HEROINE – AT 12:51 P.M. ET: Britain's Spectator has a fine piece about Judith Curry, a brave professor at Georgia Tech, who has taken on the "climate change" lobby. The result, as she says, is being ostracized from her own profession. She is considered a heretic. In the Middle Ages she would have been burned at the stake. But she is fighting on, and has a wonderful attitude:
Curry’s independence has cost her dear. She began to be reviled after the 2009 ‘Climategate’ scandal, when leaked emails revealed that some scientists were fighting to suppress sceptical views. ‘I started saying that scientists should be more accountable, and I began to engage with sceptic bloggers. I thought that would calm the waters. Instead I was tossed out of the tribe. There’s no way I would have done this if I hadn’t been a tenured professor, fairly near the end of my career. If I were seeking a new job in the US academy, I’d be pretty much unemployable. I can still publish in the peer-reviewed journals. But there’s no way I could get a government research grant to do the research I want to do. Since then, I’ve stopped judging my career by these metrics. I’m doing what I do to stand up for science and to do the right thing.’
She remains optimistic that science will recover its equilibrium, and that the quasi-McCarthyite tide will recede: ‘I think that by 2030, temperatures will not have increased all that much. Maybe then there will be the funding to do the kind of research on natural variability that we need, to get the climate community motivated to look at things like the solar-climate connection.’ She even hopes that rational argument will find a place in the UN: ‘Maybe, too, there will be a closer interaction between the scientists, the economists and policymakers. Wouldn’t that be great?’
COMMENT: It would be great, but Professor Curry may not fully understand the religious fanaticism of the left. They're not interested in science. They're interested in changing the way we live to conform to their idea of what is good. They don't accept any other idea.
November 29, 2015 |