Shaun Newman Podcast - #342 - Judith Curry

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

She has her Ph.D. in Geophysical Sciences, the president of Climate Forecast Applications Network & formerly a Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500

Hey everybody, this is Paul Brandt. This is Wayne Peters. This is Sean Baker. I'm Megan Murphy. This is Jess Moskaloop. I'm Rupa Supermonea. This is Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

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is delivering to your farm commercial or oil field locations. For more information, visit them at Hancock, Petroleum.com. She has a PhD from the University of Chicago in geophysical sciences. She's the president and co-owner of climate forecast applications network, and previously was a professor and chair of the school and earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Institute of Technology. I'm talking about Judith Curry. So buckle up.

Here we go. This is Judith Curry, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Shaw Newman podcast. Today I'm joined by Judith Curry. So first off, ma'am, thanks for hopping on. Oh, my absolute pleasure. Now, Judith, I know I certainly didn't know who you were until I went down the rabbit

hole of interviewing a whole bunch of different people. And then I stumbled across your name and reached out, et cetera. So I'm positive there will be people who recognize you, but I'm sure a lot of my audience won't. And so I thought maybe we could start with a little bit. bit of your background and we'll see where it takes us. Okay, well, I spent most of my career in universities, most recently at Georgia Tech, where I served as chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences for 14 years, I think it was. And then I left academia, I think,

about five years ago. And for the past 10 years or so, I had my own business called Climate Forecast Applications Network or C-FAN. So that's the basic stuff that you would write down. But if anybody has heard of me, that's not why they've heard of me. Basically, I started speaking out publicly about the climate debate around 2010. This was following the so-called Climate Gate episode, the unauthorized release of the emails from the University of East Anglia. And to me, that portrayed a lot of things that I thought were not good at all for our field.

and I was trying to, you know, open up a dialogue. Like, we shouldn't be behaving that way, folks. I mean, we need to be honest about the uncertainties. We need to listen to people that disagree with us. We need to let people have our data, even if we don't like them. And, you know, so on. I thought these were motherhood and apple pie things. But I was ostracized by the, how shall I say, climate establishment,

who wanted this whole thing to go away and didn't want. anything to interfere with the authority that they had built up. And I just became increasingly horrified by what I was seeing in the field of climate science has just been so completely politicized that I became very concerned. And while people from when I say the climate insiders, you know, really didn't like me, when I started my blog, Climate, et cetera, in 2010, I started building quite a sizable audience of people from much broader academic fields, workplace, engineers, lawyers, business people, academics, and social psychology, computer science, and so on, who are interested in what I had to say,

but more important, interested in participating in a real dialogue on these subjects. I mean, it was just so politically correct about, you know, the enforcement of the so-called consensus is that what we ended up with was an oversimplified problem and a vastly oversimplified solution that a lot of people were feeling increasingly uneasy about. So I became a bit of a poster person for, you know, let's open up the dialogue here and have, you know, more honest communications. And that attitude made it very uncomfortable for me to stay at the university. So I prematurely retired and focused all my time, you know, on my company. I also do a lot of like policy work, engagement with policy. policymakers, engagement with decision makers, on a range of topics. I've given congressional testimony about a dozen times in the last 10 years, on a range of top,

all of them related to climate change, but on a range of topics within that very broad domain. Yeah, I work with decision makers, both in the public and private sectors. in dealing with weather risk and also figuring out how to deal with climate change. I work with people who are being sued for various things related to climate change. I help them evaluate the merits of their case and, you know, help them, you know, evaluate all this, evaluate the complaints in objective and meaningful ways. So that's some of the things that I've been up to. I have a blog,

Judith Curry.com, it's called Climate, etc., and I'm also fairly active on Twitter, Curry, JA. So that's my general background. Well, let's take me back to ClimateGate. I would have been in college at the time and certainly paying attention to nothing but playing hockey and probably some other extracurricular activities. Up until that point, you weren't speaking out, correct?

Okay, a little bit. In 2005, I got caught up in the hurricane and global warming debate. You know, after Hurricane Katrina, you may recall like this, and again, you were probably very young at that time. You know, Hurricane Katrina became a focusing event for global warming, you know. Well, if one degree of warming can cause all this damage, oh my gosh. You know, and so I was a co-author on a paper that was a relevant paper that was published at that time. So, you know, I got caught in the whole publicity thing surrounding that topic, hurricanes and global warming in the year or two post-Hurricane Katrina. But I felt very burned by my engagements with the media.

And I thought this is just a big racket. it's so tribal, you know, like I was sort of lumped into one side and I didn't like what that side was doing or what I was getting corralled. I was actually corralled into the warmest side, you know, who thought, wow, I'm an ally with a good story to tell. And I wasn't liking what was going on. I started participating in skeptics blogs just to see what their concerns were and what they were all about, the technical climate skeptics blogs like climate, et cetera. So I started, you know, with an initial foray, you know, circuit 2005, 2006, but then I backed way off. And then I guess I got sucked into the public debate again in 2010 following Climategate.

Were you at all prepared for what was the whirlwind to come of being sucked into the debate that was in 2009 and honestly since. I mean, you mentioned 2017 walking away from the university. Were you at all prepared for any of that? In 2006, I was totally not prepared. I even wrote a paper on it. It was called mixing politics and science and testing the hypothesis that global warming is increasing hurricane intensities. Tidal something like that. And it was about the interplay between science, media, and politics. So I was already wrapping my head around it, and I said, no, I don't want to go there.

