“Climatology is becoming an increasingly dubious science, serving a political project… the policy cart is leading the scientific horse.”

– Judith Curry, City Journal, Winter 2019.

MasterResource has followed the science when it comes to climate change by profiling the work of Judith Curry, former head of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and currently a private researcher. Once in the alarmist camp, she checked her premises post-Climategate and realized that “the cause” was corrupted at the expense of sober science, not to mention public policy.

Previous MasterResource posts on Curry, emphasizing bottom-line quotations, have been:

• On the Falsity of Climate Consensus: Judith Curry’s March 29, 2017, Testimony (April 3, 2017)
• Mitigation Math: Is Climate Activism Futile? (Judith Curry thinks so) [March 27, 2017]
• Judith Curry’s Climategate ‘Open Letter’ Revisited (December 7, 2015)
• The Brave Judith Curry (Part II) [August 25, 2015]
• The Brave Judith Curry (one plus the truth equals a majority) [May 6, 2015]
• Judith Curry vs.

“It is not a matter of ‘climate denial’ to be concerned about the opportunity costs or consequences of heavy-handed interventions on liberty and living standards. Or to question the motives of those making such calls, whether for reasons of corporate rent-seeking, or ideological opportunism.” (IEA, below)

“It is not a matter of ‘climate denial’ to highlight that if the worst-case climate science scenarios are correct, adaptation is more likely to preserve life and living standards than mitigation or attempting to shut down all economic activity still dependent on fossil fuels.” (IEA, below)

The climate alarmists are losing, but not for the reason they think. And they are so angry that desperate measures are being undertaken, from civil disobedience to calls for the moral equivalent of book burning.

Climate alarm/forced energy transformation are losing because of consumer preference for affordable, reliable energy, or, in more fundamental terms, the primacy of energy density.…

My September 23, 2019, post, Don’t Debate the ‘Climate Crisis’? (Mann, Dessler, etc. want to assume, not discuss) attracted a critical comment from Master Resource reader David Appell:

Rob, you aren’t honest about what Dessler wrote, and I think you know this. He (obviously) made his point over two tweets, and you only quoted the second of them (“3/” below), out of context.

Professor Dessler in an email added:

… you claim that I don’t want to debate science. The tweet you quoted was one of a string where I make the OPPOSITE statement. However, by quoting it out of context of the surrounding tweets, you misrepresent my position. You also didn’t provide a link to my tweet string, so your readers couldn’t correct your erroneous interpretation. This suggests to me that you KNOW you’re misquoting me.

“To call the very foundational energy blocks of our society ‘evil,’ and then deprive developing countries of the same fossil fuels, is hypocrisy of the highest order.”

“Fossil fuels have single-handedly pulled the majority of people out of poverty in India, my country.”

Global warming skeptics like me often get accused of getting “dirty oil money” for writing in support of fossil fuels. Or we’re called “climate deniers” and told we must not be real climate scientists.

Many of these people turn their attention to my identity and not to the arguments I make. That is convenient if you do not want to debate the claims made in the article; you shift the attention towards the author and not facts.

The climate alarmists—those who believe that the world is headed towards an imminent climate doomsday—do this because they believe skeptics have their roots in “big oil,” which they think funds all skepticism of dangerous manmade climate change.…