Website Climate Forecast Applications Network Website
Website Judith Curry Website
Twitter/X Judith Curry X account
Book Climate Uncertainty and Risk

Ahmad (00:01.516)
Anyway, here we are, Judith. We started out our time zones, and I’ve been guilty of getting the time zones wrong quite a few times. I’ve had to apologize on air to my lovely guests. But Judith, thank you for coming on. And, you know, I just gave you a little background about me before we kicked off. You’re a climate scientist, you know, well.

You might have retired now, I’m not sure, but you know, you’ve got a lot of experience. And what I find really interesting about you is you kind of have seen both sides of the coin, the manmade climate kind of like agenda and the climate skeptic kind of questioning the narrative. Can you just tell me like, how did it all start for you? Like, I know it’s a big question. What was your, what was your journey like?

Judith Curry (00:57.422)
Okay, so I got my PhD in 1982 and for decades, I took the straight and narrow scientific path, playing the academic game and trying to build my career and all the things that academics do. In 2005, I got inadvertently caught up in the public debate on climate change when we…

published a high profile paper on hurricanes and showed that they, you know, more intense hurricanes were becoming more frequent. And this was published right after hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. So this paper got an insane amount of publicity. And, you know, global warming was not a big part of the theme, but that was what everybody picked up on. And, you know.

Ahmad (01:41.892)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (01:55.07)
me and my co-authors found us in this, you know, hugely polarized public debate. And we had to make it, you know, people were asking us about global warming and the hockey stick and all this kind of thing. And we had to make a decision. And at the time we felt that the responsible thing was to support the IPCC consensus, you know, the UN climate assessment group in our public statements on climate change.

even though I had concerns about how they treated uncertainty, and it seemed like a lot of those people were political activists, I was still convinced by the rigor of the process. OK, and so that’s what we did. And that all changed for me.

Judith Curry (02:47.934)
November of 2009, almost exactly this time of the year, right now in late November, when the so-called climate gate, yeah, right, yeah, this is almost an anniversary, with the hacking of the University of East Anglia climate research unit.

Ahmad (02:58.724)
Happy anniversary.

Judith Curry (03:13.754)
emails and these were a lot of IPCC authors and they corresponded with other authors. And I was just absolutely appalled by what was revealed by these emails. The scientists were trying to sabotage anyone who disagreed with them. They were avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests, trying to get journal editors fired and on trying to circumvent IPCC.

review policies and, excuse me, and on and on it goes. And I was just absolutely appalled. I mean, this was an international scandal. And so I spoke up, you know, I said, we need to do better. We need to be more transparent about our methods. We need to make our data publicly available. We need to lose the overconfidence and be honest about what we don’t know. And we need to be respectful of people we disagree with.

Ahmad (04:12.152)
Hmm. Sorry, I’m sorry, sorry. Sorry, are we talking about the field of medicine right now or climate scientists? Cause I, this could relate to my.

Judith Curry (04:12.542)
You know, I thought these were motherhood and apathy. Yeah.

Judith Curry (04:25.718)
I know the climate science, we were leaders in cancel culture and all this skull douchery. But you know, it’s a phenomena in many, many fields. But, but you know, I’m pretty sure climate scientists invented cancel culture. We’ll see how we can discuss that later. Okay, so you know, I spoke out about this. And

You know, the important people, the climate establishment, they were horrified at what I had done. How could she, you know, do it in a complete silence? People were communicating, oh, well, you need to feel sorry, you know, have some sympathy for these people who got caught out. I say, excuse me, I have no sympathy at all for these people for behaving like that. You know, they have egg on their face. It is very much deserved. And so, you know.

I became part of the story and I was featured in a lot of big magazine stories and things like that. And I became a problem. And the climate establishment didn’t know how to deal with me. And then about a year later, they finally figured it out. Well, let’s just call her a denier and throw her in the camp with the crazies and the…

Ahmad (05:34.5)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (05:48.922)
you know, the fossil fuel interests and that way we can just dismiss her and we don’t need to pay her any more attention. Okay, so but that even got me more fired up. It didn’t intimidate me. You know, I started my own blog, still running climate, etc. Judithcurry.com. And I began, you know, digging into all these really uncomfortable aspects of the whole thing.

not just the science, but the social psychology and the policy and the politics and legal aspects on and on it goes. And I developed a following of open-minded people, you know, and I just caused these other people more and more grief. And I’m still at it to this day. A turning point in my career, you know, my career in academia was becoming very uncomfortable.

I mean, the administrators at my university didn’t like what I was doing. And I was bringing a lot of publicity, not all of it favorable. And they started marginalizing me. And it was clear I had no future in academia. So I resigned my tenured position in 2017. I’m in the private sector now. I have my own company, Climate Forecasts Applications Network.

And I’m still very active. And this way I’m completely unfettered from all the university and my so-called peers. And I can speak out and do whatever I want. And now I have a new book. I have a new book, Climate Uncertainty and Risk, which lays it all out in terms of how I view this whole situation and where I think we should go.

Ahmad (07:23.245)
Mmm.

Ahmad (07:26.729)
I love it. I love it.

Ahmad (07:40.088)
Fantastic, I’m gonna put a link to that book on the website so everybody who’s listening can find it and all your other details and your blog. I had someone called Nick Hudson on my podcast recently and he gave some advice, which I thought was really sage advice. It was, basically, if you are in fear of being canceled by your company or your regulatory body or whatever, your university, guess what? Just cancel yourself. Make yourself canceled so that they can’t do anything to you.

And it might involve a pay cut. It might involve a bit of hardship, but at least you’re free. And just listening to you right now, Jude, if you don’t know this, but this week I just got canceled a second time. My main hospital suspended me eight weeks ago because of my social media activity and God knows what else. And then this week I got suspended because I posted a little clip of a podcast on my Instagram account.

and they didn’t like it. And so I got suspended because of that. And I feel like you, I feel like I’m struggling to stay within my profession. I feel like I’m not welcome because I’m challenging and exposing things and they don’t like it. I think our fields are very similar. Maybe all professions are like this, where if you go against the herd and…

You challenge, they don’t like it, they feel uncomfortable, which is strange because scientists are meant to question, are meant to welcome debate and ideas, don’t you think?

Judith Curry (09:14.387)
Absolutely. Instead we have political bias and…

Judith Curry (09:21.518)
unjustified overconfidence, masquerading as science. And the real scientists are people like you and me who are challenging the evidence, reassessing the assumptions, reevaluating the conclusions. That’s the job of a scientist. And we’re the people that get canceled and put in the denier camp. The world is upside down, what can I say?

Ahmad (09:49.732)
Do you know what? I knew there’s a reason I loved you. So I call it professional hubris and arrogance, especially in my field where a lot of people think they know everything and anything. And actually what they mean by that is they’ve listened to the government or they’re following the latest narrative. And they’re not questioning. They’re blindly obedient. And they think that makes them intelligent and knowledgeable when it’s actually quite the opposite.

Judith Curry (09:53.294)
No.

Ahmad (10:20.36)
And that’s the thing I really struggle with. Can we go back to the climate business? Sorry, you were gonna say?