Okay. But when Climate Gate broke, since I had been participating, you know, on the skeptics blogs, trying to understand what they were up to and providing a counterpoint and whatever, like I was right at, you know, like at Ground Zero when this broke and they were talking to me. And I was actually trying to calm the waters, you know, look, not all climate, scientists behave like this, you know, there's really a lot of integrity in climate science. You know, I was actually trying to defend the establishment a little bit, but I was saying,

but we do have to do a better job about talking about uncertainty and about respectfully dealing with people who challenge us and giving them our data. So that was the message. And boy, that really brought me into the thick of it. and in ways that were even crazier than the first time around with the hurricane situation. And the more I got into this, the more I started to realize how indefensible this so-called consensus really is and what kind of horrible sausage making has created it and how inappropriately it was framed. and, you know, I started talking to legal people, philosophers of science, social psychologists.

I started, you know, wandering far afield from, you know, what you would normally call climate science, to understand all this, you know, what was going on, you know, what are the factors in play? You know, how do we, how do we sort of turn this around and try to, to frame the whole problem of climate science much more broadly rather than just assuming it's all caused by humans and that it's dangerous. There's a whole lot more to climate variability and change than that. And what kind of solutions make sense realistically, you know, in terms of economics and politics and, you know, how should we prioritize climate change relative to other problems that humanity is facing and all these. kind of issues, you know, or what I've been grappling with since 2010. So it's brought me to a very

different place than most, what I would say, card-carrying IPCC-style climate scientists are. And, you know, I have a different perspective on all this. And apart from the work with my company, which keeps me extremely busy. I've recently finished a book called Climate Uncertainty and Risk, which is in the publication process. I went with an academic press, so it's undergoing peer review right now. I wanted that sort of extra legitimacy from peer review, not to mention I hope I'll get some good suggestions from the reviewers, but that book should be coming out, you know, sometime next year. So that's who I am, what I'm up to. I've got a different and a broader perspective on this whole topic than many people that you'll encounter.

Well, I think that's what's interesting and intriguing about you, Judith, because, you know, when you talk about basically over the past decade, a little more than that, you've seen a very interesting side of the coin or of the world or however you want to put it. You know, in today's world, I just think up here in Canada, when you say science, media, and politics, they've been intermingling for the last two and a half years on steroids. And it has been a wild, wild ride to say the absolute least. And when I hear you talk about the same thing happening a decade ago, I go, wow, this is nothing new. This is, this is kind of what's been going on here in the 2000s. You mentioned talking to all these different people, though, philosophers and science. scientists, sorry, and just different walks of life. What did you learn along the way? You talk about how you're just different than most climate scientists and how they think. What did you learn along the way about what you were going through or maybe just the general

scenario of how it was being politicized and everything else? Well, my blog, Climate, Et cetera, started in, I think September of 2010. And in many ways, at least the maybe the first seven years of it chronicles my journey through this. You know, there would be guest posts from philosophers and lawyers and social psychologists. I would report on things that I read. You know, we had quite lively, you know, discussions on the blog. And I was invited to conferences that, you know, about. communications, philosophy of science, all, you know, whole lawyers, you know, a whole bunch of different

like venues that I never would have even known about, let alone, you know, considered participating in, you know, in my earlier sort of incarnation is like a straight and narrow climate scientist. And so very, a seminal event was, going to say this was in spring of 2010, the Royal Society in the UK had a workshop on uncertainty. And, you know, in science, economics, philosophy, medicine, you know, the whole works. And there were, and I was invited to attend, I wasn't a presenter, although I did host a discussion. But, you know, there were Nobel laureates in physics. There was the chairman of the Bank of England, you know, the, you know, this level of people.

And everyone was talking about uncertainty in different ways and different manifestations, you know, from quantum mechanics to epidemics to, you know, the whole works. And I said, you know, of course, you know, this is what, there was only one speaker who even mentioned the word consensus. and he was a speaker on climate communications, and he was talking about consensus. But nobody else was the least bit interested in consensus and forcing a consensus. Rather, they were trying to, you know,

how radical uncertainty and deep uncertainty and all of this, how important this was for us to explore this and understand it, just to move the science forward. But it's critical in policy making and decision-making. because if you look too narrowly, and it was very interesting to have the economists people there, because this was a few years following the big economic crash in 2008, you know, those people missed. You know, they just missed it. Okay. So, I mean, so when you make a mistake like, when you miss something like that, you have to rethink a whole lot of stuff. And uncertainty was a key part of what, you know,

they were rethinking. And this really sort of set my mind, okay, uncertainty. This is what I want to. And then I came across, okay, this whole climate models and uncertainty in climate science, this is something I have to explore. This is what I want, the new theme for my research. And then I encountered a few months later while I was doing my literature survey, this was a Dutch social scientist, Gerald Van der Sleys, he was, wrote a paper on the uncertainty monster in environmental science. I go, uncertainty monster. Oh, my gosh, I love it. Okay.

So, you know, once I saw that, I knew I had the theme for my, you know, for what I was going to be doing here. And so I wrote a paper, climate science and the uncertainty monster. And it got a fair amount of attention. And, you know, that just broadened my invitations. you know, into other venues and whatever. But, you know, it's been a fascinating intellectual journey. Just going through this and trying to pull it all together and make sense of it from all these different perspectives.

