Most journalists and people inside the community of establishment climate scientists ‘get it’ that this is about Curry being in denial.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 21, 2014
Judith Curry admits she gets her science from (denier interpretations of?) stolen emails
Sou | 9:21 PM
Apparently Judith Curry took a trip to Australia recently. I guess it was for personal/family reasons because all I know of it is from an interview she gave to a science denying "literary" magazine, Quadrant.
Anthony Watts has copied and pasted excerpts ( archived here). I've archived the report of the interview, which was suitably in the "opinion" not fact section of Quadrant Online. She admits to the interviewer, Tony Thomas, that she's now a dyed in the wool denier, saying:
TONY THOMAS: If the skeptic/orthodox spectrum is a range from 1 (intense skeptic) to 10 (intensely IPCC orthodox), where on the scale would you put yourself
(a) as at 2009
(b) as at 2014,
and why has there been a shift (if any)?JUDITH CURRY: In early 2009, I would have rated myself as 7; at this point I would rate myself as a 3. Climategate and the weak response of the IPCC and other scientists triggered a massive re-examination of my support of the IPCC, and made me look at the science much more sceptically.
As you can see, she admits that rather than basing her opinions about climate science on research, she bases it on disinformation about snippets of stolen emails. And rather than being "sceptical", Judith has moved further and further into the fake sceptic camp as time goes by.
I'm not sure that she's being strictly honest even then. Although I agree that the evidence suggests she's become more of a fake sceptic over the years, I suspect it had more to do with her ideology overwhelming her reason than anything to do with "science by hacking" (her choosing to accept disinformation about stolen emails) or climate science. Remember that Judith only applies her "do nothing it's all too uncertain" notion to mitigation of global warming, which is so "virtually certain" you can regard it as immutable fact. When it comes to matters that affect her directly and immediately, she'll urge action even when the likelihood is only 30%.
Here's a graphic of Judith's confessed transition to denialism, according to herself.
Her transition is well supported by the evidence she's provided over the years. Every now and then we see a glimpse of her former scientific self but those glimpses are becoming more rare.
Judith opts for "it's the sun, stupid"!
As if it wasn't enough her admitting she's moved well into science denying territory, in the interview Judith tosses in an "it's the sun" type of comment.
THOMAS: Are you supportive of the line that the ‘quiet sun’ presages an era of global cooling in the next few decades?CURRY: One of the unfortunate consequences of the focus on anthropogenic forcing of climate is that solar effects on climate have been largely neglected. I think that solar effects, combined with the large scale ocean-circulation regimes, presage continued stagnation in global temperatures for the next two decades.
All that comment shows (apart from giving a boost to Marcia Wyatt's stadium wave hypothesis) is that Judith probably doesn't read much scientific literature these days (like this). Recent research ( here) shows that even a grand minimum would only set back the trend of global warming by a few years at most.
What motivates a (former?) climate scientist to accept denier disinformation about stolen email snippets and reject climate science from the experts?
Yes, I know a lot of readers object to speculation about motivation. However there has been relevant research on the topic of motivated reasoning.
Dan Kahan did some research and postulated that:
...the study found that ideologically motivated reasoning is not a consequence of over-reliance on heuristic or intuitive forms of reasoning generally. On the contrary, subjects who scored highest in cognitive re?ection were the most likely to display ideologically motivated cognition. These ?ndings corroborated an alternative hypothesis, which identi?es ideologically motivated cognition as a form of information processing that promotes individuals’ interests in forming and maintaining beliefs that signify their loyalty to important af?nity groups.
I expect Judith would argue that she would score high in cognitive reflection. It doesn't take any cognitive reflection to keep shouting "wicked" and "uncertain" over and over without any cognition or analysis.
There's a paper here about party politics and motivated reasoning, which looks to be an interesting analysis. At one stage it notes how people motivated by self-interest become more polarised as new information emerges (even when that new information contradicts their opinion), whereas other people will moderate their opinion in response to new information:
Leeper (2013) shows that individuals motivated – through primed self-interest – to defend their prior attitudes polarize over-time in response to new issue-relevant information. By contrast, individuals primed to have weaker issue attitudes moderate in response to new information, ultimately holding opinions that reflect the consideration of contradictory evidence. The selection of highly contentious issues on which individuals have strong attitudes (see, for example, Taber and Lodge 2006) might bias research toward findings evidence of strong directional motivations and their effects. Thus, the operation of motivated reasoning will look differently for individuals depending on what issues are at stake and how intensely they need to defend their prior attitudes or identities.
Most climate blog readers will be familiar with Lewandowsky13, the "moon landing" study, which found that right wing ideology was a predictor of the rejection of climate science.
Another recent paper found that motivated reasoning was a big factor where people were more engaged in thinking about climate change, and personal experience was the larger factor influencing the opinions of those who didn't know or think much about the subject. From the abstract (my paras):
We use data from a nationally representative sample of Americans surveyed ?rst in 2008 and again in 2011; these longitudinal data allow us to evaluate the causal relationships between belief certainty and perceived experience, assessing the impact of each on the other over time.Among the full survey sample, we found that both processes occurred: ‘experiential learning’, where perceived personal experience of global warming led to increased belief certainty, and ‘motivated reasoning’, where high belief certainty in?uenced perceptions of personal experience. We then tested and con?rmed the hypothesis that motivated reasoning occurs primarily among people who are already highly engaged in the issue whereas experiential learning occurs primarily among people who are less engaged in the issue, which is particularly important given that approximately 75% of American adults currently have low levels of engagement.
It could well be that Judith has indeed looked at research and realised that people's opinion could be pulled out of shape by misrepresentation of snippets of stolen emails, provided they'd heard about it and weren't familiar with climate science itself (and were predisposed to reject science). This was the finding described in another paper. Although the authors did point out that shrieking "climategate" only really works when preaching to the denier choir:
We also found that the loss of trust in scientists among those Americans who followed the Climategate scandal was primarily among Americans already predisposed, for ideological or cultural worldview reasons, to disbelieve climate science.
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