Judith Curry (10:29.454)
Okay, there’s a paper published just this week in the proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences by a group of social psychologists, a big group. And what they came up with is what explains this phenomena is self-protection and careerism, supporting their peers who they rely on for promotions and professional safety. And they’re…

personal moral assumptions and political preferences. I mean, that’s what they found is driving all of this. So, and once you get a large enough group and they become the majority, you know, it becomes a hard nut to crack.

Ahmad (11:03.352)
Mm.

Ahmad (11:17.22)
Yeah, yeah, very much so. And do you not think before we start talking about the climate science and whatnot, just carry on this theme for a little bit. Do you feel it’s almost like there’s these little cults now? They’re just their ideologies, political, almost religious fervor to it. And if you blaspheme and you go against the religious cult.

You shall be banished or even worse, you shall be punished and banished. It’s quite medieval, actually.

Judith Curry (11:52.074)
Oh, it is. Okay, now there’s another book that was recently published and this author’s in the UK. You might want to interview him at some point, Andy West. And his book is called In the Grip of Culture, explaining climate catastrophism or something like this. And he brings in all the religious parallels and the dogma and all this kind of stuff. And it’s very empirically based and he’s got a really novel.

take on all this, but you’re absolutely right. It’s become a secular religion and not just secular religion. We have the Pope, you know, pushing all this stuff, you know, they’re in training the secular religion, you know, into, um, you know, Catholic dogma now. So, you know, absolutely. Um, following the climate gate, when I was speaking out, there was a big profile on me and scientific America.

Ahmad (12:31.928)
Yeah.

Judith Curry (12:48.654)
And the title of the article was Climate Heretic Judith Curry Turns on Her Colleagues. Okay, so that title is telling in two ways. Okay, count me in as a heretic if climate science is dogma for crying out loud. And the whole thing about turning on my colleagues, you know, that’s what, you know, this whole, you know, we have to stick together and protect each other and we rely on our peers and you can’t.

Ahmad (13:06.904)
Hehehe

Ahmad (13:10.785)
Yeah.

Judith Curry (13:19.146)
you know, insult the establishment or criticize the establishment. So that was all very telling. Shoot, climate heretic turns on her colleagues. I mean, you know, well, what about science? Doesn’t that matter?

Ahmad (13:22.828)
Yeah.

Ahmad (13:30.913)
Yeah.

Ahmad (13:35.304)
Right, exactly. And the funny thing is, you know, following the narrative and following the herd is now also associated with you being a good person. So, being a climate heretic isn’t just enough. It’s not just the fact you’re a heretic and a quack or a crazy person. The fact that you even dare to challenge makes you a bad person. You’re morally not a good person. How dare you not? You’re killing the planet, you know? Judith!

Because of you now, we’re going to be killing the planet. I mean, it’s that kind of sensationalism and craziness. So for example,

Judith Curry (14:08.278)
Yes, it’s simplistic. Exactly, it’s simplistic moralizing. And there’s a worldview where humans are bad and where a blight on the planet and stuff like that. Then there’s another one that focuses on human flourishing and thriving and trying to.

protect the planet so it continues to provide ecosystem services. So these are two very different worldviews. And, you know, one is pro-human, the other is anti-human, you know. So, unfortunately, on the climate change issue, the anti-human people seem to be winning out, at least temporarily.

Ahmad (14:39.458)
Mm.

Ahmad (14:53.848)
You know, the more guests I get, the more I just, my mind gets blown away. So I had someone called Amy Lansky, who used to work in the Silicon Valley, and she was a computer scientist. Like in her own words, she told me she was a geek, computer geek, and her and her husband were programming and all that kind of stuff. And then she discovered, you know, homeopathy, and she cured her son. And she goes, you know, I had to leave California because there’s something really deeply anti-human going on here.

And that was just a week ago I chatted to her. And it’s just really funny, like, and she’s got nothing to do with climate. She’s not a doctor. She’s got a computer background, but she said exactly what you just said. It’s now this world where you’re either pro-human or anti-human. You either think we are blight on the planet and there should be less of us and we’re just parasites, or you think, actually, it’s not that complicated. You know, we were made in the vision of God. We are God’s children. The world is…

Bountiful and flourishing. And actually what we just need to do is be careful shepherds and make sure we look after this planet because it will take care of us. I fall into that camp. I don’t subscribe to finite resources. I mean, we’re terrible and we need to be called. I don’t think that’s, I think that’s very ungodly.

Judith Curry (16:11.743)
Thank you.

Judith Curry (16:16.074)
Agreed.

Ahmad (16:18.824)
Okay, so let’s move on. I wanna ask you, let’s go digging into the science just before we start talking. You’re going into the science and the politics and the social psychology aspects, but let’s go into the science because there’s some people who say we’re just producing tons of carbon and other gases, greenhouse gases, and that’s driving up the temperature.

But then you’ve got another group of people who are like, actually the temperature varies in this planet all the time and the biggest factor is the sun and carbon dioxide just makes up a tiny fraction of the air atmosphere and the human element of that is tiny in itself. We’re not responsible for climate change. What is the truth? Because you know what, you’ve got clever scientists on each side and it’s really confusing. Can you break it down for someone stupid and dumb like me? What is happening?

Judith Curry (17:15.614)
Okay, well, our understanding of the climate system is in its infancy. Back when I was a graduate student, circa 1980, there wasn’t a field of climate science. You were a geologist or an oceanographer in atmospheric science, and you studied the dynamic. It’s physics-based kind of understanding. And now we have…

all of these majors in climate studies or whatever. And we’re not educating people who have a deep understanding of the fundamental climate dynamics and the physics of how the system works. So you’ve got this whole large population of people who call them self-climate scientists. They might be ecologists or geochemists or economists or science technology studies people, a whole range of…

disciplines, but they end up calling themselves climate scientists anyways. And they assume that all of the warming is human costs. The people who actually understand the physical processes and the climate dynamics is a relatively small fraction of the whole population of so-called climate scientists and a large number of the skeptics, if you will, myself included.

have this strong physics-based understanding. They understand the uncertainties. They understand the complexity. They understand the challenges in modeling such a complex system. And they end up rather skeptical. So what do we actually know? I mean, yes, we’re burning fossil fuels and emitting CO2. CO2 has an infrared emission spectrum, which acts to warm the planet, the so-called greenhouse effect.

And yes, average global surface temperature has been increasing since about 1860. So nobody disagrees with those things. The big questions and the uncertainties is how much does CO2 contribute to the warming, particularly relative to natural climate variability? And we simply don’t know. Even understanding the sensitivity of the climate

Judith Curry (19:41.902)
to doubling carbon dioxide has been very elusive. There’s still a factor of three uncertainty and what that value is. I mean, this is not to mention the deep uncertainty surrounding our understanding of the sun and the solar indirect effects on climate and the multi-decadal to millennial scale circulation patterns in the oceans that redistribute heat and influence the atmosphere and change the cloudiness.

