Tag Archives: Dr. Judith Curry

Climate bookshelf 2023

From Climate Etc.

by Judith Curry

2023 was a banner year for the publication of interesting climate-related books.  Some excellent books for Xmas stockings, providing scientific insights, policy sanity and optimism for the 21st century.

Climate Etc. authors

First up is four books that have been ‘mid-wifed’ in some way by Climate Etc., by authors that are very familiar to the Denizens of Climate Etc.  These books have been discussed previously here, but this is a reminder if you haven’t already bought/read them.  Links to recent reviews/interviews are provided.

Climate Uncertainty and Risk – Rethinking Our Response, by Judith Curry

I assume my book needs no summary for this audience, I provide links to some reviews that I found insightful.

Climate Uncertainty and Risk is more than a book. Curry has produced a single-author counter to the IPCC that offers a radical alternative to the UN paradigm of climate change that could well serve as a manual for a future Republican administration.―Rupert Darwall, RealClear Energy

The real import of Curry’s book is her analysis of the forms of science and economics that are rallied to support extreme policy actions.  She brings hope that climate peace is possible. – Terence Corcoran, Financial Post.  This one  is entertaining, jointly reviews my book and Michael Mann’s book.

While focused on climate, the book is also a thoughtful and significant contribution on uncertainty and risk in general. It makes valuable contributions on topics such as the interface between science and politics, how we handle disagreements within science, and how scientists communicate with governments and the public. The book addresses how to think about different types of uncertainty, the role of computer simulation models, and the use (and abuse) of scenarios, and how to respond to risk. The analytical framing is scientific. The synthesis of many parts into a coherent whole is impressive. All is in the context of climate, but the thinking, the writing, and the masterful sweep of the work is such that any business person, professional, academic, politician, or official should have no trouble drawing insights and lessons for a range of other fields. Do not be surprised if this book comes to be recognised as one of the most important contributions to this field. – Stephen Wilson, IPA Review

Solving the Climate Puzzle: The Sun’s Surprising Role, by Javier Vinos

Comments on the book:

Javier Vinós has produced a masterful summary of observational facts about Earth’s climate and the theories that have been proposed to explain them. I know of no other book that presents so many detailed and interesting facts about Earth’s climate. This is a long book but well worth reading for the excellent figures alone. Its extensive references to original papers are a valuable resource. –
Dr. William Happer, Physicist. Professor Emeritus, Princeton University. Former director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science

Vinós’ journey towards identifying meridional heat transport as the driver of climate change represents the process of science at its best. “Solving the Climate Puzzle” will change the way you think about climate change. – Dr. Judith Curry, Geophysical scientist. Professor Emerita, Georgia Institute of Technology. President, Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN)

The unique achievement of Dr. Vinós in this book is his ability to tell the complex scientific stories as simply as possible and no less. He has assembled in this powerful new book a lot of fresh scientific insights and understanding that are second to none, so congratulation for all of you that are willing to study it. – Dr. Willie Soon, Astrophysicist and Geoscientist. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES)

Here is a good interview with Tom Nelson.

The Grip of Culture: The Social Psychology of Climate Catastrophism, by Andy West

Some recent reviews:

A cultural analysis, of the kind set out in The Grip of Culture, can explain the suicidal course taken by Western societies. Its message, that the true threat to our civilisation comes, not from the weather or the climate, but from the culture of catastrophism that has weaponised those issues is profoundly disturbing. Those of us who are fond of living in a free and rational society need to understand what we are facing, and soon.- Andrew Montford, Daily Sceptic

Culture explains the power and prevalence of the [climate catastrophe] narrative, the political and societal responses to it and the apparent willingness of many people to incur immense cost to avert a supposed existential threat, without proof of either its existence or our ability to alter its impact. In a new book The Grip of Culture: the Social Psychology of Climate Change Catastrophism, Andy A. West provides an academic analysis of the phenomenon. Its lessons have particular relevance to Canada’s climate obsession.- Joe Oliver, Financial Post

A free pdf of the book is available.