So that's, yeah, so it's been a very interesting ride. And now that I'm sort of working for my essentially, you know, I don't have to toe the line or worry about my peers or whatever. I can just do what I want to do and say and write what I think and the topics that I think are important. And most of this is summarized in my book and there's bits and pieces of it, you know, that you can trace back to my blog. Well, one of the one of the, the blog thing makes complete sense to me because, I mean,

And one of the interesting things someday for my kids, I assume, if they ever want to do the deep dive into hours long of podcasting, is I've done the, you know, I've experienced a very similar thing over the course of three years, closing it on four, I guess, with a podcast, right? You can go back and see different people I've certainly talked to and, and, uh, rubs shoulders with, shoulders with, if you will. And see how it's kind of deflected me along a path that I, you know, kind of constructed. and some of it, you know, you can't quite figure out exactly where you're going, especially when you run into different conversations that really, you know, challenged the way you think, I would say. And so I listened to that and I'm like, oh, yeah, that makes actually complete sense to me, Judith. Like, I'm just like, oh, yeah, absolutely. You're just, for me right now, I've interviewed a ton of doctors in the COVID world that are, have been basically ostracized, no different than you have been. And what I find fascinating about it is essentially the same thing keeps repeating, just not necessarily in the same industry, although climate change has not slowed down one iota.

It has picked up tenfold. You know, you look at some of the things happening, not only here in Canada, but across the world, you see what Europe and Russia, Ukraine and all these different things starting to play out. and what's coming this winter maybe for Europe, I don't know. You stare at some troubling things going on today. I feel like for yourself, as you started to talk to all these different people, this must be like not a slow crash. Because, I mean, hopefully events can change and lead us on a different course. But it's been probably watching from your seat had to have been an interesting view because you must have seen a lot of what's happening unfold in policy and everything. else. Yeah. Okay, the issue that where I break with some of the, you know, more alarmed

scientists is that there's a lot of natural climate variability and weather variability that, you know, a lot of what we're seeing, you know, is, especially when it's an extreme weather event. I mean, that's almost certainly natural climate variability. I mean, if you do a very few of extreme weather events really have any correlation with average global temperature. I mean, it's really the circulation patterns that really cause the extreme weather. And those are regional in nature. So, you know, blaming every extreme weather event on human cause, you know, fossil-fueled warming, you know, is just wrong. And that's even in the IPCC. And so in all honesty, I don't disagree with the establishment on that. They recognize it, but that doesn't stop a certain cadre of scientists from

blaming every extreme weather event on climate change. And then the climate scientists who do know better, they don't say anything. So is that big money? Is that politics? Is that a lot of both? Well, they want to keep their head down. They don't want to run a foul of the elite alarmists who, you know, control all the professional societies and where all the societal awards are given. And, you know, universities view this whole thing as big business. Climate stuff is booming. They don't want people to throw spanners in the works. All of the grant money implicitly assumes, you know, human cause global warming rather than asking, you know, the deeper and the broader questions. So it's, you know, the whole system is primed to sort of perpetuate that and reward people who are on the more alarmed part of the spectrum.

So, you know, and a lot of scientists know better, but they're also smart enough to keep their head down and just keep doing their work and not and stay out of trouble and stay out of work debate. Don't you think by keeping their head down, though, it only propagates worse situations. Like it's not. I know, but that's not what they need. That doesn't need to be their problem. I mean, I'm fine with the people who keep their head down and do their work. Okay, what I'm not fine with is the people who are seeking fame and fortune and political power and preaching this alarm when a scientist they should know better.

That's what I object to. The people who keep their head down, that's fine. It's the people who are taking this to the bank, so to speak, in terms of media attention. Some of these climate scientists, they have. have publicity agents and the whole works, you know, it's come on. Are you a scientist or are you trying to be a rock star or something? But so then I just come back to it. The people that are keeping their head down, because they always, and who knows, maybe it wouldn't matter if, well, no, I have to contradict myself there. I've got to think about this. Part of the problem

has to be keeping your head down because the longer you keep your head down, the more the guy who's out for himself, trying to get the fame, trying to earn all the money, et cetera, continues to get pushed up and up and up. I mean, isn't that where we're at right now? Where those... Yeah, I mean, it's a problem for society, but I'm not going to blame it on the individual scientists who wants to keep their head down and do their research.

You know, the problem is with the politicians and with the media who, you know, the media should, you know, the fifth, they used to challenge people, you know, fourth estate, you know, are we going to buy this, you know, and what's the other side of this story? And come on. You know, they used to be, that's what a journalist used to be, an investigative journalist. And now there's no, there's hardly any investigative journalism. It's all just people trying to hype the alarms so they get more clicks and make more money.

I mean, you know, and then you've got politicians who should know better that this is, that these are complex problems. And of course, there's no simple solution. You know, there's no silver bullet simple solution to a complex problem like this. They should know better rather than everybody jumping on the bandwagon for a simple solution that's been, you know, come on. So I'm going to blame the media and the politicians much, much more enthusiastically than I am going to be the scientist who keeps his head down. Well, that's interesting because if it isn't for people such as yourself standing up and others, and coming on shows like this,

where I get to hear parts of your story and certainly then what I love about the audience is they either think you're full of shit, pardon the French, or they're like, oh, I really like this, Judith, and I'm going to do a little digging, and I'm going to go on her website, and believe me, they'll do it, because they're a wonderful group of people. Without people such as yourself to do that,

all we're left is the journalism that, you know, has become very one-sided narrative, and we're left with the politician who promotes, this is what we're going to do in order to meet all these climate change directions, the net zeroes, the, the everything because if we don't we're all going to die. Well the scientists speaking out like me

are either very senior or even retired or independently wealthy where they don't really rely. You know if I had a mortgage and two kids to put through college, you know, would I be doing this? No, I'd be doing whatever it took to hang on to my university salary. Okay, but in a position, Right now, when I'm pretty senior approaching 70 years old, actually, you know, I don't have to care. You know, I have enough money and I don't have to care what anybody else thinks about me. And so you find that a lot of the people are either independently wealthy or fairly senior or retired. That's a very sad state of affairs, but that's what it is. You know, the whole cancel culture, it's accelerated so much, even in the last,

