On Monday, Judith Curry scooped herself, posting to her blog the text of an op-ed she was apparently invited to write for a Madrid newspaper during COP25.
The annual UN negotiations are in the unique position of having to balance the Trump administration’s intransigence with the rest of the planet’s aims to put rules in place and ramp up ambition to meet the Paris agreement targets. There’s plenty of interesting things that could be said about COP this year.
Instead, Curry sticks to what she knows: arguing that nobody knows enough to act on climate change, and giving bargain-basement denier talking points a pseudo-intellectual sheen.
Curry laments that the UNFCCC treaty was signed in 1992, before the IPCC report confirmed that humans were having a discernible influence on the global climate. She then says that the “political pressure” on researchers “resulted in a drive to manufacture a scientific consensus.”
Curry’s deception here is subtle but serious. The second IPCC report, which carried the fateful “discernible human influence” line, was confirming the consensus from the mid-90s! The one that Curry STILL does not acknowledge today. And it’s that exact denial mindset and talking point that motivated the 97% consensus study in the first place!
It doesn’t get any better from there.
Next she picks up the noble academic mantle carried by climate Twitter gadfly denier Tom Nelson, writing that “fossil fuel emissions as the climate ‘control knob’... is a misleading oversimplification.” As Curry (and the trolls she’s apparently taking talking points from) almost undoubtedly knows, a rebuttal to that point can be found in the October 2011 Science study titled Atmospheric CO2: Principal control knob governing Earth’s temperature.
Curry also claims that we are collectively ignorant of whether warming is dangerous, and that we don’t “have a good understanding of” the connection between climate change and extreme weather. Here’s a headline from last week that Curry apparently missed: Climate change driving entire planet to dangerous ‘tipping point’.
She then complains that “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” that found there was more extreme weather in the early 1900s. But it doesn’t make sense to only compare the early 20th century weather with the latter half’s to determine if the climate has changed things. The better comparison would be the latter half of the 20th century as we experienced it, versus what it would have been without the warming we caused. And of course when that happens, the fingerprint of climate change emerges. Here’s a report with 200 studies connecting climate and extreme weather that Curry may want to brush up on.
She concludes with an eye-rolling list of “common sense, no-regrets strategies” that “avoid the political gridlock” of current policies.
But if Curry really wanted to avoid gridlock and enact meaningful climate policy, she wouldn’t keep writing pieces like this advocating against it.
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