Risk’ which covers most of the topics she discussed but in more detail.
“We have vastly oversimplified both the climate problem and its solution,” she told Rattansi. That a warming climate is dangerous is the weakest part of the argument, she added.
In the 1980s, the United Nations Environmental Program was looking for a cause to push forward its anti-capitalist and elimination of fossil fuels agenda. The UN picked up on the climate change issue and from that time it has been assumed that a warming climate was dangerous. So, “the policy cart has been way out in front of the scientific horse for decades now on this issue,” Curry said.
“And the problem has been very narrowly framed. This narrow framing is only about fossil fuel emissions and has acted to marginalise important fields of climate science. And it’s led to us making extremely sub-optimal decisions about how we should deal with the problem in terms of eliminating emissions,” she said.
In her book, Curry discusses how the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”) manufactures consensus.
Referring to a tweet US President Barack Obama posted in 2013 claiming that 97 per cent of climate experts believe global warming is “real, man-made and dangerous,” Curry explained that there’s a very big difference between a scientific consensus and a consensus of scientists.
“When you hear talk about consensus it probably means that some politicians are looking for scientific evidence that will support their preferred policies,” she said.
“Towards that end, the IPCC was asked to seek consensus about climate change to support the UN climate agenda. And in order to do so, they carefully selected people who would promote this particular idea, they completely marginalised natural climate variability and in order to enforce a consensus they had to demonise anybody who challenged it,” she told Rattansi.
This manufacturing of scientific consensus to support political objectives is not only very bad for science but it’s also very bad for policy-making, she added.
In her book, she also talks about how the African continent suffers under the dictatorship of the IPCC agenda. While African countries suffer restrictions to development, rich people get even richer from climate policies.
Curry explained that for several decades, international development aid has been tied to the agenda to eliminate fossil fuel emissions. “Money that used to be used to try to eradicate poverty and reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events and help eliminate world hunger – all of that is now ignored in the zeal to eliminate fossil fuels,” she said.
The discussion then moved to Climategate. The Climategate scandal began on 19 November 2009 when an archive file containing emails between members of the Climatic Research Unit (“CRU”) was copied to numerous locations across the Internet. The senders and recipients of the emails constituted a cast list of the IPCC’s scientific elite.
Before Climategate was exposed, Prof. Curry thought the responsible thing for a climate scientist to do was to support the IPCC consensus and public statements about climate change. So, she supported them.
“That all changed when I read those [Climategate] emails,” she told Rattansi. She began speaking out. As a result, she has been attacked and accused of being funded by the fossil fuel industry.
“Activists who were preaching the consensus and talking about [climate] deniers didn’t really want to engage with any sceptics about their actual arguments. They felt the easiest way to tar them was to say, ‘Oh well, they’re being funded by the fossil fuel industry and we can therefore dismiss them’,” she explained.
“To my mind, at least in the US, government funding is far more biased and resulting in more politicisation of the scientists than the very paltry amounts of research funding from the petroleum sector. So that whole argument doesn’t make sense,” she said. “But it’s an easy way of just completely dismissing anybody who challenges any of the science or the policies.”
We’ve previously published an article about how in the aftermath of Climategate, Curry felt compelled to reassess the “groupthink” on climate change she had been drawn into and conduct her own independent assessment. You can read our article HERE.
“The climate system is extremely complex and our understanding is deeply uncertain. There is a whole lot that we don’t know and even more that we can’t know because of the fundamentally chaotic nature of the climate system,” Curry said.
“So, these overconfident predictions [made by climate alarmists] with inadequate climate models are just fundamentally not fit for purpose for making policy decisions about the energy system [currently driven by fossil fuels]. But that doesn’t stop the politicians from completely relying on them.”
The information given to the public is carefully laundered spin. Curry explained how this comes about:
“You take a research paper with ambiguous conclusions but they will make the abstract and the title provocative so that they will get some press and some media attention. But if you read deep there’s a lot of caveats and uncertainties.
“And then you go to the level of the IPCC. They select papers that are convenient to their conclusions and they ignore a lot of the ones that are inconvenient. In the body of the IPCC report, there’s some good material and some good analyses. But by the time you get to the summary for policymakers, this has all been spun – the results have been cherry-picked and carefully crafted to support the preferred narrative.
“And then once you have the UN officials talking about the IPCC report, we have ‘code red’, ‘highway to hell’, all of this kind of crazy rhetoric – and the media takes it from there with all of this alarming rhetoric.
“So, by the time the public actually sees it, they’re exposed to a bunch of unjustified, overhyped alarm that is not supported by the science or even by the full text of the IPCC reports themselves.”
Returning to the incorrect assumption that global warming is dangerous, Curry explained that since 2021, the UN has been working on a 2.4oC temperature rise by 2100, and half of this warming has already occurred. So, the expected temperature rise from now until the end of the century is 1.4oC, or less.
Looking at the effects over the previous 100 years where there has been a 1oC increase in temperatures, she said, “We saw the global population increase by about 400%, far fewer people are living in poverty than before, agricultural productivity has skyrocketed and a far smaller percentage of the population die from weather and climate extreme events.”
“Humans have always adapted to their weather and climate and if they have enough energy and wealth, they will continue to do so
“We don’t know how climate change will play out. Regional climate change [for example in Africa] depends far more on natural climate variability related to multi-decadal regimes of ocean circulation patterns. It’s not a simple trend in one direction.”
The best way to approach climate change is a bottom-up approach, not a UN top-down approach. “Once you put the decision-making down at the lower levels, you can end up with some sensible actions,” Curry said.