five to seven years, you know, since I've retired from university. The whole political correctness, wokeness, cancel culture is just out of control at universities, just absolutely out of control. You know, the least little thing and you can end up losing your job. I mean, it's like walking on eggshells. Well, you mentioned the different problems or, you know, certainly what was going on with politicians being one. And then you mentioned, you know, journalists used to give you both sides of the story. One of the ones that. I'd written down was that I keep hearing about is universities and what students are being taught. And certainly, you mentioned a few different things right there, Judith, that are, I guess,

glaringly obvious. I mean, I finished college in 2011 at a very liberal school. And I still remember being in different climate classes and certainly, like, having healthy discussion back and forth about it. And I didn't understand. I'm going to be honest. I sat as a fly on the wall, so to speak, and kind of listened to it because I was, you know, this is intriguing. I haven't really done a whole lot of digging into it. Has that changed? Oh, geez. Quite a bit, quite a bit. Okay, I'll give you one example. At the University of Chicago, which ranks number one in common sense, free speech, not to mention excellent academics. They have a professor there called Dorian Shiler,

who raised the issue at the University of Chicago that he was concerned about, you know, quotas and stuff and downgrading test scores and whatever in admissions to graduate school. He said he just wanted it. He was completely colorblind, gender blind, whatever, but he just wanted the best people. So he raised the concern and that got publicized and he got ostracized widely. Not at the University of Chicago, they defended him, but he got ostracized widely in the Twitter universe and, you know, all this kind of stuff. So he was a paleo-climatologist and he was invited by MIT to give the,

some prestigious named lecture and be a public lecture at MIT. So the students, not demonstrated in whatever, to get him disinvited, not because of his science, okay, but because of he was, he had voiced his concerns about the quality of students that were being admitted into graduate school. And this should just be solely based on quality. qualifications, not any kind of quotas or diversity inclusion kind of issues. And so then MIT did disinvite him from giving the lecture. Okay. So now Dorian Abbott is more fortunate than many because he's at like one of the best universities in the world that also defends academic freedom and freedom of

speech. But people have lost their university positions for much less. You know, and that's a very scary situation. Very scary situation. I hate to bring up your age again, but since you, you shared it, in your 70 years then, Judith, you must have had an interest, because you mentioned, you know, you get your PhD, I believe, from the University of Chicago, and then you went on to get other degrees from Northern Illinois University, and you just have been in that world for a long time. So over the course of... In 2017, I was in university.

So go back to the 1980s for me. Was this a problem, or where does it start to be a problem? Okay. In the 1980s, the field of climate science didn't exist. It was all physics-based, geophysical sciences, this kind of thing. atmospheric science, atmospheric chemistry, geochemistry, you know, and climate was just like a little sub-interest in many of these traditional hard, sort of applied physics and chemistry fields. And that's what it was in the 80s. And even in the 90s, it was still the same way.

Now, the IPCC, the first assessment report was in 1990. And that was, was still a real science endeavor. You know, the people worked hard to make this about science. They were honest about what we didn't know. They said, well, we didn't really find any evidence of this warming yet. You know, that was a conclusion. Okay. And then the powers that be, the UN frame, you know, the UN committees, they didn't like this. So they went ahead in 1992 and had the first climate treaty to prevent dangerous climate change. There was no evidence of it yet. Okay, but the policymakers were way out of the head of the science. And then the pressure was on the IPCC to deliver for the UN treaty. So the second assessment report was similar to the first assessment report. And then in the meeting

with the policymakers, and they were writing the summary, come on, you need to give us something. And then somebody put in, there is discernible evidence of some warming that's caused by humans. Okay, and this was done at the last minute to try to appease policymakers. And then they went back and changed the report to make it consistent with discernible. And this raised a huge uproar, you know, like the politicians are fixing the science. Well, it was. But the politicians and whatever won. And then the hospital.

hockey stick was the next big icon, you know, which was trying to drive the legitimacy of this whole thing. So through the 90s, there was still, it was still, it was in the 90s, it was actually fashionable to be skeptical and sort of dismissive of the IPCC. Oh, come on, it's just politics. You know, it's way too much overcommodence. They don't really know what they're talking about. It's just politics. And, you know, a lot of people just ignored it. Okay, in the 2000s, it became harder to ignore. It was a lot more political, you know, some big politicians sort of took this to heart. In the U.S. Al Gore, you know, jumped on the bandwagon, you know, and he had a very big voice.

And he did his inconvenient truth. And then the 2007, the IPCC fourth assessment report that received the Nobel, peace prize jointly with El Gore, and then it sort of became, you know, unstoppable. And there was still no cancel culture yet. You know, people disagreed, but there was just an overwhelming political juggernaut, you know, that was pushing this forward. But it was still okay to disagree. Okay, although people who disagreed, you can see hints of this.

Once you read the Climate Gate emails that were published in 2009, you can see Michael Mann of hockey stick fame trying to thwart anybody who disagreed with them, trying to get rid of editors of journals, sabotage this person, don't give them the data on and on them. You know, it was academic skull dudgery. So they were quietly trying to sabotage anybody who disagreed, you know, the important people. but publicly people could go out and do it and there was no canceling in the universities really okay then shift to the 2010s in the post-climate gate world you know it became very very important to defend the IPCC consensus you know from the infidels the heretics the whatever just for political things. So it became very, very important. So that's when people like me, they started wanting to squash me because I was challenging the whole idea of the IPCC and the fact that a consensus about a top, you know, a scientific consensus is one thing. A consensus of scientists,

which is manufactured at the behest of politicians, you know, that's something very, very different, you know, and so I was making this, this thing. and speaking out against a consensus. So people started riling up against me and other people sort of of my ilk. But I'm going to say more like 2015-ish, 2017. This is when the whole cancel culture, I mean, you can argue that climate scientists were the progenitors of cancel culture in some ways. but in in 2015, 2017, it became very much, you know, woke and diversity and all this kind of stuff became a top priority.