Ahmad (19:59.85)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (20:11.03)
You know, all of these things we don’t have a good quantitative understanding of. I mean, we have qualitative understanding, but not quantitative, not a predictive understanding. So we simply don’t know. But the bigger issue, and to me, this is a fundamental one, is why do we think that warming is dangerous? Okay, there’s no particular reason to think that warming is dangerous. I mean, they measure the current warming.

Ahmad (20:22.989)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (20:40.254)
since the pre-industrial period. Okay, the pre-industrial period was in the little ice age, the coldest period of the last millennium. Why are people holding that up as the Goldilocks climate? You know, what’s wrong with warming? People have referred to, you know, warm climate periods as the optimum.

you know, the Roman optimum or the mid Holocene optimum, you know, these are the warm periods. These are good for life on the planet. You know, so what exactly are we worried about? You know, since the late 1800s, we’ve warmed by 1.2 degrees centigrade, you know, over that period of time. Population has grown explosively, life span has increased substantially.

Global poverty is vastly reduced, agricultural productivity and yields are way up. Even the per capita life loss from extreme weather and climate events is down by two orders of magnitude. So, so far, we’ve been doing really well in the face of this warming that we’ve seen so far. And right now there’s nothing particularly bad about the weather or climate.

Ahmad (21:46.057)
Mmm.

Ahmad (21:50.078)
Yeah.

Judith Curry (21:59.406)
I mean, people blame extreme weather events on the warming. Well, even the IPCC doesn’t find much in the way of anything that the warming is causing in terms of more extreme weather events. Yes, we’re getting more heat waves, but we’re also getting fewer extreme cold periods.

And the deaths in extreme cold periods are an order of magnitude greater than during hot periods. So, you know, overall, this is a good thing. So to me, this issue of whether this is dangerous is the weakest part of the whole argument. Yes, we have the slow creep of sea level rise and glacier melting, but, you know, we can easily adapt to that.

So the only way to really alarm someone is to mistakenly blame extreme weather events on the warming or talk about hypothetical tipping points. You know, the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, you know, the collapse of the Gulf Stream, you know, all of these things that have a very low chance of happening in the 21st century. And if they did,

they’re more likely to be caused by natural climate variability than by CO2-driven warming. So what are we left with? We’re not left with a lot to worry about. No, we don’t want to keep polluting and endlessly dumping things into the atmosphere and whatever in the ocean. So we should minimize that where we can. But these urgent deadlines that we’re facing and the cow farts

Ahmad (23:46.529)
Hmm.

Judith Curry (23:49.138)
situation and screwing with our agriculture and our electric power systems. I mean, it’s just insane that that’s a recipe for human suffering, economic collapse, and trashing of our environment. I mean, people are going to start burning wood. Electricity is too expensive.

or it’s not sufficiently available, and all these wind turbines and solar power plants are having very adverse ecosystem impacts. What we’re doing right now is just so beyond stupid, all in the interest of maybe improving, having a better climate in the 22nd century. Even if we’re successful with this net zero by 2050 or whatever the slogan is, we’re not gonna notice that.

in the weather or the climate against the background of natural variability. Plus there’s huge inertia in the ice sheets and oceans. Whatever we’ve done is just gonna hang around for a while. So what we’re doing makes absolutely no sense. And I lay this out in great detail in my book with 1500 references and so forth and so on. But this is so…

Ahmad (25:10.524)
Hmm

Judith Curry (25:17.702)
much the opposite of what you hear in the media, from UN officials, from our national leaders. People are running into reality in terms of there’s no way we can completely transform our agriculture and electrical power systems on a dime.

Hopefully we can improve all that over the course of the 21st century, but trying to do this by 2030 or whatever is just, you know, a rough recipe for economic and environmental disaster.

Ahmad (25:58.836)
Wow, Judith, the parallels between medicine and climate science, science are just insane. I swear. I mean, I always used to think global cooling is an absolute disaster. That’s what’s gonna be terrible. What’s wrong with global warming? I can tell you right now, in my little garden office, I’ve got my little heater on. It’s not warm enough.

Judith Curry (26:02.326)
Hahaha!

Judith Curry (26:18.979)
Well…

Ahmad (26:25.548)
Bring on the global warming. We could definitely do with some more warming. You’re right, they’ve picked on something. And I’m sure in the 1970s, they were talking about there’s global cooling and it’s gonna be a disaster. And then they realized actually that’s not happening. Let’s change story. It’s global warming now. And if I’m not mistaken, is it true that the global warming is kind of tailed off a little bit? It’s not going up as high as they want it to. Am I right about that?

Judith Curry (26:50.17)
Oh, there’s so much natural variability. I mean, it was slowing down for a while. And then we had this crazy spike this year that started mid-May, and it looks like it’s turned the corner, but this will probably end up being the warmest year. But, you know, totally nothing related to greenhouse gas emissions. It’s circulation patterns, changing the clouds, changing the radiation balance. And then we also have the…

hung a tong of volcanic eruption in there, which is also playing with the stratosphere in terms of the water vapor. So it’s been an unusual year, but it has absolutely nothing to do with CO2 emissions.

Ahmad (27:21.793)
Yes.

Ahmad (27:33.048)
So, I mean, can I ask, CO2 makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere. How much of that is actually manmade?

Judith Curry (27:44.446)
Not that much, but the argument is that the CO2 budget and balance was in equilibrium before humans started burning fossil fuels. Well, that’s not entirely true. There have been some pretty large variations in carbon dioxide over geologic history and some orders of magnitude higher.

CO2 concentrations earlier in the planet’s history. So there’s plenty of natural fluctuations in CO2. So the argument is that the humans have disturbed the balance, so the excess, the increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is caused by humans. Well, some of it certainly is. I mean, we don’t have a good enough understanding of the quantitative understanding of the.

global carbon dynamics and budget, the uptakes by the oceans and releases by the oceans and by plants and geologic processes and all sorts of things. We have a pretty good qualitative understanding, but again, we don’t have a good quantitative understanding. And new research continues to turn up surprises. So sure, humans have contributed to the increase in the atmospheric CO2 concentration.

A lot of it is all by land use. Yeah.

Ahmad (29:13.272)
Okay, so for someone who’s dumb like me, just say, yeah, for someone who’s dumb like me, you’ve mentioned a few times qualitative understanding, but not quantitative understanding. Break that down into simple, plain English. What do you mean by that?

Judith Curry (29:28.99)
Okay, well, okay, we can say that carbon dioxide, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase the temperature of the planet. That’s the qualitative understanding. The quantitative part would be, well, how much warming? That’s the part we don’t know. So we understand the basic processes and the sign and the general directions, but in terms of quantitative, like…

Ahmad (29:41.112)
Hmm.

Ahmad (29:47.332)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (29:57.838)
Human caused is bigger than natural cause. We don’t know how to predict this forward. We don’t know with any confidence. So that’s why I mean qualitative versus quantitative.

Ahmad (30:10.944)
And what about the interactions? Like, I heard that actually with all this carbon dioxide, actually you get a greener planet, and actually the planet’s never been greener in recent history. Is that true or is that just baloney?