Doubt and Certainty in Climate Science, by Alan Longhurst

Text from my review of the book:

This is a remarkable book, a tour de force.  There are fresh insights in each chapter, borne of Longhurst’s objective analysis of the data and the literature.  The papers he cites are from Nature, Science, PNAS, Journal of Climate and other mainstream, high impact journals.  I doubt that John Cook’s activist abstract classifiers would classify many if any of these papers as ‘skeptical’.  However, each of these papers provides a critical link in Longhurst’s reasoning that produces conclusions that do not agree with the ‘consensus.’

I am reminded  of this quote by Galileo: “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”  The value of an independent assessment of this broad range of topics, by a scientist who does not have a dog in this fight, is extremely high.  Very, very few climate scientists have personally dug as deeply as Longhurst over such a broad range of climate science topics.  This reminds us that the broad range of complex issues surrounding detection and attribution of climate change are outside the scope of what most climate scientists consider, and one can only infer that their support for the consensus conclusions is based on second-order belief regarding many topics outside of their personal expertise and research experience.

Science

A number of climate science books were published in 2023, starting off with some interesting science then concluding with climate alarmism.  In this genre is Michael Mann’s Our Fragile Moment, which looks like the 4th edition of Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.  These two books caught my eye (haven’t read them yet).

The Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World, by Helen Czerski.

From the book description:

All of Earth’s oceans, from the equator to the poles, are a single engine powered by sunlight, driving huge flows of energy, water, life, and raw materials. In The Blue Machine, physicist and oceanographer Helen Czerski illustrates the mechanisms behind this defining feature of our planet, voyaging from the depths of the ocean floor to tropical coral reefs, estuaries that feed into shallow coastal seas, and Arctic ice floes.

Through stories of history, culture, and animals, she explains how water temperature, salinity, gravity, and the movement of Earth’s tectonic plates all interact in a complex dance, supporting life at the smallest scale―plankton―and the largest―giant sea turtles, whales, humankind. From the ancient Polynesians who navigated the Pacific by reading the waves, to permanent residents of the deep such as the Greenland shark that can live for hundreds of years, she introduces the messengers, passengers, and voyagers that rely on interlinked systems of vast currents, invisible ocean walls, and underwater waterfalls.

Most important, however, Czerski reveals that while the ocean engine has sustained us for thousands of years, today it is faced with urgent threats. By understanding how the ocean works, and its essential role in our global system, we can learn how to protect our blue machine. Timely, elegant, and passionately argued, The Blue Machine presents a fresh perspective on what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet.

Elemental: How Five Elements Changed Earth’s Past and Will Shape Our Future, by Stephen Porder

From the book description:

It is rare for life to change Earth, yet three organisms have profoundly transformed our planet over the long course of its history. Elemental reveals how microbes, plants, and people used the fundamental building blocks of life to alter the climate, and with it, the trajectory of life on Earth in the past, present, and future.

Taking readers from the deep geologic past to our current era of human dominance, Stephen Porder focuses on five of life’s essential elements—hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. He describes how single-celled cyanobacteria and plants harnessed them to wildly proliferate across the oceans and the land, only to eventually precipitate environmental catastrophes. He then brings us to the present, and shows how these elements underpin the success of human civilization, and how their mismanagement threatens similarly catastrophic unintended consequences. But, Porder argues, if we can learn from our world-changing predecessors, we can construct a more sustainable future.

Blending conversational storytelling with the latest science, Porder takes us deep into the Amazon, across fresh lava flows in Hawaii, and to the cornfields of the American Midwest to illuminate a potential path to sustainability, informed by the constraints imposed by life’s essential elements and the four-billion-year history of life on Earth.

