Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry rips ‘manufactured consensus’ – Human influence is NOT ‘dominant over natural climate variability’

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry Testifies to Congress: Recent data ‘calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change’

Georgia Tech Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry on The Mark Levin Show – April 15, 2015

Selected radio excerpts – Listen to full interview here (click on April 15 show – Curry begins at 57 min.)

Curry on Consensus: “I am a scientist who thinks independently  and I happen to disagree with the manufactured consensus about climate change. Just because scientists agree on something doesn’t mean its right.

[If you have seen] the collapse of the consensus on cholesterol and heart disease– that one collapsed overnight. I can only hope that sanity will eventually prevail with the climate problem as well.”

Curry on Predictions: “We don’t really know what the climate is going to be like in 70 years. I am sure we will be surprised.”

Curry on impact of CO2: “The carbon dioxide that humans are putting into the atmosphere does have a warming tendency, but it’s not clear that [CO2] is going to dominate with the other things that are going on with the sun or volcanic eruptions or deep ocean circulations – the things that contribute to natural climate variability. Those are the things that could really surprise us.”

Curry on 97% consensus claims: “The so-called 97% consensus is about fairly trivial things: ‘Yes the temperature is warming; Yes, humans are putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and Yes, carbon dioxide does have a greenhouse effect. But that doesn’t tell us whether human caused climate change is dominating over natural climate change and that is where the big debate is about.

On balance, I don’t see any particular dangers from greenhouse warming….[Humans do] influence climate to some extent, what we do with land-use changes and what we put into the atmosphere. But I don’t think its a large enough impact to dominate over natural climate variability.

It’s become ideology driven at this point. laughs. Yes definitely.”

Curry on being targeted by Congressman Grijalva of Arizona: “I was one of seven scientists he targeted. All of us had been called to testify by Republicans and wanted our emails and grant information and our travel information and all sorts of info like that.

Trying to question our integrity and make us look untrustworthy…At this point, I am used to it. It was really pointless and I think its backfired…

They were trying to smoke out if any of us were getting money from oil companies…It’s an absolute red …

The 97 Percent Climate Change Consensus That Wasn’t

http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2015/04/06/97-percent-climate-change-consensus-wasnt

Cook’s paper, because of its poor research methods, doesn’t even prove the limited claim 97 percent of the academic literature supports a human role in climate change.

Cook and his colleagues, including a small group of environmental activists, claimed to examine abstracts of more than 12,000 papers. Tol writes:

They did not check whether their sample is representative for the scientific literature. It isn’t. Their conclusions are about the papers they happened to look at, rather than about the literature. Attempts to replicate their sample failed: A number of papers that should have been analyzed were not, for no apparent reason.

The sample was padded with irrelevant papers. An article about TV coverage on global warming was taken as evidence for global warming. In fact, about three-quarters of the papers counted as endorsements had nothing to say about the subject matter.

The environmental activists Cook enlisted to determine what the papers under consideration claimed about climate change did not work independently. Rather, they freely compared notes, discussing their work. They disagreed among themselves concerning what the papers were about 33 percent of the time. Sixty-three percent of the time, they disagreed with the authors of the papers concerning their messages and findings. This is post-modern science at its worst. Critics and outside ‘experts’ rather than the authors themselves have the final say over what an author or team of researchers are truly saying in their own paper. The original authors are simply offering one opinion, not necessarily the definitive one, concerning what their research shows.

In addition, writes Tol, “Cook broke a key rule of scientific data collection: Observations should never follow from the conclusions. Medical tests are double-blind for good reason. You cannot change how to collect data, and how much, after having seen the results.” Yet this is precisely what Cook did. Computer time stamps from the research reveal Cook’s team collected data for eight weeks, analyzed it for four weeks, and then collected three more weeks of data. The same people who collected the data analyzed it. After the initial analysis, they changed their classification scheme in the middle of the study and collected more data.

The paper’s reviewers did not question this gross misconduct. Instead, the editor praised the authors for “excellent data quality.”

These methodological errors should lead to the paper being withdrawn with an apology from the authors and the journal.

Going back …