Judith Curry (30:24.13)
Well, we’ve had good satellites up since about 1980, and the planet is definitely greening in like something like 80% of the region that are covered. And the plants, the forests, agriculture, and everything is thriving in a higher CO2 environment. I mean, in a greenhouse, you’re pumping CO2 in there to help the plants grow. So yeah, the plants are thriving, and they’re also as they…

grow more, they uptake more CO2 from the atmosphere. So they’re helping keep, you know, CO2 under control. That’s part of the carbon balance and budget and the carbon cycle, how all these things interact. So yeah, now the plants are thriving. And people are talking about.

Ahmad (31:10.072)
This is.

Ahmad (31:13.489)
This is what I mean by… Sorry, you’re saying?

Judith Curry (31:16.758)
Yeah, species extinction, you know, the species, no, the plant stuff is doing fine. I mean, any problems that we might be causing with species extinction is really related to land use. You know, the fact that we cemented over cities and whatever and cut down for us, but simply burning CO2 at the plants like it.

Ahmad (31:30.626)
Mmm.

Ahmad (31:41.256)
Yeah, well, that’s what I thought. And it kind of made sense from a biological standpoint. I think part of the professional hubris that I also see is that, you know, oh, humans are emitting this tiny extra bit of carbon dioxide. And we, us humans are so powerful that we can throw the planet off-sink. It’s like, we’re just little ants. The planet is such a sophisticated system, so complex.

and it knows how to deal with balance. It’s got all these feedback mechanisms and it will take more than us doing this to take it off balance. That’s personally what I think. I think we give ourselves a bit too much credit and we need to give the planet a bit more due respect.

Judith Curry (32:26.37)
Well.

You know, we do impact the climate and the planet, largely through land use and, you know, ocean use. And then, you know, what we put into the atmosphere, we do impact the climate. But these impacts happen and there are positive and negative feedbacks and, you know, you can’t always predict, you know,

what might happen related to a specific impact. So we are impacting, but the flip side of that, that we can actually control the climate, that’s where it gets really stupid. Like we can somehow control the climate by eliminating CO2 emissions. That’s where it becomes stupid. Because we’ve, for better or for worse, we’ve set this into a play. There’s all sorts of feedbacks, long time scales.

inertia in the system, this is just going to play out however it’s going to play out. We might not want to make it, I mean, it may play out for better or for worse. We don’t particularly know at this point in the long term.

Judith Curry (33:42.886)
So thinking that we can, you know, everything’s gonna be fine if we stop emitting CO2. No, we’re still gonna have extreme weather events. The sea levels are gonna continue to arise. You know, the glaciers are gonna continue to shrink until the next big, you know, natural climate variability cycle impact or whatever kicks in. I mean, 4,000 years from now, we’ll probably be in an ice age. That’s gonna be a much bigger challenge for us.

Ahmad (34:14.135)
Right?

Judith Curry (34:14.305)
preventing mile high ice sheets over Europe and North America. I mean that’s a much bigger issue. I mean we can probably end

Ahmad (34:22.76)
Yeah, I think Greta might get upset about that. All these people might suddenly find actually they wished for the warmer climates. No one wants global cooling. It’ll be an absolute disaster. Can we just go back to the planet and you’re talking about water and air and land usage and then manipulating, controlling the environment, the temperature.

Are you aware of people injecting stuff into the air? It’s called stratosphere injection something. Other people know it as chemtrails. They actually think they can change the weather systems. Have you come across this?

Judith Curry (35:04.526)
come across this and I haven’t paid much attention to it, but there are jet contrails up there. You can see as jets, it’s really water vapor, whether there’s some crazy chemical, I find very dubious. I find that pretty credulous, but people have interviewed me and really pushed this and I say, look, you know.

I find this very dubious, but I haven’t looked into it. So I don’t have a heck of a lot to say about it. People are talking about injecting aerosol particles, trying to mimic the effect of a volcanic eruption into the stratosphere to block the sunlight to cool the planet. Well, it probably would cool the planet. It would probably also screw your agriculture. So what’s wrong with warm temperatures?

Ahmad (35:38.178)
That’s fine.

Judith Curry (36:01.066)
You know, we just need to get over that thinking that warm temperatures are somehow bad.

Ahmad (36:06.66)
So I actually had a chat with someone called Efrat Fenixon, who’s an Israeli independent journalist, and she actually showed me a UN paper on it, and I didn’t believe until I was like, what? And it’s there, it’s all about stratospheric injection, and they inject particles of metal and God knows what, and they want the sunlight to reflect back, they want haze, they want clouds, and then the clouds will reflect the sunlight back, and they get cooling. So.

And they’re definitely, and if you just Google it, there’s Wikipedia page on it. And again, it comes back to that hubris, that arrogance of humans thinking that they can modify the planet. And I just find it crazy, crazy. So what you’ve summarized in a nutshell, if I can summarize it is, the climate is an extremely complicated system.

that a lot of the scientists that we’re seeing aren’t really scientists, they’re just using the climate scientist tag because it’s cool and you get funding with it and kudos, but actually it’s a mixed bag of specialties. No one’s doing joined up thinking of what is actually a really complicated system and admitting that probably we don’t know what’s going on. There’s a lot of modeling that happens, but models are only as good as what you input in. And if you input in garbage, garbage comes out.

Um, that there’s a, an almost like ideological belief system now that this is happening, that scientists aren’t coming to the table with an open inquiring mind and saying, you know, what’s actually happening, they’re coming with their opinion, we’ve got global warming. So everything’s coming through that lens, which is not really scientific. And if you question it, then you’re ostracized and made into a boogie man and just, you’re a bad person. Is that, is that a nutshell?

Judith Curry (37:53.582)
Well, that’s a very good summary. The one piece of it is there’s so much activism, political activism, by the climate scientists involved in this. It’s almost part of the expectation now that you be an activist, promoting a policy, political trying to get people to stop burning fossil fuels, OK, and various other.

Ahmad (37:56.435)
Mm.

Ahmad (38:11.224)
Tell me about this. What do you mean by this?

Judith Curry (38:21.938)
whether you’re anti-nuclear or pro-renewable energy or anti-agricultural, they’re advocating for these green policies. And this isn’t the job of scientists. I mean, not to say that you can’t have your political opinions, but this is now the expected behavior by the community. Climate scientists are supposed to be political activists, which I think is a very, very bad recipe.

And in fact, the current post on my blog, climate, et cetera, is a piece called A Bad Recipe for Science. And this relates to the political activism by scientists. And the parallels, and I use the, not just climate science, but also the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic. There are so many parallels between the COVID-19

climate science. And, you know, the climate science thing is…

Ahmad (39:27.322)
Wow. I didn’t think we’d be going there. I love this. Tell me, tell me what the parallels are.

Judith Curry (39:32.722)
Oh my goodness. OK, the whole consensus thing. You hear about the climate change consensus. Well, in March of 2020, just when the pandemic was getting underway, there were two papers published, one in The Lancet, one in, I don’t know, another big journal. And they were these statements that

Judith Curry (40:02.706)
Of course, the pandemic came from natural origins. Anyone who thinks the lab, that was a lab leak is a conspiracy theorist who is anti-Chinese, is this, that and the other. And they established a consensus surrounding the origins of the COVID virus. And anybody questioning that, they were canceled from social media, Twitter, Facebook, on and on.

