Judith Curry

Judith A. Curry is chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. A prolific climate communicator, she runs a climate blog and has been invited by Republicans on several occasions to testify at climate hearings about uncertainties in climate understanding and predictions.

Climate scientists criticize her uncertainty-focused climate outreach communication for containing elementary mistakes and inflammatory assertions unsupported by evidence.

Education
Curry has a B.S. in Geography from Northern Illinois University (1974) and her PhD in Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago (1982).

Research interests
Curry's research interests have included hurricanes, remote sensing, atmospheric modeling, polar climates, air-sea interactions, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for atmospheric research. In 2010 and beyond, she has been looking at uncertainty.

Academic institutions
Curry's academic positions have been:
 * 2002- : Georgia Tech, Chair, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
 * 1992-2002 University of Colorado at Boulder, Professor, Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences
 * Earlier positions at Penn State, Purdue University, University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Business - Climate Forecast Applications Network
With partner Peter J. Webster, Curry has run a weather prediction consulting business, Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN), since 2006. .

Clients not disclosed
The identities of Curry's clients have not been disclosed.

Curry, 2010: no correlation between co. funding and public statements
In an interview with Curry for a October 2010 Scientific American profile, Michael Lemonick reports (pers. comm.) that he asked Curry about potential conflicts of interest, and she responded,
 * "I do receive some funding from the fossil fuel industry.  My company...does [short-term] hurricane forecasting...for an oil company, since 2007. During this period I have been both a strong advocate for the IPCC, and more recently a critic of the IPCC, there is no correlation of this funding with my public statements."

Curry to SourceWatch: full extent of fossil fuel ties
Curry has clarified that this is the full extent of her ties to fossil fuel interests, and said she has no ties to organizations or individuals with an interest in delaying climate action, or to organizations working on behalf of such interests such as PR firms and "advocacy science" firms, or subcontractors of such firms.

2011 Recognition
Judith Curry was awarded the title "climatologist of the year" at the 'post-normal science conference' in Lisbon 2011; it is unclear whether any Institution of note supports this award.

Climate views
Curry believes the IPCC has done a bad job of characterizing uncertainty". She believes "skeptical scientists" have difficulty getting their papers published. She does not view herself as a climate hawk (one who judges that the risks of climate change are sufficient to warrant a robust response. ) - though somewhat confusingly, she denies playing down the urgency of climate action: "I am saying nothing about that one way or the other".

Weblog - Climate Etc
In September 2010, Curry started a weblog, Climate Etc., which takes the same "stress-the-uncertainties" approach taken by past efforts to thwart science-based policy actions, as documented by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their book Merchants of Doubt.

Laundry list
Curry's contrarian-leaning "public outreach" public communication is criticized by prominent climate scientists and other science-aligned climate bloggers for a propensity toward "inflammatory language and over-the-top accusations ...with the...absence of any concrete evidence and [with] errors in matters of simple fact." ,, , , ,.

Climate scientist James Annan has provided examples (with rebuttals) of assertions made by Curry on topics like no-feedback climate sensitivity, aerosols, climate change detection&attribution, and the IPCC tolerance of challengers; he finds there's a pattern of "throwing up vague or demonstrably wrong claims, then running away when shown to be wrong",
 * "...Examples of the unreliability of Curry's blog publications are illustrated by Michael Tobis and James Annan, who both showed basic flaws in her understanding of uncertainty and probability, or at least an irresponsible level of sloppiness in expressing herself. Arthur Smith pointed out an under-grad level misunderstanding in her own field's basic terminology,"  said Coby Beck.

Willingness to criticize based on second-hand info from contrarian, inexpert sources

 * "In a 2010 comment she called blogger Deep Climate's detailed and well-documented investigation into the Wegman Report "one of the most reprehensible attacks on a reputable scientist that I have seen" even as she revealed in her incorrect synopsis of the charges that she had not even read it for herself. ... [i.e.] she shows herself ready to publicly criticise someone else in the strongest terms based entirely on second hand information gleaned from places like Climate Audit and Watts Up With That."

Offering off-the-cuff, uninformed criticism of mainstream climate science
Gavin Schmidt has criticised Curry for "not knowing enough about what she has chosen to talk about, for not thinking clearly about the claims she has made with respect to the IPCC , and for flinging serious accusations at other scientists without just cause." .

2011: Berkeley Earth Project "BEST" dissension, and widely publicized claims of "pause"
Curry was a member of the partially-Koch-funded Berkeley Earth Project temperature reanalysis project headed by former global warming skeptic Richard Muller, which reanalyzed existing weather station data and found yes, global warming was real. The project FAQ (and a draft paper, which lists Curry among the authors) reported there was no evidence to indicate the rate of global warming had changed in the last decade. But despite Curry's having agreed (as evinced by her coauthorship) with this conclusion, London Daily Mail contrarian (and oft-misrepresenting,, ) journalist David Rose portrayed a vigorously-disagreeing Curry saying, "This is 'hide the decline' stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline." .

Curry backtracked somewhat on her blog, saying "The article spun my comments in ways that I never intended", but didn't step back from "Our data show the pause", and "There has been a lag/slowdown/whatever you want to call it in the rate of temperature increase since 1998." When pressed for the scientific basis for these statements, Curry admitted the time period was too short for a statistically significant difference to emerge. In response Tamino noted, "There is Occam's razor -- ... the simplest hypothesis (namely: the trend hasn't changed) is preferable. Besides which, basing her statement on "It may have stopped since 1998" is really no different than "it may have stopped since last Thursday.""

Eyeballed "pauses" are misleading - in a graph titled "How "Skeptics" View Global Warming", Joe Romm shows that if you see a "pause" in the post-1998 temperature data, you'll also think global warming "paused" at least six times from 1973-2010, covering almost the entire period - yet the global temperature actually continued to increase.

2011 WIRES article on uncertainty
Climatologist James Annan noted in passing that in this article Curry had "grossly misrepresented the IAC report." .

Claims not backed up
The WIRES article also didn't back up claims made earlier: in an earlier paper, Curry and Webster had said the forthcoming article "argues that the attribution argument cannot be well formulated in the context of Boolean logic or Bayesian probability...[and] argues that fuzzy logic provides a better framework..." But when the WIRES paper appeared, it didn't do so - not even mentioning fuzzy logic, Boolean logic or Bayesian probability. . (When asked, Curry said her reviewers had found that section confusing, so "in the revised version, I simplified the argument". )

2010: Liu and Curry
Liu and Curry's August 2010 paper, "Accelerated warming of the Southern Ocean and its impacts on the hydrological cycle and sea ice", has been criticized for its failure to cite previous papers drawing the same conclusion, and for its "uncritical use of invalid data". ,

Related SourceWatch Articles

 * Heretic (frame)
 * Scientific American (magazine)
 * Berkeley Earth Project

External resources

 * Curry's weblog Climate Etc.
 * Curry's Home Page at Georgia Institute of Technology
 * Curry's Curriculum Vitae