You know, color, you know, colorblind wasn't enough. You know, it had to be, you know, way, way, way beyond that. And people with anything to the right way, way. right of far left, you know, politically, you know, needed to be stamped out. And so it just became at some universities more than others, it just became absolutely outrageous. You know, a few universities have tried to stand their ground again. University of Chicago absolutely stands out in this regard. And it just became, you know, a worse and worse place. And now what I would say in the 2020s, we've got a changing dynamic.

Climate change has become so huge. You know, every newspaper, journalism, whatever, they have a climate change division, not just, you know, that's big with all these, you know, so people. And every company needs climate scientists for whatever reason. There's all this climate tech startups, big data, AI, and all sorts of technologies.

I mean, climate is becoming. big business. So a lot of people who would normally have stayed in universities are now leaving for either journalism or the private sector, either established companies who want a climate scientist or for startups. So on Twitter, I see all sorts of university professors complaining they can't get postdocs or graduate students or whatever. Everybody's just going off and finding really good jobs, you know, so the whole, the whole dynamic is changing. There's a lot of climate scientists out there that are no longer in the university environment tied to the whole IPCC, the government grant thing, that are working on solutions or communications or some other aspect of this. And so I think

eventually, what I'm hoping, is that the academic hegemony, you know, these IPCC politically correct kind of university environments just have less sway in this whole debate as there are so many more people, including really, really bright ones out in some segment of the private sector, working on solutions, mostly, which I think is much healthier than trying to do science to help enforce a manufactured consensus. You know, so you can play the academic game, get your grants, get your professional recognition, get promoted, get your big center, get your big lab space, you know, it's just a big game.

but it has nothing to do with advancing the science of climate or developing solutions. I see this really heading to the private sector in many ways. So you're hopeful then of a positive future out of all of this, if I hear you correctly. Okay, this whole thing is going to bump into reality. Okay, right now, the whole Russian Ukraine thing, you know, like, oops, you know, we can't stop using fossil. fuels until we have something in place that's going to replace it. And it has to be reliable and secure and affordable and on and on and on. We're not anywhere close to there.

You know, with all the trillions of dollars that have spent on renewable energy, the percentage of global energy from fossil fuels has dropped from 82% to 81%. Okay. All this, you know, you save renewable energy everywhere, wind farms. solar. It's not making a dent. Part of it is because energy demand continues to increase and it's going to increase even more if we're going to electrify everything. We're going to need more electricity, heat pumps, electric vehicles and so forth and so on. But electricity fuels all of our, you know, advances, human advances, you know, for new materials, genomics, artificial

intelligence, robotics, on and on you go. It's all going to need more. more electricity. So thinking that we're going to power and advancing, not just industrially, but just, you know, with all this other stuff into the 21st century on wind and solar energy. I mean, that's just a fairy tale. You know, so, I mean, wind and solar, it's sort of a niche solution, you know, for, like, I have household solar. I really like having, and Tesla batteries, I really like having the security of knowing that I have my own power. If the power goes out, you know, I've got power. So that's why I have household solar.

But on a utility scale, solar doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense. And the land required for wind farms and even coastal ocean, I mean, that's just not feasible for so many places. and the energy density just isn't there. So, I mean, at this point, nuclear seems to be the best option, and there's lots of advanced nuclear technologies that are coming online, which are very exciting, and it's going to take a decade or two to bring this online. Advanced geothermal is very interesting. You know, we have to see how this plays out,

and what regions is actually going to work. So there's some new things on the horizon. And, you know, I don't think we're going to, once we get to 2100, I don't think we're going to be using a whole lot of fossil fuels just to burn it for energy. We may use it for, you know, industrial production or making plastics or polymers or whatever. But I don't think we're just going to be burning it for heat or electricity. I mean, we'll see there's lots of better options. But this urgency, this rush to immediately get rid of fossil fuels

without anything to replace it, you know, it's going to, I mean, it's on its way to destroying the economy of Europe. I mean, this is crazy. I have to see how they pull out of this. But it's going to be a couple of really bad years just because, you know, they said, well, we don't, they were very, very, and burning wood. I'm burning of wood pellets. I mean, Europe. Well, the UK, we just talked about this the other day.

UK is getting wood pellets, probably from the United States as well, but from BC. From Canada, I know, from Canada. So they're tearing down forests, chipping it into wood chips, shipping it all the way across Canada, then across a boat to the UK, and they call that Korean energy. I know. There are also the seeds, the rape seeds, you know, that you would normally use to produce canola oil. they're burning that for fuel and there's a cooking oil shortage in England. Meanwhile, they're burning that for fuel.

In the U.S., corn ethanol, apart from the fact that it's really stupid to waste our precious farmland growing corn so we can burn it, a big chunk of our refining capacity is going to this ethanol stuff instead of being able to refine it, you know, and help with gasoline

and all the oil shortage stuff. So our refinery cap capacity is being crippled by this. Okay, it sounds like you've already had other podcasts on this topic. So the solution that people think is green or renewable, it's insane. Okay, but people are starting to realize that, you know, even... Well, it's just in the problem is that government has their hands on it. And they're the ones, you know, you talk about policy and everything else. It just seems we're caught up in this web of,

bad policy, if you will. And the whole corn ethanol thing is stupid. But, okay, in the U.S., it's untouchable, you know, with Iowa being the main source of corn for corn ethanol, and that's the place where the first presidential primaries are, everybody's got to go. Any candidate for president has to go to Iowa and say, we love corn ethanol. Okay. And you can't piss off the islands.