Modelling

Predicting Our Climate Future, by David Stainforth

IMO, David Stainforth is the world’s deepest thinker on climate modelling.  I referenced many of his papers in my book Climate Uncertainty and Risk.   From the book description:

This book is about how climate science works and why you should absolutely trust some of its conclusions and absolutely distrust others. Climate change raises new, foundational challenges in science. It requires us to question what we know and how we know it. The subject is important for society but the science is young and history tells us that scientists can get things wrong before they get them right. How, then, can we judge what information is reliable and what is open to question?

Stainforth goes to the heart of the climate change problem to answer this question. He describes the fundamental characteristics of climate change and shows how they undermine the application of traditional research methods, demanding new approaches to both scientific and societal questions. He argues for a rethinking of how we go about the study of climate change in the physical sciences, the social sciences, economics, and policy. The subject requires nothing less than a restructuring of
academic research to enable integration of expertise across diverse disciplines and perspectives.

An effective global response to climate change relies on us agreeing about the underlying, foundational, scientific knowledge. Our universities and research institutes fail to provide the necessary clarity – they fail to separate the robust from the questionable – because they do not acknowledge the peculiar and unique challenges of climate prediction. Furthermore, the widespread availability of computer simulations often leads to research becoming divorced from understanding, something that risks undermining the relevance of research conclusions.

This book takes the reader on a journey through the maths of complexity, the physics of climate, philosophical questions regarding the origins and robustness of knowledge, and the use of natural science in the economics and policy of climate change.

The editorial reviews on this book at the amazon site are well worth reading, from an  impressive list of academic scientists.

Escape From Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It, by Erika Thompson

This is a very thought provoking book, and Thompson’s ideas influenced Chapters 8 and 9 of my book Climate Uncertainty and Risk.  I posted a previous blog post on her journal article that spawned this book.  From the book description:

Why mathematical models are so often wrong, and how we can make better decisions by accepting their limits. Whether we are worried about the spread of COVID-19 or making a corporate budget, we depend on mathematical models to help us understand the world around us every day. But models aren’t a mirror of reality. In fact, they are fantasies, where everything works out perfectly, every time. And relying on them too heavily can hurt us.

In Escape from Model Land, statistician Erica Thompson illuminates the hidden dangers of models. She demonstrates how models reflect the biases, perspectives, and expectations of their creators. Thompson shows us why understanding the limits of models is vital to using them well. A deeper meditation on the role of mathematics, this is an essential book for helping us avoid either confusing the map with the territory or throwing away the map completely, instead pointing to more nuanced ways to Escape from Model Land.

Natural Resources

Fossil Future: Why Global Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal and Natural Gas — Not Less, by Alex Epstein

From the book description:

The New York Times bestselling author of The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels draws on the latest data and new insights to challenge everything you thought you knew about the future of energy. For over a decade, philosopher and energy expert Alex Epstein has predicted that any negative impacts of fossil fuel use on our climate will be outweighed by the unique benefits of fossil fuels to human flourishing–including their unrivaled ability to provide low-cost, reliable energy to billions of people around the world, especially the world’s poorest people.

What does the future hold? In Fossil Future, Epstein, applying his distinctive “human flourishing framework” to the latest evidence, comes to the shocking conclusion that the benefits of fossil fuels will continue to far outweigh their side effects—including climate impacts—for generations to come. The path to global human flourishing, Epstein argues, is a combination of using more fossil fuels, getting better at “climate mastery,” and establishing “energy freedom” policies that allow nuclear and other truly promising alternatives to reach their full long-term potential.

Today’s pervasive claims of imminent climate catastrophe and imminent renewable energy dominance, Epstein shows, are based on what he calls the “anti-impact framework”—a set of faulty methods, false assumptions, and anti-human values that have caused the media’s designated experts to make wildly wrong predictions about fossil fuels, climate, and renewables for the last fifty years. Deeply researched and wide-ranging, this book will cause you to rethink everything you thought you knew about the future of our energy use, our environment, and our climate.