Some people lost their jobs for speaking out about that. So this consensus was declared before we had any clue as to what was going on. And it lasted for about 15 months until an investigative journalist did some digging and found that one of the leaders of this was some guy who was funding.

the lab in Wuhan, and he wanted to divert any attention away from that. And there are all sorts of these venal motives and career motives involved for these people wanting to not have this be a lab leak. And they uncovered this. And then all of the people spoke up, of course, we have no idea. It very well could be a lab leak. But everybody was silenced. They didn’t want to lose their funding.

Okay, they didn’t want to be ostracized. They didn’t want to be canceled. But as soon as the dam broke by this investigative journalist that everybody spoke up, of course, they were saying either we have no idea or we think it might really be a lab leak, you know, and just, you know, the whole house of cards collapse. So, you know, the issue isn’t that a consensus collapse, but how was such a dubious consensus?

so rigorously enforced for 15 months, and it wasn’t really challenged. I mean, it’s just astonishing. If you look at all the factors in play there, I mean, this is really not very good. And the other parallel was trying to control. People tried to control the pandemic with lockdowns, this, that, and the other, and the Chinese, and the New Zealanders were particularly draconian.

Judith Curry (42:32.958)
trying to control it. But we’re dealing with one of these crazy, wicked problems, like climate science. Crazy complex, deeply uncertain, ambiguity of values, different people wanted to do different things. In the face of something like that, you can’t control the situation. The best you can do is work to understand it and then try to manage the myriad of risks that are emerging.

Ahmad (43:02.018)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (43:02.158)
And so the same thing for both climate change and COVID. Those are a couple of the examples. Precautionary principle, the misuse of the cautionary principle in both the pandemic and climate change. Those are some of the parallels that come to mind.

Ahmad (43:13.088)
Yes.

Ahmad (43:22.38)
Sum up, can you sum up the precautionary principle? I know what it means, but I think it’d be good for the listeners just in case they don’t understand. What do we mean by precautionary principle?

Judith Curry (43:28.674)
Okay, well, everybody.

Okay, well everybody knows what caution is. You know, when you’re crossing the street, you look both ways and make sure a car’s not coming. That’s caution. Precaution is similar, but it’s when there’s scientific uncertainty. Okay, so you think that red dye number two might cause cancer, but you’re not really sure. Well, maybe we should just get rid of red dye number two. Anyways.

and use red beats instead, something like that. I mean, that’s an example of precaution, that you do something even if you’re not completely sure there’s scientific uncertainty. And in the example of red dye number two, it doesn’t really cost people much not to use it. Who needs red dye anyways? But when you’re talking, okay, the precautionary principle, okay, is something different. And…

It is related to precaution, but this was canonized really in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit. And it relates to that the lack of uncertainty or the lack of certainty should not prevent action. Okay. And so this was a green light, you know, for anybody who had, oh, this could be a problem. We need to cancel it. You know?

Ahmad (45:01.284)
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Judith Curry (45:01.834)
And then this evolved where you had to have some credible whatever arguments, some balance of evidence and what that actually was became very fuzzy. But people became very precautionary principle. And the precautionary principle is enshrined in the European Union in a lot of what they do. Now, the Americans are more…

Judith Curry (45:30.666)
less a fair and risk tolerant than Europeans overall with the British people, I think somewhere in between. But you’ve got, you know, precautionary principle is really a big thing in the European Union. And I have a whole big section in my book, you know, deconstructing, you know, all of this and why, it’s a bad approach for any complex problem.

like a pandemic or pretty much any health problem or climate change or any environmental problem, the precautionary principle, it’s not a decision rule. At most, it tells you, well, maybe this is something we should think harder about. And there’s a whole lot of other risk management tools that you can apply to these complex, deeply uncertain, ambiguous problems. The precautionary principle is just a really

Ahmad (46:17.176)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (46:24.834)
bad recipe for dealing with these kind of very complex problems.

Ahmad (46:30.924)
Well, I think the parallels in the pandemic are really there. You know, for me, the precautionary principle is important because sometimes it’s best just to wait it out. If you don’t understand something fully, just wait. Don’t just react. Because you don’t know what impact your reaction will take. Sometimes, especially when it comes to human beings, nature and human beings, when there’s illness and disease, actually the body’s incredible at healing itself. Sometimes you just need to leave it to get on with itself and it’ll heal.

And, you know, is it a case of just, let’s see what’s going on rather than start doing medical interventions that may cause harm. So in medicine, we call it first do no harm. So just because it’s a problem, just because Judith comes to me with a problem, doesn’t mean, okay, Judith, here we go. Lie down on the operating table. I’m gonna open you up and have a look inside. It’s maybe it’s, Judith, let’s keep an eye on this. Let’s just see what happens.

Judith Curry (47:10.213)
Thanks.

Judith Curry (47:14.955)
it

Ahmad (47:30.46)
and see if it gets better, gets worse. Let’s give it a few days or a week. I think that’s the most important thing, a little bit of caution, take your time, don’t react. Don’t do anything that may cause harm. That all went out the window with the so-called pandemic. And I found that very worrying. The parallels with climate, science, and medicine these days in the pandemic was there was this manufacturing of consent.

the population was made to consent to this one narrative. And then the second parallel was that there was no dissent allowed. If you dissented, you’re a climate change denier. You know, that’s just not a nice thing to be calling anyone. Or you’re an anti-vaxxer, or you’re some crazy person, quack, conspiracy theorist.

Judith Curry (48:01.751)
Exactly.

Ahmad (48:26.936)
So if you challenge the narrative, you immediately get ostracized and publicly shamed and humiliated and discredited. And then there’s this idea of we have a solution. We have a global problem that needs a single solution, which is very worrying. And that solution often comes with taking away your freedoms and liberties and enriching a few people and corporations. Surprise, surprise. It’s like.

It’s funny how that always happens. And the people who dissent, like you and me, get shot down. There’s more parallels. I’ll let you interject now.

Judith Curry (49:07.022)
Okay, a couple of things, going back to what you said earlier. Well, there’s a tension between precaution and do no harm and innovation. Okay, so if you’re too cautionary, you’re not ever gonna innovate. So there is this tension. I mean, there’s this big question in the artificial intelligence field right now, tremendous opportunities, but wow, what could be the downside? So, you know.

Ahmad (49:34.178)
Yeah.

Judith Curry (49:35.862)
What do you do? You try to understand it, you try to manage it, and you do scenario planning. What are the worst case scenarios? What could possibly go wrong here? And try to understand that. And it’s challenging how to manage those things. But if you’re overly cautious and precautionary, you’re going to slow down innovation. And I’m going to say that.

the way a lot of the European laws and regulations are set up, to me it seems rather stifling of innovation. Of course in the US we have the opposite, you know, pretty much anything goes we’ll worry about it later. So there’s a balance to be struck, but it’s very difficult for these extremely complex topics.

