Judith Curry : Lost to the Dark Side ?

This is my second appeal to Dr Judith Curry to come in from the cold, wrap up warm and sit by the fire of rational sanity with her professional colleagues.

While the “Curry Unfavour” saga continues, I have continued reading some history on anti-science propaganda, “Merchants of Doubt”, courtesy of Naomi Oreskes and her pardner-in-grime Erik M. Conway.

It is a lesson in how easily we can forget things, how meddling sceptics, deniers, delayers and obstructers down the decades have influenced the course of public communications on science, and prevented sound policy.

All the same arguments that were used against the science and scientists back in the 1980s, about the research on nuclear winter, acid rain and ozone depletion have been resurrected in the attacks on Climate Change.

Sadly, some of those involved in attacking the process of scientific progress were themselves scientists, some having been instrumental in fighting regulation on smoking by downplaying and warping the conclusions of the medical evidence.

It seems that Dr Judith Curry of Georgia Tech may be travelling down the same slippery slope as Professor S. Fred Singer, who in the 1970s appears to have been a reasonably concerned, quasi-environmentalist, but once apparently infected with ideas on the excessively high costs of environmental remedies, turned tail, turned coat, and has been seen as a bane of the true course of science ever since :-

https://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/07/judith_curry_and_the_hockey_st.php

Shall we say goodbye as we part company with Judith Curry ?

Shall we implore her to use her full powers of reason and come back ?

She seems to prefer to trust those who are cynical above those who are sane, and those who are scornful above those who are respectful.

More importantly, she seems to want to make allies amongst those whose mission appears to be to destroy rather than build up.

The sceptic-deniers don’t deploy the techniques of empirical science, they merely repeat refuted arguments, again and again and again.

If they want to go join Tony Hayward in Siberia, to do some proper data collection on the impacts of Global Warming in the formerly Arctic wastes and squidgy permafrost, then I might read something they write :-

https://www.sendasceptictosiberia.org/
https://www.sendaskeptictosiberia.org/

It’s all very well sending your unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV spy toys) over the North Pole, Judith, but you need to get up there, and get your hands messy with rotting sea ice so you can begin to understand what’s really going on :-

https://curry.eas.gatech.edu/onlinepapers.html
https://curry.eas.gatech.edu/currydoc/Inoue_JAOT25.pdf
“Inoue, J., J.A. Curry, J.A. Maslanik, 2008: Application of Aerosondes to melt-pond observations over Arctic Sea ice. J. Atmos. Oceanic Tech., 25 (2): 327-334.”

I trust the Polar Explorers. I do not trust Steve McIntyre and his whirling whining buddies. I trust NASA, NOAA and the Hadley Centre. I don’t trust people who are propagandising in the national newspapers without proper qualifications.

Don’t run off into the night of shame, poor reasoning, mangled graphs and dodgy statistics, Judith. Come back !

Don’t listen to that Steve McIntyre fellow. He’s probably at heart got a plan to kick science down, and his ideology goes right back to the 1980s.

You remember the 1980s, don’t you Judith ? I certainly do. Science painfully staggered on with body blows and toxic blow dart injuries until it reached the sunlight of the international environmental conferences of the early 1990s.

Don’t forget all we have achieved. Don’t gamble and lose it all by betting on the enemies of reason.

There’s no talking sensibly with these sceptic-deniers, honestly. You can’t bridge the divide. They haven’t taken the Empirical Science oath. They don’t couch their results in terms of probabilities of outcomes.

When they say that Climate Change Scientists are lying or manipulating (for example), they don’t give error bars, or Standard Deviations. How can you accept their thesis that all Climate Change Scientists are lying without properly analysing the data ?