Not the End of the World: How We Can Be The First Generation To Build a Sustainable Planet, by Hannah Ritchie

This book won’t be published until Jan 2024.  But I follow Hannah Ritchie on twitter and substack, I expect this to be an outstanding book from what I have seen so far.  From the book description:

This “eye-opening and essential” book (Bill Gates) will transform how you see our biggest environmental problems—and explains how we can solve them. It’s become common to tell kids that they’re going to die from climate change. We are constantly bombarded by doomsday headlines that tell us the soil won’t be able to support crops, fish will vanish from our oceans, and that we should reconsider having children.

But in this bold, radically hopeful book, data scientist Hannah Ritchie argues that if we zoom out, a very different picture emerges. In fact, the data shows we’ve made so much progress on these problems that we could be on track to achieve true sustainability for the first time in human history. 

Packed with the latest research, practical guidance, and enlightening graphics, this book will make you rethink almost everything you’ve been told about the environment. Not the End of the World will give you the tools to understand our current crisis and make lifestyle changes that actually have an impact. Hannah cuts through the noise by outlining what works, what doesn’t, and what we urgently need to focus on so we can leave a sustainable planet for future generations.

These problems are big. But they are solvable. We are not doomed. We can build a better future for everyone. Let’s turn that opportunity into reality.

Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, by Marian Tupy and Gabe Pooley

From the book description:

“For centuries, the ivory towers of academia have echoed this sentiment of multitudinous ends and limited means. In this supremely contrarian book, Tupy and Pooley overturn the tables in the temple of conventional thinking. They deploy rigorous and original data and analysis to proclaim a gospel of abundance. Economics―and ultimately, politics―will be enduringly transformed.” ―George Gilder, author of Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy

Generations of people have been taught that population growth makes resources scarcer. But is that true? After analyzing the prices of hundreds of commodities, goods, and services spanning two centuries, Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley found that resources became moreabundant as the population grew. That was especially true when they looked at “time prices,” which represent the length of time that people must work to buy something.

To their surprise, the authors also found that resource abundance increased faster than the population―a relationship that they call “superabundance.” On average, every additional human being created more value than he or she consumed. This relationship between population growth and abundance is deeply counterintuitive, yet it is true.

Why? More people produce more ideas, which lead to more inventions. People then test those inventions in the marketplace to separate the useful from the useless. At the end of that process of discovery, people are left with innovations that overcome shortages, spur economic growth, and raise standards of living.

But large populations are not enough to sustain superabundance―just think of the poverty in China and India before their respective economic reforms. To innovate, people must be allowed to think, speak, publish, associate, and disagree. They must be allowed to save, invest, trade, and profit. In a word, they must be free.

Climate policy and politics

Climate Change Isn’t Everything: Liberating Climate Politics From Alarmism, by Mike Hulme

IMO, Mike Hulme is one of the most important thinkers on climate change, and I referenced many of his papers in my book Climate Uncertainty and Risk.  From the book description:

The changing climate poses serious dangers to human and non-human life alike, though perhaps the most urgent danger is one we hear very little about: the rise of climatism. Too many social, political and ecological problems facing the world today – from the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the management of wildfires – quickly become climatized, explained with reference to ‘a change in the climate’. When complex political and ethical challenges are so narrowly framed, arresting climate change is sold as the supreme political challenge of our time and everything else becomes subservient to this one goal.

In this far-sighted analysis, Mike Hulme reveals how climatism has taken hold in recent years, becoming so pervasive and embedded in public life that it is increasingly hard to resist it without being written off as a climate denier. He confronts this dangerously myopic view that reduces the condition of the world to the fate of global temperature or the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide to the detriment of tackling serious issues as varied as poverty, liberty, biodiversity loss, inequality and international diplomacy. We must not live as though climate alone determines our present and our future.

See this very interesting review from the New Atlantis.

