The world of Climate research lost a great academic figure as Judith Curry resigns her tenured faculty position at Georgia Tech.
She has figured largely in the climate debate as a skeptic in global warming.
I have retired from Georgia Tech, and I have no intention of seeking another academic or administrative position in a university or government agency. However, I most certainly am not retiring from professional life.
Why did I resign my tenured faculty position?
I’m ‘cashing out’ with 186 published journal articles and two books. The superficial reason is that I want to do other things, and no longer need my university salary. This opens up an opportunity for Georgia Tech to make a new hire (see advert).
The deeper reasons have to do with my growing disenchantment with universities, the academic field of climate science and scientists.
She has endured considerable abuse from the alarmist side. She is called a “heretic” in the alarmist circles.
over the past year or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates, many of her scientific colleagues. Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit, the Air Vent and the Black¬board. Along the way, she has come to question how climatologists react to those who question the science, no matter how well established it is. Although many of the skeptics recycle critiques that have long since been disproved, others, she believes, bring up valid points
So, she might have a point. However:
The experts broadly agree that it will take massive changes in agriculture, energy production, and more to avert a potential disaster.
In this context, figuring out how to shape the public debate is a matter of survival. If people and governments are going to take serious action, it pretty much has to be now, because any delay will make efforts to stave off major climate change much more expensive and difficult to achieve. But the COP15 climate negotiations in Copenhagen last December ended in a watered-down policy document, with no legally binding commitments for countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
See, she is risking our lives with her skepticism ! Therefore, it doesn’t matter who is right ! It’s too dangerous to wait to see if the alarmist are correct. We must dismantle civilization.
Curry ventured onto a blog run by Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado who is often critical of the climate science establishment, and onto Climate Audit, run by statistician Steve McIntyre. The latter, Curry adds, “became my blog of choice, because I found the discussions very interesting and I thought, ‘Well, these are the people I want to reach rather than preaching to the converted over at [the mainstream climate science blog] RealClimate.'”
It was here that Curry began to develop respect for climate outsiders—or at least, some of them. And it made her reconsider her uncritical defense of the IPCC over the years. Curry says, “I realize I engaged in groupthink myself”—not on the hurricane paper per se but more broadly in her unquestioning acceptance of the idea that IPCC reports represent the best available thinking about climate change.
The Nature article is interesting in showing how she began to look outside the closed academic world and saw some light. Now, she has given up on the academic world. One commenter points out an important fact.
Never forget Wright Brother did a better job than Langley with a much smaller budget.
My own skepticism began with the email scandal at East Anglian University.
Late on the night of of November 19, news broke on PJM and elsewhere that a large amount of data had been stolen from one of the major climate research institutions by an unknown hacker and made available on the Internet. The institution is the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit, home institution for Dr Phil Jones and one of the world’s centers of research into anthropogenic global warming (AGW), or “climate change.”
The hackers released about 172 megabytes of data, and we can be sure examining it closely will take some time. But after a few days, certain things are beginning to become clear.
The data appears to be largely, perhaps entirely, authentic.
The emails are incendiary.
The implications shake the scientific basis for AGW, and the scientific reputations of some of AGW’s major proponents, to their roots.
It has taken 7 years for the whole edifice to collapse. Meanwhile, Michael Mann is attempting to hold the lid on the scandal with a defamation lawsuit.
Climate science is politicized from top to bottom. One of the nastier spats occurred in 2012 when Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) policy analyst Rand Simberg intemperately denounced Pennsylvania State University climate researcher Michael Mann as “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science.”* Sandusky, of course, was the Nittany Lion football coach convicted of child molestation. Simberg was critiquing the fact that the Penn State had just exonerated Mann of accusations of scientific misconduct. Columnist Mark Steyn piled on in the National Review declaring that the university’s “‘investigation’ by a deeply corrupt administration was a joke.”
Mann’s suit against National Review has been dismissed. The suit against CEI and Mark Steyn can go forward.
The Obama packed DC Appeals Court has continued the farce. I just hope Steyn and Simberg countersue for costs and time.
Meanwhile Judith Curry has given up on academia.
Meanwhile, evidence of academic malpractice continues to accumulate.
A report released this year by Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers reinforces the disconnect between legal education’s overwhelming focus on legal knowledge and the competencies new lawyers need. A study of more than 24,000 lawyers in 50 states sought to determine the foundations entry-level lawyers need to launch successful careers in the legal profession. The study found “that characteristics (such as integrity and trustworthiness, conscientiousness, and comment sense), as well as professional competencies (such as listening attentively, speaking and writing, and arriving on time), were far more important in brand new lawyers than legal skills.” Yet, again, only in clinical and first-year legal writing courses are there efforts in the law school curriculum to address the “soft skills” so necessary for the success of new lawyers.
I have watched the evolution of medical schools as the profession “feminizes” and am uneasy but so far the medical schools still seem to trun out competent physicians, albeit with less clinical experience.
The deterioration of Humanities education at the college level proceeds apace as History is longer required for History Majors.
The department eliminated requirements in U.S., North American and European history, as well as the foreign language requirement. Thus, it is possible that a student can major in history at GWU without taking a survey course on United States history.
White man’s history, I guess.
Tags: education, global warming, politics
Those worried about global warming should say something about the ultimate number of people packing the planet, and the migration that jumps modest third world energy users onto the first world burn-a-thon they like to criticize so much.
But they pointedly say nothing about demographics, except to imply that the first world should extinguish itself to make way for more third worlders; and there is plenty of racial overtones in that implication.