Otherwise, you know, you're damaging yourself really badly. politically. You know, it's just, it's just nonsense. But, okay, the, we've had a spate of, you know, like since about 2015, 2016. We've had a lot of severe weather. Before that, from 2006 to 2014, it was pretty quiet. I mean, you go through periods when it's active and inactive, and that's tied to the big global multi-decadeal ocean circulations. And, you know, we're going to see a shift sometime in the next decade to a quieter period. And, you know, the whole, and we're going to have more data about the sun. Another thing, you know, I don't want to go deep into climate science here,

but people aren't really giving the sun it's due in terms of climate. The climate models don't include the solar indirect effects and other stuff that they ignore it. But the sun is... What don't we... Sorry, Judith. When you talk about the sun, what are you pointing to specifically that nobody's talking about? Oh, they're talking about it, but they're not included in climate models. And this is a frustrating thing.

If you want to give me five minutes to do my solar show. You got time. Yeah, absolutely. That's why I brought you on. No worries. There's a couple factors. The first one is just how much energy the sun puts out. And that's what you normally talk about.

And to understand the current variability and project into the future, you have to know the past variability. Well, we're styming from this, even in this age of satellites, is because we have this big gap in the late 80s to early 90s, you know, where you have to cross-calibrate the satellites. and that gap occurred because of the challenger disaster, you know, the explosion. So they put off all the satellite launches until that was sorted out. And so there's a gap between the old satellite and the new satellite. And there's two different teams of scientists that resolve that gap in different ways. One turns out to be a high variability solution. The other turns out to be a low variability solution.

Okay. If it's a high variability solution, then there's lots more impact of sun variations on the climate. If it's low variability, then it's small. Now, the low variability scenario is the one that's used to force the climate models, even though the most recent IPCC assessment in a different chapter acknowledges, you know, there's that gap and this is uncertainty. It could be anywhere from this or that. But the climate models then just use the low variability.

Okay, that's one issue. The other issue is so-called solar indirect effects. Not everything is just related to heat. You know, there's ultraviolet effects. There's cosmic ray effects. There's magnetic field effects. There's all sorts of different solar indirect effects that have been hypothesized to also influence climate.

and people see indirect evidence in the paleo climate and whatever. And so this is out there. And people who have done various experiences say there's something going on with the sun that isn't explained just by the amount of energy from the sun. There's other stuff going on. And there's hypotheses about what these are, but these haven't been nailed down. So there's this big unknown sitting out there that a lot of people, think is important, including me. Okay, and just, oh, it's not important. Okay. So it's, the field of

climate science is rife with these kinds of uncertainties. Okay. And I point out that one. And just declaring this very narrow consensus on the basis of climate models, which are very imperfect and don't include a lot of things, you know, is a bad place to be. And even the most recent IPCC assess, the report that was published last year really reduces reliance on climate models because they were running way too hot with their projection. And they go, oops. And it seems what happened is they improved the parameterization of how the clouds interact with aerosol particles. And that made it much more sensitive. And it increased the warming quite a bit. So they threw out a lot of the climate model and say, oh, well, we really think these are the ones you should include, you know,

the lower sensitivity ones. So it's just, it was sort of an admission that you can't really use the climate models anymore for much, you know, for predicting forward. You know, when all of this has been based on climate model predictions. So there's all this circular reasoning that goes on to support preferred political objectives. And, you know, there's group think and the community and there's people who want to, you know, a big part of their professional reputation is wrapped up in the IPCC, you know, they don't want to blow it up. So, but you, yeah, go on. Sorry, I was just curious.

When you talk about clouds and how they act, interact with aerosol particles, what are you talking about specifically there? Okay, there's lots of little, okay, not like spray can air. You know, that's an area. It's little tiny particles, like a salt particle, a sand particle. I mean, those are more common ones, soot, sulf, sulfate particles, which you get from combustion. Those are some of them.

And they're tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny. You know, if you see, sometimes you see in the sun through your window, you'll just see all the sudden, oh, my gosh, it seems like a bunch of, you know, all of a sudden it's illuminating all these little particles. You know, you've got hundreds per cubic inch, you know, these little particles in the air. Okay. And these little particles and other things serve as nucleus for a cloud droplet.

And they also nucleate a liquid drop into freezing into an ice and how you deal with all this, you know, these processes. It turns out the climate models are quite sensitive to this. And so the latest and greatest parameterization of all these effects turned out. to make the climate models run way too hot. So, you know, not to say, you know, so the models are so tuned, sometimes you kick it with something new, even if the new thing is better, it can disrupt the climate models because it was so tuned up to the old way of doing things. So, you know, you can't use these climate models for much of anything other than to,

you know, play scientific games with. And you can learn a lot from playing games with these models, but using them to attribute. Yeah, you can instill a lot of fear in a population with models. And certainly once again, the last couple of years have taught me just that. With the COVID models, yeah. Well, everything was models. You know, at one point it was like 10%, you know, and you're like, holy man, you know,