Not Zero:  How an Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China and Won’t Save the Planet, by Ross Clark

From the book description:

‘Bravely challenging the Establishment consensus … forensically argued’ – Mail on Sunday

The British government has embarked on an ambitious and legally-binding climate change target: reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions to Net Zero by 2050. The Net Zero policy was subject to almost no parliamentary or public scrutiny, and is universally approved by our political class. But what will its consequences be?

Ross Clark argues that it is a terrible mistake, an impractical hostage to fortune which will have massive downsides. Achieving the target is predicated on the rapid development of technologies that are either non-existent, highly speculative or untested. Clark shows that efforts to achieve the target will inevitably result in a huge hit to living standards, which will clobber the poorest hardest, and gift a massive geopolitical advantage to hostile superpowers such as China and Russia. The unrealistic and rigid timetable it imposes could also result in our committing to technologies which turn out to be ineffective, all while distracting ourselves from the far more important objective of adaptation.

This hard-hitting polemic provides a timely critique of a potentially devastating political consensus which could hobble Britain’s economy, cost billions and not even be effective.

Best Things First: The 12 most efficient solutions for the world’s poorest and our global SDG promises, by Bjorn Lomborg

From the book description:

Now selected as one of the Best Books of 2023 by The Economist.

In this urgent, thought-provoking book, Bjorn Lomborg presents the 12 most efficient solutions for the world’s poorest and our global SDG promises. • If you want to make the world better, Best Things First is the book to read.

World leaders have promised everything to everyone. But they are failing. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are supposed to be delivered by 2030. The goals literally promise everything, like eradicating poverty, hunger and disease; stopping war and climate change, ending corruption, fixing education along with countless other promises. This year, the world is at halftime for its promises, but nowhere near halfway. Together with more than a hundred of the world’s top economists, Bjorn Lomborg has worked for years to identify the world’s best solutions. Based on 12 new, peer-reviewed papers, forthcoming in Cambridge University Press’ Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, this book highlights the world’s best policies.

Some things are difficult to fix, cost a lot, and help little. Other problems we know how to fix, at low cost, with remarkable outcomes. We should do the smart things first.

Governments and philanthropists should focus on these 12 smartest things. Fix tuberculosis, malaria, and chronic disease, tackle malnutrition, improve education, increase trade, implement e-procurement, and secure land tenure. This will improve the world amazingly. The cost is $35 billion a year. The benefits include saving 4.2 million lives each year and generating $1.1 trillion more for the world’s poor.

We can definitely afford it: The cost of $35 billion is equivalent to the increase in annual global spending on cosmetics over the last two years. This is likely the best thing the world can do this decade.

JC note: I look forward to your comments on any of these books that you’ve read, and also other book suggestions.

Doomsday Climate Talk, Deja Vu

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

At Quora, Dan Gracia responds to this question: (in italics with my bolds)

Q: Why did people start using the term “climate change”
instead of the previous term “global warming”?

I’m 73 now and I remember on April 22, 1970 carrying the totally green American Flag (stars and stripes but in green) at college in a parade celebrating that first Earth Day. Problem then was that we were causing the earth to slip into an ice age due to the use of fluorocarbons as a propellant in spray cans of all types but the most significant factor was their use in hair spray cans. So it was an “Pending Ice Age Alarm”. Well, of course, that didn’t happen as actual temperatures didn’t sink and actually raised very, very slightly (less than a fraction of a degree over the next 10, or was it 20 years?) .

Then it turned into a “Global Warming Alarm” because there was some evidence of an increase in temperatures, regardless of how minuscule it was. So “Global Warming” is the earliest term most people remember now. Then the warming not only did not fit any of the climate models they were/are basing their alarmist claims on, it stopped warming entirely for about 20-years despite Al Gore’s claims the ice-cap would melt and our coasts would be underwater within 10-years.. And then temperatures sank slightly again.