Ahmad (50:32.3)
Yeah, I think, you know, but the thing is there should be a freedom, freedom of speech, freedom of thought. And like with climate and medicine nowadays, there’s a lot of censorship that goes on and cancel culture. So, for example, if you say, I want to do a scientific project and I want to see if climate change really is happening and whether how much of it is manmade and whether it really is impacting polar bears, you know, that’s probably not going to get funding. But if you say, I’m investigating manmade

climate change and the drastic effect it’s having on polar bears. And, you know, coming with the conclusion already that manmade climate change is the issue. Now you’re just looking at what effect is having on polar bears. You will get the funding. So there’s, there’s bias now. There’s not real science. There’s not true open ideas. Everything is now you’re pitched. If you have to pitch everything along the lines of there’s climate change. Now we’re assessing the impact of it and how harmful it is. That’s what’s going to get your research grant.

That’s what’s going to get your promotion in your department and speaking engagements. You won’t get the research if you challenge it. If you say, I’m not sure climate change is actually being driven by men and, you know, man, mankind, and I think there might be more nuanced issues here. You probably get ignored and it’s the same with medicine. If you say, you know, vaccines are the best thing since sliced bread, you know, you’ll get patted on the back. But if you say, Hey, are vaccines actually safe? Are these ones safe?

Are there complications with this? You’re an anti-vaxxer and then you get punished. And so this is a problem that we’ve got with science right now, I think. Maybe it’s always existed. Maybe I’m just, I don’t know my history. Maybe it stretches back centuries.

Judith Curry (52:14.819)
Oh, yeah, the history and philosophy of science really do provide some insights into why we’re in the place we are now. And we’ve been there before. You know, there’s people, there’s scientists or humans, there’s also sorts of human motives in play. You know, the ideal of the gentleman scientist.

tinkering away, you know, the 18th and 19th century model.

You know, it was relatively disinterested, but there was all sorts of professional skull dodgery. Sir Isaac Newton was quite the SOB. You know, even Darwin, you know, these guys, they were sabotaging, you know, their competitors and I don’t know how to go. So, you know, it’s always been pretty rough sport. Oh, geez. Yeah. Always been pretty rough sport. But.

Ahmad (53:04.601)
Wow.

Judith Curry (53:12.494)
I think we need to educate scientists and people in the medical fields, you know, more strongly in terms of ethics and the philosophy of science and the philosophy of medicine to have people better grounded. So they’re not just pursuing the career objective du jour and, you know, running roughshod over whoever or whatever it takes. You know, I just think we need…

a more, a broader intellectual and moral foundation in our education of scientists and people in the medical fields. You know, that’s probably a pipe dream. But you know, absent that, we’re going to just going to be, you know, it’s a doggy dog world, you know, in these professions. And there’s a lot of politics and a lot of

Power politics involves that, you know, it’s just sort of part of the game. And then people wonder why they don’t trust doctors or scientists, well, there you have it. People see all this power politics being played and they just don’t trust any of it. I mean, the whole backlash to the COVID vaccines in the US is translating to all childhood vaccines, you know, not just the COVID vaccines. So there’s just like a,

Ahmad (54:27.46)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (54:39.49)
big backlash against that in the US. And the US is really bad. The US is still recommending mRNA vaccine for babies. I mean, there’s, yeah, oh yeah, six months old.

Ahmad (54:42.828)
Well, I’ll be honest with you, Judith, I’ll be honest with you. Wow, wow, well.

Ahmad (54:55.688)
I’ve interviewed quite a lot of people like Brian Hooker and Aaron Surian. To be honest, I’ve gone from a position where I’m jabbed up to the hill with so many things where I wouldn’t recommend any vaccines now. I I’m very dubious. I want to see the science. I’ve looked at it now and there’s not very good science, no real long-term safety data, no real placebo studies. It’s just interesting. The whole thing is just, it’s a game. It’s just,

and ideas that we’ve just accepted. And I think we need questioning. And the problem is when you’re not allowed to question something, my alarm bells go off. Like what is going on?

Judith Curry (55:35.981)
Yeah, I had three Moderna jabs, you know, the mRNA vaccine, and my first booster.

Ahmad (55:41.838)
Yes.

Judith Curry (55:46.226)
I was messed up for a year while I’m still messed up. You know, I had a Vax injury, totally messed up my immune system, TAF infections, shingles, Epstein-Barr, everything that I ever had just coming back and crashing around. And I still have the trigeminal neuralgia in my face from the shingles. And this was like, you know, all of this started like a month after my second Vax.

Ahmad (56:10.199)
Oh no.

Judith Curry (56:15.826)
this huge immune system crash out. And I know there are people who had much worse than me and then some people have even died apparently. From things that…

Ahmad (56:32.036)
See, so, Judith, this is very common, and you’ve actually at least accepted that there’s a link here. I had a conversation with someone just literally a month or so ago, and he was telling me how he’d had shingles in his eye. And I was like, what? And he was like, it was absolutely agony, it was painful and this. And I can tell you right now, when I went from med school, we were told that shingles was very rare.

and that you only got it when you’re severely immunocompromised. And if someone got shingles, think cancer, think something’s wrong with this person, think AIDS or whatever. And now, shingles is so commonplace. Everybody, it’s like my neighbors had shingles. So this guy, I was like, are you okay? Have you got any other medical conditions? Are you immunocompromised? Like, no, been healthy, never had any problems. I went, have you had a booster recently? He said, four weeks ago.

Judith Curry (57:31.798)
Yeah, I know.

Ahmad (00:00.478)
So basically before the internet cut out on your end, I was saying, so I said to him, how long ago did you have a booster? And he went, four weeks ago. And I went, how long ago did you have the shingles in your eye? He went, three weeks ago. I went, do you think they might be related? And his response shocked me. Why do you say that?

Judith Curry (00:24.689)
No!

Ahmad (00:27.694)
I was like, maybe they might be related because it’s having problems with people’s immune system. Really? I was like, yeah. And the problem is I have seen so much harm due to, okay? Just like literally, I’m walking in to pick up my kids and I’ve got a few minutes to kill. I’m standing at the duck pond in the village that I’m at. And there’s a man with a really red, hot, swollen looking leg. I went, dude, I think you might have a blood clot. And he turns around and I’m like, how’d you know that? I’m an orthopedic surgeon.

Judith Curry (00:29.422)
Yeah.

Ahmad (00:57.682)
I do. I went, oh, have you been traveling recently? Nope. You had an injury? Nope. What do you think’s going on? He goes, I think it’s the booster, but the doctors say it’s not. And it goes on and on. Countless stories, turbo cancers, everything. So I did a video to put on Twitter last year in December saying I’ve been speaking to doctors and they’re scared to say things. I’m seeing a lot of harm. Maybe we need to pause, just investigate what’s going on.

Oh my God, I got such a shit ton of crap thrown at me. For how dare you? How dare you do this? And it’s again, the precautionary principles gone out the window. We’ve done this mass experimental vaccination with gene therapy. It is not a conspiracy theory, it’s gene therapy. It’s not a vaccine. And instead of saying, ooh, maybe we don’t really understand things. Maybe we need to pause and have a look. It’s like, no, shut up. Don’t question it.

So I’m sorry to hear you’re having these problems, but to be honest, I’m not really surprised. Um, off air, I can give you some advice if you want to.

