Climate heretic: Judith Curry turns on her colleagues
Climate heretic: Judith Curry turns on her colleagues
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101101/full/news.2010.577.html
Over to the dark side
Curry's saga began with a Science paper she co-authored in 2005, which linked an increase in powerful tropical cyclones to global warming. It earned her scathing attacks on skeptical climate blogs. They claimed there were serious problems with the hurricane statistics the paper relied on, particularly from before the 1970s, and that she and her co-authors had failed to take natural variability sufficiently into account. "We were generally aware of these problems when we wrote the paper," Curry says, "but the critics argued that these issues were much more significant than we had acknowledged."
She did not necessarily agree with the criticisms, but rather than dismissing them, as many scientists might have done, she began to engage with the critics. "The lead author on the paper, Peter J. Webster, supports me in speaking with skeptics," Curry says, "and we now have very cordial interactions with Chris Landsea (whom we were at loggerheads with in 2005/2006), and we have had discussions with Pat Michaels on this subject." In the course of engaging with the skeptics, 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.
“So it's not so much as finding things that were wrong, but rather ignorance that was unrecognized and confidence that was overstated.”
She says she always trusted the IPCC to gather and synthesize all the disparate threads in this complex and multifaceted area of science. "I had 90 to 95 percent confidence in the IPCC Working Group 1 report," she states, referring to the basic-science section of the three-part report. But even then, she harbored some doubts. In areas where she had some expertise—clouds and sea ice, for example—she felt that the report's authors were not appropriately careful. "I was actually a reviewer for the IPCC Third Assessment Report," Curry says, "on the subject of atmospheric aerosols [that is, particles such as dust and soot that affect cloud formation]. I told them that their perspective was far too simplistic and that they didn't even mention the issue of aerosol impacts on the nucleation of ice clouds. So it's not so much as finding things that were wrong, but rather ignorance that was unrecognized and confidence that was overstated." In retrospect, she laughs, "if people expert in other areas were in the same boat, then that makes me wonder."
Apparently few others felt the same way; of the many hundreds of scientists involved in that report, which came out in 2001, only a handful have claimed their views were ignored—although the Third Assessment Report could not possibly reflect any one scientist's perspective perfectly.
Still, once Curry ventured out onto the skeptic blogs, the questions she saw coming from the most technically savvy of the outsiders—including statisticians, mechanical engineers and computer modelers from industry—helped to solidify her own uneasiness. "Not to say that the IPCC science was wrong, but I no longer felt obligated in substituting the IPCC for my own personal judgment," she said in a recent interview posted on the Collide-a-Scape climate blog.
Curry began to find other examples where she thought the IPCC was "torquing the science" in various ways. For example, she says, "a senior leader at one of the big climate-modeling institutions told me that climate modelers seem to be spending 80 percent of their time on the IPCC production runs and 20 percent of their time developing better climate models." She also asserts that the IPCC has violated its own rules by accepting nonpeer-reviewed papers and assigning high-status positions to relatively untested scientists who happen to feed into the organization's "narrative" of impending doom. Climate skeptics have seized on Curry's statements to cast doubt on the basic science of climate change. So it is important to emphasize that nothing she encountered led her to question the science; she still has no doubt that the planet is warming, that human-generated greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are in large part to blame, or that the plausible worst-case scenario could be catastrophic. She does not believe that the Climategate e-mails are evidence of fraud or that the IPCC is some kind of grand international conspiracy. What she does believe is that the mainstream climate science community has moved beyond the ivory tower into a type of fortress mentality, in which insiders can do no wrong and outsiders are forbidden entry.
Some disinterested commentators agree. One is S. Alexander Haslam, an expert in organizational psychology at the University of Exeter in England. The climate community, he says, is engaging in classic black sheep syndrome: members of a group may be annoyed by public criticism from outsiders, but they reserve their greatest anger for insiders who side with outsiders. By treating Curry as a pariah, Haslam says, scientists are only enhancing her reputation as some kind of renegade who speaks truth to power. Even if she is substantially wrong, it is not in the interests of climate scientists to treat Curry as merely an annoyance or a distraction. "I think her criticisms are damaging," Haslam says. "But in a way, that's a consequence of failing to acknowledge that all science has these political dynamics."
In a sense, the two competing storylines about Judith Curry—peacemaker or dupe?—are both true. Climate scientists feel embattled by a politically motivated witch hunt, and in that charged environment, what Curry has tried to do naturally feels like treason—especially since the skeptics have latched onto her as proof they have been right all along. But Curry and the skeptics have their own cause for grievance. They feel they have all been lumped together as crackpots, no matter how worthy their arguments. The whole thing has become a political potboiler, and what might be the normal insider debates over the minutiae of data, methodology and conclusions have gotten shrill. It is perhaps unreasonable to expect everyone to stop sniping at one another, but given the high stakes, it is crucial to focus on the science itself and not the noise.
Michael D. Lemonick is senior science writer at Climate Central, a nonprofit, nonpartisan climate change think tank. For 21 years he was a science writer for Time magazine.
This article was first published by Scientific American on 25 October 2010 and appears in the November 2010 issue.
