Comment

Comment by Eric A. Tuttle on December 11, 2019 at 11:08am

A Child of mentally troubled parents, deserting her to a social system it is no wonder why she is brainwashed by a socialist agenda. Leave it to Time Magazine, often a 16 page publication of Advertisement to pick another bad choice. 

I have yet to see any images of this person that presents a look of sanity, just looks of anger and hate. 

Comment by Willem Post on December 11, 2019 at 10:52am

Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology,  on the symbiotic relationship between climate "science" and the policy making institutions. It is absolutely scandalous!!!! 

 

 

 

The UN Climate Change Conference this week in Madrid provides an important opportunity to reflect on state of the public debate surrounding climate change.

 

Most of the world’s governments are prioritizing energy security, affordability and industrial competitiveness over commitments made for the Paris climate agreement. Even if these countries were on track to meet their commitments, a majority of the national pledges are totally insufficient to meet the Paris targets.

 

At the same time, we are hearing increasingly shrill rhetoric from Extinction Rebellion and other activists about the ‘existential threat’ of the ‘climate crisis’, ‘runaway climate chaos’, etc.

 

There is a growing realization that Paris climate agreement is inadequate for making a meaningful dent in slowing down the anticipated warming. And the real societal consequences of climate change and extreme weather events remain largely unaddressed. How have we arrived at this point?

 

For the past three decades, the climate policy ‘cart’ has been way out in front of the scientific ‘horse’. The 1992 Climate Change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible observed human influence on global climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the recent warming was caused by humans.

 

There has been tremendous political pressure on the scientists to present findings that would support these treaties, which has resulted in a drive to manufacture a scientific consensus on the dangers of manmade climate change.

 

Fossil fuel emissions as the climate ‘control knob’ is a simple and seductive idea. However, this is a misleading oversimplification, since climate can shift naturally in unexpected ways.

 

Apart from uncertainties in future emissions, we are still facing a factor of 3 or more uncertainty in the sensitivity of the Earth’s temperature to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

 

We have no idea how natural climate variability (solar, volcanoes, ocean circulations) will play out in the 21st century, and whether or not natural variability will dominate over manmade warming.

 

We still don’t have a realistic assessment of how a warmer climate will impact us and whether it is ‘dangerous.’

 

We don’t have a good understanding of how warming will influence extreme weather events.

 

Land use and exploitation by humans is a far bigger issue than climate change for species extinction and ecosystem health.

 

Local sea level rise has many causes, and is dominated by sinking from land use in many of the most vulnerable locations.

 

We have been told that the science of climate change is ‘settled’. However, in climate science there has been a tension between the drive towards a scientific ‘consensus’ to support policy making, versus exploratory research that pushes forward the knowledge frontier.

 

Climate science is characterized by a rapidly evolving knowledge base and disagreement among experts. Predictions of 21 century climate change are characterized by deep uncertainty. Nevertheless, activist scientists and the media seize upon each extreme weather event as having the fingerprints of manmade climate change — ignoring the analyses of more sober scientists showing periods of even more extreme weather in the first half of the 20st century, when fossil fuel emissions were much smaller.

 

Alarming press releases are issued about each new climate model prediction of future catastrophes from famine, mass migrations, catastrophic fires, etc. Yet, these press releases don’t mention that these predicted catastrophes are associated with highly implausible assumptions about how much we might actually emit over the course of the 21st century.

 

Further, issues such as famine, mass migrations and wildfires are caused primarily by government policies and ineptitude, lack of wealth and land use policies.

 

Climate change matters, but it’s outweighed by other factors in terms of influencing human well-being.

 

We have been told that climate change is an ‘existential crisis.’ However, based upon our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations.

 

However, the perception of manmade climate change as a near-term apocalypse and has narrowed the policy options that we’re willing to consider.

 

We have not only oversimplified the problem of climate change, but we have also oversimplified its ‘solution’.

 

Even if you accept the climate model projections and that warming is dangerous, there is disagreement among experts regarding whether a rapid acceleration away from fossil fuels is the appropriate policy response.

 

In any event, rapidly reducing emissions from fossil fuels and ameliorating the adverse impacts of extreme weather events in the near term increasingly looks like magical thinking. Climate change – both manmade and natural – is a chronic problem that will require centuries of management.

 

The extreme rhetoric of the Extinction Rebellion and other activists is making political agreement on climate change policies more difficult. Exaggerating the dangers beyond credibility makes it difficult to take climate change seriously.

 

The monomaniacal focus on elimination of fossil fuel emissions distracts our attention from the primary causes of many of our problems and effective solutions.

 

Common sense strategies to reduce vulnerability to extreme weather events, improve environmental quality, develop better energy technologies, improve agricultural and land use practices, and better manage water resources can pave the way for a more prosperous and secure future.

 

Each of these solutions is ‘no regrets’ – supporting climate change mitigation while improving human well-being.

 

These strategies avoid the political gridlock surrounding the current policies and avoid costly policies that will have minimal near-term impacts on the climate.

 

And finally, these strategies don’t require agreement about the risks of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions.

We don’t know how the climate of the 21st century will evolve, and we will undoubtedly be surprised.

 

Given this uncertainty, precise emissions targets and deadlines are scientifically meaningless. We can avoid much of the political gridlock by implementing common sense, no-regrets strategies that improve energy technologies, lift people out of poverty and make them more resilient to extreme weather events. 

 

Executive Summary

Climate Models for the layman, by Judith Curry 2017

 

There is considerable debate over the fidelity and utility of global climate models (GCMs). This debate occurs within the community of climate scientists, who disagree about the amount of weight to give to climate models relative to observational analyses.

 

GCM outputs are also used by economists, regulatory agencies and policy makers, so GCMs have received considerable scrutiny from a broader community of scientists, engineers, software experts, and philosophers of science.

 

This report attempts to describe the debate surrounding GCMs to an educated but nontechnical audience. Key summary points • GCMs have not been subject to the rigorous verification and validation that is the norm for engineering and regulatory science.

 

• There are valid concerns about a fundamental lack of predictability in the complex nonlinear climate system.
• There are numerous arguments supporting the conclusion that climate models are not fit for the purpose of identifying with high confidence the proportion of the 20th century warming that was human-caused as opposed to natural.
• There is growing evidence that climate models predict too much warming from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.
• The climate model simulation results for the 21st century reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) do not include key elements of climate variability, and hence are not useful as projections for how the 21st century climate will actually evolve. Climate models are useful tools for conducting scientific research to understand the climate system.

 

However, the above points support the conclusion that current GCMs are not fit for the purpose of attributing the causes of 20th century warming or for predicting global or regional climate change on timescales of decades to centuries, with any high level of confidence.

 

By extension, GCMs are not fit for the purpose of justifying political policies to fundamentally alter world social, economic and energy systems.

 

This improper application of climate model “predicted” outcomes fuels the vociferousness of the debate surrounding climate models.