Judith Curry (02:04.443)
Sure.

Judith Curry (02:08.614)
Sure.

Ahmad (02:09.438)
Oh you paused again, Judith Currie.

Judith Curry (02:13.063)
can’t hear again.

Ahmad (02:15.914)
You’re just frozen. I’m just going to go in low data mode so you won’t see me. But here we go. I’m going to do low data mode. Just give me a sec.

Right, can you hear me?

Judith Curry (02:31.024)
Yeah.

Ahmad (02:32.23)
I was saying, all fair later, I can give you some advice if you want to.

Judith Curry (02:38.041)
Okay, sure.

Ahmad (02:40.046)
Cool. So, um.

Coming back, I don’t want to talk about COVID too much, but hasn’t it shattered your trust in the system? Has it made you question?

Judith Curry (02:54.683)
Well, yeah, well, I have no reason to trust the system at all. You know, I’m very much, you know, and

Yeah, in terms of medical, I mean, what we’re getting in the US, I mean, we’re still

protocol is to vaccinate with the mRNA vaccines, children as young as six months old. Whereas in Europe, it’s only used for people over 65. In the US, it’s insane. I mean, because otherwise the pharmaceutical companies won’t make any money. There’s so, the whole health policy situation is so much influenced by big pharma. It’s a very bad situation in the US.

I mean, you know, so the system, you know, I have no trust in the system. Um, you know, I have to, anything that’s important. I just have to sit down and figure out for myself. I can’t, you know, trust any so-called experts and, you know, and I find, you know, the whole Twitter ecosystem to be quite interesting, um, especially since Elon Musk took over, so many people were canceled and shadow banned.

Ahmad (04:00.11)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (04:13.127)
I was shadow banned. I mean, for about a year and a half before, Musk took over, I was tweeting into the void. I was getting no new followers, very few likes or retweets or anything like that. And within a week of when he took over, boom, you know, my followers and engagement substantially increased. So I was clearly shadow banned.

Ahmad (04:19.074)
Why were you shadowbanned?

Judith Curry (04:41.455)
But now we have this marvelous ecosystem where a broad range of perspectives are out there in the public square, how to filter it and find the good people to listen to, but at least the information is out there and accessible and available. And so, especially not just on climate, but my second category for following is public health nutrition.

Ahmad (04:51.539)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (05:11.667)
medicine type issues that I follow very closely. And it’s, you know, and it’s really eye opening.

Ahmad (05:15.938)
Well, I like it. Yeah, like it.

Ahmad (05:29.166)
After you, Judith.

Judith Curry (05:30.467)
Yeah, so.

No, you go ahead. I’m waiting for you.

Ahmad (05:35.166)
I was going to say, um, listen, if you’re interested in health, seriously, get into my podcast. Let’s just start listening to my podcast. One of the reasons, one of the reasons why they pushed for the vaccines at first at a young age in the U S is if you can get it on the childhood schedule, then you are immune, you know, you’re immune to any prosecution. So that’s because of the 1986 vaccine injury and vaccine act or whatever it was.

Judith Curry (05:43.03)
I will stop, I will. I will.

Ahmad (06:03.734)
So once it’s on the schedule, it can never go away. You’ve got guaranteed income forever and you’ll never ever get into trouble. You’re never liable for it. It doesn’t matter how defective your product, whatever, you’re fine. So it’s quite sinister. And that leads me to the next question about the climate change. Again, the parallels. Yes, we’ve talked about…

Judith Curry (06:05.589)
Oh my-

Ahmad (06:26.946)
the failure of scientists and doctors, the indoctrination, the herd mentality, the group think that preservation of careers and incomes and status and conformity, yes, yes. Forget all that though. Isn’t there an element of people who just wanna make money, corporations, banks, you name it, whatever, who see a way of making a…

a shit ton of money, you know, because there’s many people who think of climate, the climate scam and the pandemic scam. Basically they’re based not on science and grounded in reality. And it’s all about fear, a single narrative. And then you put in place systems that will make a lot of money.

What do you think?

Judith Curry (07:23.079)
Okay, I think the big pharma driver is quite significant in the COVID arena. And the climate change is far more diffuse. I think it’s fear, saving the planet, all these religious kind of.

sentiments that are dominating. Somebody is always going to try to figure out how to make a buck out of something. But all these wind turbine and solar farm companies are having a tough go and they’re surviving off of government subsidies. So nobody’s making much money out of that. All this ESG investing and all this kind of thing is pretty much collapsing. So nobody’s making

much money out of this. I mean, a few people probably, but it’s not a big moneymaker. So I think the driver is different in the climate case than in the COVID case. I think big pharma is clearly a big driver in what’s been going on.

Ahmad (08:30.778)
What about power and control? So over here in the UK, and around the world actually, they’re talking about 15 minute cities, restricting and making everything sustainable and using less energy, less travel. I mean, it seems a very totalitarian, dystopian world they want us in.

Judith Curry (08:42.035)
Oh, yeah. It’s all about. Yeah.

Judith Curry (08:53.195)
Okay, well, you know, it’s a, you know, all of this started with the UN environmental program back in the 1980s. You know, it’s a very anti industry, anti democratic, anti capitalist, non governmental world control kind of agenda that’s out there coming down from the UN. And yeah, it’s all about political power and control. That’s what’s behind this, you know, and it’s scary, you know, the US

is very different culturally than US. It’s just very hard to control anybody or anything in the US. We’re just, I know we’re uncontrollable. And Europeans look like sheep to me right now, with the UK being intermediate.

Ahmad (09:32.834)
That’s why I love you guys. That’s why I love you guys. And you got guns as well.

Judith Curry (09:50.027)
Now we’ve even got with the latest selection talks of the Netherlands leaving the EU. It’ll be interesting to see how that things in the Netherlands are completely insane. I mean, they had to shake something up. Yeah. So this is out of control. People just don’t want this in this day and age. But, you know, this sort of soft, friendly, gentle socialism, you know, of Europe.

Ahmad (10:00.446)
Yeah.

Judith Curry (10:19.107)
you know, can maybe survive, but not if they go too far. It won’t really take away people too many freedoms. I think it’ll backfire. And we’re sort of seeing that in the Netherlands. We’ll see how much that spreads in Poland. Well, Poland was never quite, you know, in the same mindset. But yeah, the US, you know, we have all these different states. We have…

some states that behave more like European countries and other ones that are just, you know, totally wild and let’s say fair and uncontrollable. So the whole range that we have here.

Ahmad (10:52.771)
free.

Ahmad (10:56.503)
Yeah, I love it.

Ahmad (11:00.238)
So Judith, before I wrap up, I’ve got a few more questions, just a few, just a few, and then I’ll let you off. I know I’ve taken up a lot of your time already. What I wanna ask is, say you met a family member of mine who was totally into the idea that manmade climate change is real, that we’re killing the planet, we need to reduce the carbon. Sometimes I hear and I kind of believe this, that…

actually the only carbon that people really want to reduce is us people, human beings. They just want less of us. But you know, these people who believe this whole climate change thing religiously, how in just a few paragraphs would you start to change their mind? Because like COVID, what I found was it doesn’t matter how much facts you give, how much data you give,

Judith Curry (11:35.783)
I’m a high schooler.