Figure 1: The measured (symbols on left) and modeled (lines) temperature trends vs. altitude. The Russian model comes closest to the data, and the worst fit is GFDL-CM3, Manabe’s model for which he was awarded a Nobel prize. (Fig. 3 from John R. Christy and Richard T. McNider, DOI:10.1007/s13143-017-0070-z, annotated.)

None of these changes fit any of the computer models that were generating the Alarmist predictions. At that point, instead of trying to find out what variable(s) they were missing, the alarmists finally decided to just call it “climate change”. And now they could blame anything even slightly out of the ordinary as due to climate change. It’s a great catch-all term that you can claim regardless of what the temperatures actually show and also because the global climate is in a almost constant state of change. You’d be a fool to deny climate change because the climate is constantly changing and has been for over 4-billion years now. The trick is proving that human interaction is contributing to it in a meaningful and detrimental way. There are so many more powerful forces at play.

Add to that the fact that the earth was in its most prolific state millions of years ago when the Co2 ratio was much higher. Remember those elementary school science lessons that taught you that plants consume (ingest) Co2 (carbon dioxide) and exhaust O2 (oxygen)? Or perhaps that’s not common knowledge anymore? Plants and trees proliferated because growing conditions were better suited for them.

But regardless of weather getting warmer or colder,
climate alarmists are able to blame it all on climate change.

So it’s a catch-all phrase and anyone can chant it for any reason and claim there is a consensus among scientists that this it is a real threat. Unfortunately included in that “consensus” are medical doctors, dentists, Mechanical Engineers, Electrical Engineers, Biologists, Chemists, etc. – basically anyone who has a Bachelor of Science degree or higher. The thing that is missing is a consensus from climatologists. Many of these Bachelor of Science degrees may deal with some fringe parts of the problem but Climatology is an incredibly detailed with ever-changing data field and none of the others have the depth of knowledge to make an accurate claim of cause and effect with enough data and knowledge to make valid predictions.

Would you want a microbiologist to perform open heart surgery on you? Undeniably a scientific background but certainly not enough knowledge and practice to perform a long and complex surgery. Would you look to a Electrical Engineer for that? Definitely a scientist because he/she has at least a bachelor of science degree, ore perhaps a masters or even a doctorate degree. But would you trust that “Doctor” of engineering to perform open-heart surgery on you. Of course not. They don’t have the specialized education, ability to analyze relevant data, or even determine what data was relevant, let alone the fine motor skills needed to successfully complete open heart surgery.

To further muddy the waters, there’s huge amounts of money being spent on climate change research, and if they reach the conclusion that it is not a main ingredient in climate change, that research money dries up and goes away. So actually reaching a provable conclusion whose computer models can be born out with actual evidence instead of speculation, is working towards the elimination of their jobs. Plus, there’s real money to be made outside of climate research projects and grants. There’s the “Carbon TAX”.

Al Gore was one of if not the earliest proponent for “Carbon Credits”. If an industry or installation was generating too much Carbon Dioxide, they would have to purchase the carbon credits to offset their pollution. Ideally this money would then be spent to further other methods of Co2 control. And of course, you would purchase them from Al Gore’s carbon credits company. So then, if the installation had the credits, they could go ahead and continue polluting. As if Al Gore didn’t get enough money from his climate alarmism over the many years he’s been involved this is a Bonanza for him. And how much of that money is actually spent to improve methods and machinery to reduce the carbon levels? How much goes to the top executives of those companies and the people working for them…?

And of course, government has to get in on this cash cow too. A recent carbon tax was imposed on businesses in Washington state. The carbon tax basically requires companies to buy “greenhouse gas allowances,” sold at auction by Washington state, if they emit more than 25,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. The law took effect on Jan. 1, 2023. The first of 4 “auctions” of “greenhouse gas allowances” raised over $300 million dollars. The remaining 3 auctions for the year are expected to raise at least as much resulting in over $1.2 billion dollars for 2023.

