Source: YouTube
URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxmZtmyZGg8
Date: 01/11/2011
Event: Judith Curry is interviewed at the Third Santa Fe Conference on Global and Regional Climate
Attribution: Rob Nikolewski
People:
Rob Nikolewski: What were some of your concerns with Dr Muller's -
Judith Curry: I think that it was overplayed in the Mail article, but my initial concern was, I was not happy with the PR and the way that was handled. It wasn't co-ordinated amongst the team members, and I didn't like that Wall Street Journal op-ed - you know, the anti-scepticism... I didn't appreciate that. And I thought some of the conclusions were - I think, overstated, in the sense that, you know, these papers haven't even been published. You know, there's bound to be controversy over -
Rob Nikolewski: You were part of the team? The research team?
Judith Curry: Part of the team, yeah. I didn't play a huge - you know, as big a role... I'm going to say - me and several other authors - played a role where we weren't hands-on with the dataset, it was more suggesting analyses, working on the writing. You know, it was participating at a dist- you know, we earned our co-authorship but I haven't been hands-on in the way that some of the other co-authors - a few of the co-authors have been.
Rob Nikolewski: So -
Judith Curry: So I am a member of the team -
Rob Nikolewski: Rght.
Judith Curry: - I haven't met any of the team personally until literally meeting Rich Muller last night. I'm obviously in communication with them on Skype and email and everything else. But they invited me to be a participant of the team, because they liked my, um - they viewed me as an honest broker, you know, in this debate, and they particularly liked an interview in Discover magazine, where they saw my position portrayed. They saw - oh, there's a kind of person they would like on the team. And so - I was excited by their project, and I thought it was a very impressive group of people, so I agreed to join.
Rob Nikolewski: So what you said just a little while ago - you said there's probably no question that there is some anthropogenic warming -
Judith Curry: Yes -
Rob Nikolewski: the question is how much -
Judith Curry: - how much, relative to natural. Yeah. We don't know, and I think the IPCC attribution statement is overconfident, I don't -
Rob Nikolewski: IPCC is therefore -?
Judith Curry: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, you know, the Al Gore, and Nobel Prize -
Rob Nikolewski: And they came out and said that something like greater than 90 degree certainty -
Judith Curry: 90% - more than 90% certainty that most of the warming is anthropogenic.
Rob Nikolewski: And you got problems with making a statement as blanket as that?
Judith Curry: Yes, and also the ambiguity of the "most". What does that mean? Okay. The real answer may be 50%, so that's what we should be talking about, rather than putting a high-confidence statement around that ambiguous "most".
Rob Nikolewski: So, for the average person out there, they're seeing this debate being played out. Where does the truth lie?
Judith Curry: Well, the whole point is that's a very complex system, a very complex situation. There's a lot of uncertainty. So there's a scientific debate that's ongoing, I mean there are some things that we know with substantial certainty and there's a lot that we don't.
Rob Nikolewski: What are the things that we do know with certainty?
Judith Curry: Oh, the basic infra-red radiative transfer - how, you know, some basic physical processes we understand.
Rob Nikolewski: So, is the Earth getting warmer?
Judith Curry: Yeah... Overall, it depends on which time scale. You know, are you talking about day-to-day, year-to-year, decade-to-decade, there's an overall warming trend, you know, since about 1970. What's going on in the last decade has been - and how that should be portrayed and understood - has been the source of a lot of controversy surrounding the BEST dataset, in terms of which year do you start the average on, and... how do you actually do this, has been the subject of some current - a lot of current discussion. And so - but that's good. The BEST - the Berkeley Group has put their dataset out there where everybody can look at it, and that's - you know, talk about the results and try to come to some sort of agreement on how we should interpret all this.
Rob Nikolewski: So can -
Judith Curry: And that's the processes happening, in a good way. But I think Muller came out, you know, with too dogmatic statements early on.
Rob Nikolewski: And what about remediation, cap and trade, that sort of stuff?
Judith Curry: I don't think - I'll talk a little about that. I don't know if you're going to be here tomorrow night - I have my talk tomorrow night, a keynote tomorrow evening. And that's related to - you know, it's the uncertainty monster, the climate science/policy interface, and I talk about all that. And that's - you know, the whole precautionary principle idea that's motivated that particular policy solution may not be the best.
Rob Nikolewski: Why not?
Judith Curry: Because precaution's not a robust - okay, say if we think we know what's going to happen, and we do all the stuff with fossil fuels, and it turns out to be worse than we thought, we're still in trouble. Or if it turns out to be not as bad as we thought, then we've wasted a lot of money and effort. So, there's - sort of, precautionary idea that - there's more robust ways of approaching this problem, and a broader way to policy options that we should be looking at, and try to make our decision based on a whole variety of other, ancillary factors. And accounting for uncertainty, so it's not a simple, silver-bullet solution.
Rob Nikolewski: Should scientists be making policy recommendations?
Judith Curry: No - okay, the scientists, like the IPCC, view themselves as informing policy. And they basically work for the U.N. Framework for Climate Change Convention, so they work for a policy-making organisation. So, whether that has polluted the IPCC's thinking on how they approach this problem - I'm arguing tomorrow that yes it has. So you've got this, sort of, chicken-and-egg problem right now, where we've sort of -
Rob Nikolewski: Yeah.
Judith Curry: - put ourselves on this path, and we need to take a step -
Rob Nikolewski: Is everyone - you're scientists, but it seems like so many people with dogs in this fight. It's almost like a religious discussion -
Judith Curry: People get ideological about this, and -
Rob Nikolewski: If you say something that they disagree with, you're a heretic.
Judith Curry: Exactly. And that's happened. You know, I'm just trying to do the best I can to protect the integrity of science, and at the same time understand all these other ancillary forces and factors that are influencing the science, potentially, in unhealthy ways. And that there's no simple way to separate it, but we could try to better understand it. And try to open up the debate, and I think this conference is unique, in terms of bringing people from both, you know - all scientifically valid opinions are invited to present here, and you don't often see that. And even if somebody says that, if you hear certain people are coming, "Oh no, I'm not going to attend", you know, kind of thing.
Rob Nikolewski: So even within the scientists' community -
Judith Curry: Yeah. Not going to attend, if they thought Fred Singer was going to be here.
Rob Nikolewski: Who's he?
Judith Curry: He's [indicating] an elderly gentleman back here. He's one of the big global warming sceptic, and he works for -
Rob Nikolewski: Do you consider yourself a sceptic?
Judith Curry: In the traditional, scientific sense of the word, I consider myself a sceptic. We should always be questioning ourselves and challenging our assumptions. We should always be doing that. So, I consider myself a sceptic in that traditional, scientific sense, in which all scientists should be sceptics. But in terms of disagreeing with the IPCC conclusions, my main gripe about the IPCC conclusions is that I think they're mostly overconfident, their confidence levels are too high, and I have great reservations about the IPCC process itself. So -
Rob Nikolewski: Dr Curry, thank you very much for your time.