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better to know...?, climate-debate

Trump Unsettles Supposedly Settled Climate Science

by H.S. Burnett, Aug 26, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch 

DOE climate report shows rising CO2 has limited impact on temperatures and isn’t catastrophic as alarmists claim.

 

Donald Trump’s presidency has seemingly unsettled the supposedly settled science of climate change, disrupting 40 years of “climate change is killing us” dogma in seven short months. [emphasis, links added]

For nearly four decades, scientists with a reputational and financial stake in the game, and compliant, uninquisitive mainstream media, have told the public one thing consistently concerning climate change: there is a consensus, there is no debate, human greenhouse gas emissions are causing dangerous climate change. The end, roll credits, The Science is settled.

The Consensus Climate Cabal (CCC) of scientists, activists, and politicians attempted to enforce the settled climate science orthodoxy because they profited from it in one way or another, in part by shutting down continued debate and discussion about the causes and consequences of climate change.

For example, the Climategate emails showed scientists suppressing or lying about inconvenient data, undermining climate concerns, having open-minded journal editors removed from their positions or reined in by journal publishers (nefarious activity that continues to this day, unfortunately).

In Climategate’s aftermath, climate skeptics were increasingly shut out of the peer review process, and papers openly skeptical of the anthropogenic climate disaster narrative were nearly impossible to get published in top journals.

The mainstream media then piled on. It began to shut dissenting voices out of climate change stories.

The media concluded that since “the science was settled,” the debate was over, and publishing the views of climate skeptics/climate realists was tantamount to allowing Holocaust deniers a voice in stories about Nazi death camps.

Those not in the consensus group were labeled as climate deniers and disenfranchised in polite company.

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A recent article in Nature acknowledged that the DOE’s report has at least a modicum of validity.

“Predictions of global warming are uncertain,” writes Tim Plamer, D.Phil., in a recent article in Nature. “That’s why we need to keep finding out how the climate system works.”

Palmer admits, for example, that climate change is not catastrophic, and “its authors are correct in one respect: the most important uncertainty in our ability to predict how much global temperatures will increase as carbon emissions continue is related to how cloud coverage will change over time.”

The response of global temperatures to rising CO2 is the most critical question in the climate debate. If that question is unsettled, then we can’t really know how the climate will respond to rising temperatures and whether it endangers humans or the environment. Score one for the DOE report.

The science is not “settled,” after all. It never was!

better to know...?, climate-debate

INTERVIEW. Dr. Judith Curry on Global Warming: Where Is the Danger?

by Clintel Foundation, Aug 24, 2025

“People used to call the warm periods the optimums, the climate optimums, because ecosystems and people thrived in these warmer climate optimums,” says Dr. Judith Curry, professor emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We talk about two degrees of warming, things like that, but the part that they don’t tell you is that the baseline is the period between 1850 and 1900. Since that period, we’ve already seen 1.3 degrees of warming,” she says. And each of us can see for ourselves if human life on planet Earth has gotten better or worse during that time, while the population has been increasing along with agricultural productivity. “The lives lost per 100,000 people from weather and climate extremes have dropped by two orders of magnitude. So, you know, we’ve managed to do quite well during the first 1.3 degrees of warming. So if we were to see another 1.3 degrees of warming, which is the current best estimate from the UN climate negotiators by 2100, is there any reason to think that would be any worse than the first 1.3 degrees of warming?” Curry asks a simple question.

Many widely held beliefs, such as the notion that a climate crisis or global warming is causing more extreme weather, are simply false. The sea level rise is insignificant. “So where is the danger?” Curry asks.

Curry also points out that until we better understand natural climate variability, we can’t be very confident about stating how much of the warming is human-caused. According to her we don’t have a good enough understanding of a number of issues, e.g. how big is the Sun’s influence on climate, or what is the effect of ocean circulations etc. Therefore the widely used narrative of 97% of scientists agreeing that we are facing a man-made climate crisis is, according to Curry, simply a joke. “Scientists do not agree on the most consequential issues,” she explains.

There is a popular claim. It is still alive, pretty much. I think that there is a scientific consensus that 97% of scientists agree that human-caused climate change exists. Many interpret this to mean there’s no room for any discussion. But where does this claim actually come from?

Well, where it comes from is that there was an activist scientist who had a blog, and he had some of his blogger buddies do a search of scientific abstracts, and they classified the abstracts as either for or against human-caused global warming. Most of them didn’t directly confront the issue. And they counted papers that included cook stove technology being used in India, for example. And they counted that as in favor of the global warming narrative. So, it’s actually a big joke.

What climate scientists actually agree on is very little. Everyone agrees that it’s been warming since about the middle 19th century. Everyone agrees that we’re adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. And everyone agrees that carbon dioxide has an infrared emission spectra that, all other things being equal, acts to warm the planet.

But scientists do not agree on the most consequential issues, such as how much of the recent warming has been caused by humans. How much warming can we expect for the remainder of the 21st century? Is warming dangerous? Will humanity and human welfare overall be improved by a rapid transition away from fossil fuels? There’s a huge debate, scientific and political debate on these issues, and pretending that we shouldn’t have this debate and pretending that there’s some sort of agreement by all scientists on these issues where there’s a lot of disagreement is not only bad for science, but it misleads policymakers. So it’s not good for anybody other than for the activist scientists who want attention, fame, fortune, whatever – who knows what drives them.

In your book Climate Uncertainty and Risk: Rethinking Our Response (2023), you write that in 2017, you resigned from your faculty position at the Georgia Institute of Technology because academia increasingly felt like “wrong trousers” due to climate consensus enforcement and free speech issues. Could you please elaborate on this? What did you mean?

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