you start doing the math on that. You don't have to be a mathematician to understand how lethal of something that could be. You know, I've often joked that if I had a time machine, I'd go back to, you know, Colonel Sanders and make sure he doesn't make the KFC and McDonald's and all that because I've seen what the fast food industry has grown into. Right now, I mean, it's a huge part of the Western world, you know, it's on every street corner and it employs a lot and it's just big business now. if you could go back to the early 90s and stop the IPCC, whether it was their report or them being formed, is that something you would do, Judith? Or is this just, it was going to, it was going to happen no matter what. And it was just slowly the progression of it. Because when you talk about outlining the entire thing to where we are right now, it sounds like the early 90s was the initial seed that has grown and growing and growing to where we are. today. Okay, well, it started in like, say, 85, so you had that 80s building up to this. You know, but I don't blame it on the IPCC per se. I blame it on the UN Framework Climate Convention, which was driven by the UN Environmental Program. This is the one behind the treaty, and this is who

the IPCC reports to and whatever. So it's really politics all the way down, you know, and it's UN politics and the environmental program is like the most how shall I say left wing organization in the UN I think it had you know the anti-capitalism don't like oil don't like you know want a global government you know all these kind of things appeal to them okay and and so climate change was perfect vehicle for that you know and they jumped on that you know And why on earth in 1992 did you have a international treaty to prevent dangerous human cause climate change when there was no evidence that it was even happening yet? I mean, like, huh? I mean, you know, the policy cart was way out in front of the scientific horse or whatever it is.

And, you know, if the IPCC wanted to stay in existence, they realized in that second report that they had to. at least show a discernible evidence of something. Okay. So, you know, it was after that, it was sort of all over. You know, then, you know, IPCC was no longer independent of the policy process. They were really, they knew what they had to produce. And this was their, and then certain scientists became invested in it. It was their path to scientific fame and fortune and a seat at the big tables. And, you know, it became very self-referential and whatever. And so it became a big juggernaut. At this point, now, the sixth assessment report,

the Working Group 1 report on a scientific basis, it was actually pretty good this time. They were honest about the uncertainty. I mean, the summary for policymakers is all cherry-picked and politicized. But you go deep into the, and it's pretty good. I mean, I have my quibbles with it, but I think it was an honest job, and it was far intellectually superior.

to any previous reports except maybe the first IPCC report. But nobody pays attention to that, not even the Working Group 2 report on impacts or the third report on mitigation. And people, you know, the how shall I say, the alarmed, the alarmist, talking head, media's favorite scientists, Michael Mann and all these people. they don't pay attention to the IPCC working group one. It's not alarmist enough for them. You know, they just are ready to dismiss it. And so ironically, it's people like me and people who are, you know, labeled as skeptics or heretics who run around citing the IPCC working group one report.

You know, we've gotten into a very strange place here. When you talk about the elite alarmists, you know, the men's and the different people, I'm sure you could rattle them all off. Is it that long ago they stopped looking at the alternative stuff? Have they seen something? Are they just in group think?

They're stuck in the same circle. Is it power? Is it money? Is it all the above? Is it none of the above? Power, money, prestige. And yeah, it's like the whole

academic ecosystem is now evolved to reward the Michael Mann kind of characters. He's in the National Academy of Sciences. He's director of a big new center at Penn. He has publicity agents. He gets like five-figure speaker's fees, and on and on you go. you know, and some people want that. And personally, Michael Mann, he likes a fight.

It's just his personality. He's out there and he wants to fight. There's other people who, oh, I want everybody to just get in a room and think and talk to each other. You know, but, you know, some people like, you know, and Michael Mann's a role model for a lot of, you know, younger scientists who see this as a path to academic fame and fortune and money and power and influence and all this kind of stuff. So, I mean, it's a model that's rewarded. It's not, you know, I don't care about those things, basically.

I mean, when I was in academia, I was more worried about my, I really needed, I liked tenure and I really wanted to have that financial security. But in terms of big recognition or big whatever, you know, I didn't really care that much. And I don't know if it's a female thing versus a male thing, because some extent it is, but you do see some females also out there playing this sort of climate power game. It's never appealed to me. So it's just different strokes for different folks. I don't know. But the reward systems are definitely, at least in the academic world or for our gear.

You know, Michael Mann has played that very successfully. You know, with people bleeding off from academia into the private sector into the media world. I think we're on the cusp of some kind of a change where you'll see these other voices having outsized influence. I mean, one example is Zeke Housefather, who's, I don't know if you know of him, but he's very prominent.

I mean, he publishes in general. He's more of an energy climate sort of interface. So he publishes academically, but he's employed by, I don't know, he was at the Carbon Brief. I think he now might be at the Breakthrough Institute. I'm not sure exactly where he is now. He might even be somewhere else. But he's, you know, parlayed that sort of media path.

I mean, he's very, very good, very good communicator and a very honest, you know, evaluator of the science. But, you know, he gives congressional testimony quite frequently, you know, he's a very visible and high profile voice. And it's definitely not, did not get that influence by an academic route. He has a PhD. He's an example.

There's other people who have gone into, you know, working for insurance companies and commodities companies and all these tech startups. And, you know, and these people are having some big voices in various environments. So I'm hoping that trend continues because the whole academic game is becoming very toxic. And a lot of people are seeing that this needs to be broadening. There's a whole lot of different issues here that go outside this little box at the UN FECD,

the UN Framework Convention has sort of ordained that this problem and its solution lies in. So, you know, I'm cautiously hopeful that, you know, we'll see a change over the next decade. but you know who knows I don't underestimate the potential for for humans to do crazy things you I was looking at a I can't remember if this was in a paper you wrote or if I grabbed this off of an interview you had either way you know when you mentioned trends I'd put this under trends you'd said our vulnerability to weather disasters is increasing as populations and wealth continue to concentrate in susceptible locations. So in one sense, you know, maybe I'll get better because more and more people are leaving academia to go to private companies. But as we,

you know, here in Canada, you just got to go back to the 30s. And it was close to a 50-50 split roughly. Actually, might even be a touch higher in the rural part of the country compared to the urban. And now in Canada, it's 83% of people live in cities. If those are in more and more susceptible locations to weather events or weather disasters, I should say, it will be more and more easy, would it not, than to push on people that weather is getting more severe and it's worse than ever or am I wrong in that? It's all economics and demographics. It's not about the weather system.