Ahmad (11:56.298)
If you present all this information and it goes against their worldview, instead of saying, Oh, wow, I didn’t know that. They get physically quite uncomfortable and they run the opposite direction. You’re, you’re really. Breaking them. They, they don’t like that. How, how would, how do you try and convince people that it’s not that simple and that it might be a different thing?

Judith Curry (12:21.251)
Well, I start with trying to understand their world view and challenge it from that direction rather than a scientific challenge or even a policy challenge. And I say, well, we have 8 billion people on the planet. Of course we’re gonna impact the planet.

Judith Curry (12:49.887)
you know, and, you know, if there are, well, we need to get the politician, the people, the population back below a million people, you know, if they come back with that. And I said, Oh, you know, okay, shall we start with you and your family and your community? You know, like, you know, why, you know, and just a lot of this is sort of anti-human versus pro-human. And if you can’t sort of communicate with them,

and get them to acknowledge that, yeah, we have to help humans flourish on the planet. Then I would ask them some other moral questions. Do you think it’s right to keep like a billion people in Africa without electricity, you know, just and having to farm without any machines? Do you think that’s morally just? You know, I just challenge them on these basic worldview ethical issues. And if you can’t.

you know, make some headway there, you’re probably never gonna make any headway talking about uncertainties, you know, scientific uncertainty or political debates. You just have to, you know, point out, you know, clarify their worldview and take it to its logical conclusions. Okay, so you want to reduce, you know, get rid of 90% of the people.

Ahmad (13:56.279)
Mmm.

Ahmad (14:00.364)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (14:16.039)
Okay, how are we going to do that? And where would you start? How about if we start with your family and your community?

Judith Curry (14:25.135)
you know, just try to point out illogical aspects of their worldview, but trying to debate a specific policy or a specific scientific issue. Oh, but I read on this website, you know, and this, that, and the other, and they’ll have experts to cite and this, that, you won’t make any headway. It’s really about worldview. And, you know, do you, you know, how much would you give up? Would you give up?

Ahmad (14:26.646)
Yeah.

Ahmad (14:46.53)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (14:56.739)
your house, your car, how much would you give up and on what time scale? Find out what kind of sacrifices do you, do you ever wanna go visit relatives in other countries, other states and just find out what they’re, just come at it from like a soft worldview and moral perspective and see what they’re willing to do. And once they start questioning all that kind of stuff, they’re riper.

Ahmad (15:07.01)
Yeah.

Judith Curry (15:26.439)
They’re more ripe to accept that maybe all this isn’t necessary or such a good idea, or we should slow down or whatever. But yeah, people are just like religion, challenging the existence of God. But.

Ahmad (15:30.978)
Mmm.

Ahmad (15:40.027)
What’s really interesting?

Ahmad (15:48.95)
Yeah, 100%. What I find strange is a lot of people, you know, buy into this manmade climate change, but don’t see how electric cars, for example, are so damaging to the environment, how many toxic chemicals are released into the water system, and a lot of so-called green endeavors are actually really damaging to the environment. You know, getting rid of beef, cattle, is actually terrible for biodiversity, and monoculture crops is awful.

Judith Curry (16:12.719)
Yeah.

Ahmad (16:18.71)
rapes the land of its nutrients, you’re pumping insecticides and, and you know, the pesticides and you destroy the biodiversity of the insects. How’s that? How is that good for the planet? And I think they just see things from one single lens and don’t actually appreciate the bigger picture. And it’s, it’s a lot more nuanced and complicated and not as simplistic as they would like to think. Can I quickly ask like, and when it comes to medical science, I found that things are very corrupted.

And what I mean by that is, it used to be that, you know, when you talk about evidence-based medicine, it was the experience of the clinician, it was the patient’s experience, and then it was peer-reviewed literature. All three together were used to, you know, evidence-based medicine. But now, the doctor and the patient are no longer important and it’s all about peer-reviewed literature. But if you listen to some of the former journalists of the big medical papers, they say 90% of the papers they publish is junk, it’s conflicted, it’s there’s conflicts of interest,

It’s just bad science. It’s not reproducible. And, but right now, you know, we, in medicine, we go, oh, it’s a science. It’s a science. Like, it’s like, you know, some holy scripture that you cannot challenge. And actually what is today’s science and accepted, you know, and tomorrow or in the next decade, we’ll be looking back and laughing at it. And this has happened again and again in medicine. So when people say to me, oh, the science and the data, I find that actually a lot of it, you cannot trust.

and it’s not reliable. What is the science like in climate change? Are there similar parallels? I mean, are there studies, robust, fantastic papers that prove the other side is correct or are they really relying on just garbage science as well?

Judith Curry (18:06.563)
Well, when you’re dealing with a complex system, maybe you can carve off objectively a little piece of something that you can really apply fundamental physical principles to. But in other things, you’re dealing with inadequate data sets, inadequate models, different ways of.

Ahmad (18:16.557)
Mmm.

Judith Curry (18:33.163)
organizing the evidence that can lead you to different conclusions and on and on it goes, you know, that there’s just, it’s very difficult to.

Judith Curry (18:44.299)
unambiguously come up with something that’s definitive when you’re dealing with natural systems. Your knowledge base slowly moves forward. A lot of papers don’t stand the test of time. In fact, some of them don’t even survive their press release before people have attacked them and found major flaws. So people have to recognize science as a process.

not as a collection of facts that has been canonized. Because one of the real dangers in climate science is that the IPCC consensus, the manufactured consensus has resulted in premature canonization of a lot of science that remains deeply uncertain. And so that’s what the big.

danger of all this manufactured consensus is it’s the you’re working with incorrect premises. There’s all sorts of questions that don’t get asked anymore. And you’ve slowed down the progress of science and you’re misleading policymaking and decision making.

Ahmad (20:01.358)
The bias is rife.

Ahmad (20:08.726)
I was saying bias is rife within the science of climate science.

Judith Curry (20:15.001)
Right, right, right.

Ahmad (20:17.49)
Okay, Judith, I’m going to let you off the hook. This is the last question. Imagine you’re on your deathbed. You’ve reached a great old age of 130 odd. You’re surrounded by your family and loved ones. What advice, health, or otherwise would you give them before you pass on?

Judith Curry (20:37.041)
Um…

Judith Curry (20:42.119)
Take no one’s word for it. Always think for yourself and don’t be unduly influenced by peer profession, either social peers or professional peers. And always think for yourself and value your independence. I mean, that’s and your freedoms. That’s really what brings out the best of us, the best in us as humans. So.

Be independent and be free.

Ahmad (21:13.954)
I love it. I love it, I love it, Judith. Judith, I really enjoy chatting to you. Thank you for doing this. Ha ha ha. Emmy, I just wanna say thank you to all my listeners. You’ll find all of Judith’s links and blogs and her book, her latest book on the website, www.malloc.com. Don’t forget to support me. Thank you so much, everyone. Bye bye.

Judith Curry (21:20.255)
This was fun.