Washington State Senator Ericksen said it best, “This legislation will raise billions of dollars from the people of Washington state. Now, who’s going to pay those billions of dollars? It’s not going to be the oil refineries, it’s not going to be the manufacturers, it’s going to be the people of Washington state who will pay through increased costs for their energy.” Anyone who’s had any experience in business from employee to CEO knows that if a company is to stay in business when their costs increase, they either have to raise their prices or decrease their costs. The first place they go to decrease cost is to chop hours and to let people go. Since it’s an industry-wide expense, they all raise their prices because they all have to do so to stay in business – competition doesn’t have a lot to do with this. If they delay raising their prices, then people lose their jobs instead.

As a result of this carbon tax, energy prices have skyrocketed. Promises were made that it certainly wouldn’t raise the price of gas by more than perhaps 5¢ per gallon because it was a tax on businesses, not a raise in the gas tax. In the first 3-weeks of 2023 it went up 25¢ per gallon and now has exceeded a 50¢ per gallon increase. Pricing of Diesel is even worse. Politicians who have never worked a “real job” for a “real business” don’t have much common sense when it comes to raising taxes.

Energy prices have also risen and continue to rise and since virtually everything moves by truck, that drives up the cost of all goods driving inflation even higher. And of course, now that the government has it, they will never let go of that tax regardless of how it hurts their residents.

So this is a self-perpetuating process originated by well meaning folks
who just didn’t have the knowledge or data to back it up.

Absolutely on that first Earth-day in 1970 everyone was concerned for the earth and wanted to find ways to help make it better. Since then it’s become a self-perpetuating scheme with prediction models that have consistently failed over the last 50-years raising alarms which still can’t be proven.

And people seem to forget that Science is not an absolute. What we believe is true today may be disproven tomorrow. THAT is the scientific method regardless of how many people believe in something. At one time virtually all the people in the world believed the earth is flat and the son revolves around the earth. Folks who disagreed were called heretics and persecuted.

The scientific method requires an proposal of what they believes is a reasonable hypothesis that can be proven or disproven. Then through a series of “repeatable” experiments the hypothesis is proven out and published for peer review. If the technique of proving the hypothesis does not generate the same result, then the hypothesis is not proven. Peer review invites dissent, opposing views, and proof of the ability or inability to reach the same result.

NOTE that peer review means scientists who are the peers of those offering the hypothesis with the ability to repeat the experiments used to prove it. You do not solicit or consider the opinion of a medical doctor to a hypothesis put forward by a climatologist, just as you don’t consider the opinion of a climatologist regarding a surgical procedure for a surgeon. Neither are actual peers in the other field of study. They can have opinions, but they are not “peer review”.

As a result I am far more interested in the opinions and research of Dr. Judith Curry and her true peers, than I am of a screaming media darling.

I’m not particularly fond of people
who fly in private jets to a meeting
where they discuss how to take away
my car and feed me bugs . . . but that’s just me.

New Paper by Climate Contrarian Dr Judith Curry Debunks Climate Hysteria about 2023’s Hot Weather

From Daily Sceptic

By CHRIS MORRISON

There have been a number of unusual climate patterns around the Earth this year and some scientists are making excellent progress in providing some reasonable explanations. The distinguished climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry has come up with some interesting answers by examining recent changes in heat balances at both the top of the atmosphere and the internal flows driven by the air and ocean currents at the surface. In addition she has considered contributions made by the switch from El Nino to La Nina, the Hunga Tonga underwater volcanic eruption and changes in atmospheric aerosols caused by ships using less polluting fuels. Any increase in the greenhouse effect from increasing carbon dioxide “is lost in the noise”, she states.

This latter conclusion, of course, will mean that Curry’s excellent work will be ignored in the mainstream media, which largely follow the view of the UN’s IPCC that most climate change is caused by humans burning fossil fuels. Curry’s research is a detailed piece of scientific work, and the full paper can be seen here. I shall try to highlight some of the most significant features, showing how scientists can harness the power of observation to add to their knowledge about how the chaotic and non-linear atmosphere actually operates.