A paper that I plagued in the last week, a study about looking about the population growth in floodplains. That's huge. Okay, well, duh. Okay. Are the flood beating worse? Or are there more people and more property in floodplains? So, I mean, land use is a huge issue. You know, the whole Florida thing, you know, Hurricane Ian,

which has been what is still involving me because we have to do reconstructions and working with our clients to interpret to, you know, what actually happened, you know, everything from electricity lot outages, Florida to insurance losses and whatever. And my sister also lived in Fort Myers Beach, which was ground zero for the landfill.

So I've been very wrapped up in the Hurricane in issue, but the bottom line is you say, well, people shouldn't live in those regions, but there is no way that people aren't gonna live in Florida. I mean, some of those regions are very, extremely desirable, extremely beautiful, or otherwise productive in some way. So, you know, people aren't going to abandon many of those places.

I mean, like the floodplain of a river, yeah, you don't need to live there. But when you're talking about the coast, I mean, people want to live on the coast. You know, the challenge is you have to be smart about it. You either have to build something that's really strong enough to withstand all this stuff, or you have to build really cheap and figure it's going to get knocked down every 20 or 30 years and you rebuild. I mean, you know, you have to decide what you're going to do. But like Fort Myers Beach, I mean, that's basically a sandbar. I don't know how robust you can really make the buildings there.

So it's a genuine dilemma, you know, in terms of the land use thing. But there's a lot of development in river floodplains that don't need to be there. I get the coastal issue. But yeah, it's a tough one. but it comes down to economics and demographics. I mean, the weather isn't, you know, if you go back, at least in the U.S., where I've done most of my analysis,

I mean, the worst weather, far and away, was the first few decades of the 20th century, particularly the 1930s, the worst hurricanes, the worst heat waves, the worst droughts, the worst floods, you know, the worst everything. I mean, so people don't like, you know, and they start their analyses, Oh my gosh, this is the worst since 1950 or the worst since 1970.

Well, excuse me, go back to 1900. And you'll see those first few decades were absolutely awful for weather in the U.S. I mean, globally, you know, I don't know the details of extreme weather. I mean, you never see those details because all the analyses start 1970, 1980, 1950, 1950. But in the U.S., we definitely have good data back to 1900 and before. And the weather was just awful, awful, worse than now. And so, you know, and that wasn't, and it was a couple degrees, well, a degree, a degree centigrade colder than it is now.

Okay. So did warming, you know, like, so blaming all this extreme weather, but also fueled warming, you know, it just doesn't hold water, so speak. So, you know, sea level rise is the, one thing that's unambiguously tied to global warming. Okay, that it really is tied to global warming. Whether it's a slow creep, just from the warming and the expansion, the melting and accumulation from Greenland is relatively cyclical associated with the

Atlantic ocean circulations. So I think, you know, the melting sort of peaked around 2010. 2012 and now it's dropped way back. You know, things like that. The worst case scenario is what's going on with the West Antarctic ice sheet. And this could, but that's a really complicated situation. And I probably don't want to go into explaining it here, but it's unstable and it's not just warming.

There's also under ice volcanoes and, and this just geographic instability that are causing problems. So, you know, if this were to really destabilize for one reason or another, that could give us a significantly higher sea level rise, but it would still take centuries. So, I mean, to me, that's about the worst that can happen is like the sea level rise and something more than we expect if something bad goes wrong with the West Antarctic ice sheet. But all this extreme weather and stuff like that, no.

And concerns about warming, harming agriculture. Well, overall, the agriculture seems to be doing fine, and it's improving. And, you know, new crop varietals, new agricultural practices, and the extra CO2, and mostly the extra rain generally is helping. agriculture. So there's no, you know, overall there's no adverse harm yet from agriculture, but people try to tease something out. So like in Canada, would you expect agriculture to be better or worse in, in a warmer climate? I would expect it would be better. I would expect it better. Yes. Yes. 100%. Well, Judith, I've really appreciated this. You hopping on with me here and giving me

some of your time today. I want to do the final question, as we always do, the Crude Master final question. Shout out to Heath and Tracy McDonald for being supporters of the podcast since the very beginning. It goes like this. It's he's words. If you're going to stand behind something, then stand behind it, absolutely. What's one thing Judith stands behind? I'm trying to push for the integrity of the scientific process. It sounds like rather arcane. but we have to allow for disagreement. We have to understand the uncertainties. We have to push forward the knowledge frontier,

and that requires honesty and humility and integrity. Things like group think, manufactured consensus, politicization of science is anathema and antithetical to that process. So this is what I'm all about, the integrity of the scientific process. And apart from what's needed to move science forward, this kind of really honest science, where you're humble and you acknowledge your uncertainties, this is what's needed to inform the policy process in an effective way.

So that's what I'm all about. It's sort of arcane. But, you know, that's what makes me tick. Well, I appreciate you coming on and doing this. Give me an hour of your time and all the best and certainly feel better. I won't. We're both, I'm dealing with the cold. You've got your own things going on, but both of us a little under the weather.

So hopefully things get a little better for you. Either way, I appreciate you coming on and give me an hour of your time. Okay, well, thank you. I really enjoyed this.