In Curry’s view, the recent warming in spring/summer 2023 is associated with a spike in heat flows at the top of the atmosphere. The warming is said to reflect an increase in incoming shortwave radiation – essentially the sun is a bit brighter – a decrease in high level cloudiness, the impact of reduced ship sulphate aerosols, reduced snow and ice extent and the Hunga Tonga eruption that propelled 13% extra water vapour into the stratosphere.

At the surface, there was anomalous sunlight heating in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, and again Curry notes the involvement of reduced sulphate particles from ship fuel. The eastern North Atlantic is said to have warmed from anomalously low turbulent heat flows, reflecting weak surface winds particularly in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico. In the mid/high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere oceans, there was strong cooling from surface turbulent flows that are associated with strong wind speeds.

Curry provides a dispassionate analysis of some of the anomalies, or departure from recently recorded norms, in stark contrast to the hysterical reporting found in mainstream media. Earlier this month, the BBC reported that ocean heat records were broken, “with grim implications for the planet”. Dr. Matt Frost from the Plymouth Marine Lab warned that “we are putting oceans under more stress than we have done at any point in history”.

Curry points out that current warming in the North Atlantic “is comparable to changes over consecutive three-month periods during the winter/spring seasons of 1983, 1987, 1989 and 2010”. The high this time around was boosted from a relatively warm initial start. Each of these past warmings was followed by cooling of an approximately equal magnitude within the next 6-24 months, resulting in relatively small net changes in sea surface temperatures and upper ocean heat content.

Current North Atlantic sea temperature anomalies occurred in an ‘arc’ pattern and this is a signature of natural variability. Two more extreme natural variations are also identified by Curry. Around 1970, there was strong warming followed by a large sea surface temperature drop in 1971 that marked the beginning of lengthy period of cool conditions and weak hurricane activity. During 1994-95, the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation shifted to a warm phase and this sea current boosted surface temperatures around the arc at the time. This introduced a period of warmer conditions that “in some respects” remains to the present day.

As the Daily Sceptic has noted, the recent spate of climatic anomalies has provided climate hysterics with a field day. None more so than those commenting on Antarctica where Curry confirms there was low surface sea ice during the current winter. Clive Cookson of the Financial Times jumped to the conclusion that the continent “faces a catastrophic cascade of extreme environmental events… that will affect climate around the world”. Curry points out that in 2023, a different wind pattern has been in play, bringing strong winds from the north that are breaking up and compressing the sea ice against the continent.

Meanwhile, Curry notes that Arctic sea ice is healthy – the extent for July was only the 12th lowest in the satellite record. Last month’s Greenland mass ice sheet balance – annual snow accumulation minus melt – was above average relative to 1980-2010.

There are many reasons why the work of climate scientists such as Judith Curry never get picked up in the mainstream media. Much of what she describes is natural variation and has been observed before in the climatic record. But the Net Zero political project demands a simple message from scientists – it’s all down to human-caused CO2. As I have noted before, this closes off vast areas of science for investigation or debate for fear of opening a Pandora’s Box. 

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

CLIMATE UNCERTAINTY and RISK: An Interview With Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry

The Heartland Institute

Recently, respected climatologist Dr. Judith Curry published a new book, “Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response.”

This book helps us rethink the climate change problem, the risks we are facing, and how we can respond to these challenges. Understanding the deep uncertainty surrounding the climate change problem helps us to better assess what the proper course of action our society should take.

This book shows how uncertainty and disagreement can be part of the decision-making process. It provides a road map for formulating pragmatic solutions.

Tune in to the show for a review by the Dr. Curry herself. We’ll also take a look at some of the silliest climate news of the week!

Catch Host Anthony Watts and panelists Linnea Lueken and Andy Singer along with special guest Dr. Judith Curry for episode 69 of Climate Change Roundtable, live every Friday at 12pm CT/1PM ET.