Renowned climatologist Dr. Judith Curry says it is very tough to make the case of warming becoming dangerous

See INTERVIEW. Dr. Judith Curry on Global Warming: Where Is the Danger? by Hannes Sarv.

"“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.

"The global climate models are very sophisticated models. And they've been very useful to climate scientists for research to try to test various ideas and change parameters and things like that in the models. However, they do not adequately treat natural climate variability, for starters. They do not adequately resolve extreme weather events. So, the things that we're most interested in, how much warming is being caused by humans, we don't know. There's uncertainty by a factor of three in terms of how much warming these different climate models produce. The so-called climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide varies by a factor of three among these different models. This is the most basic parameter, and we don't really understand what it should be. And so climate models produce a range of predictions. If the climate sensitivity is on the low end, then we don't need to worry about it very much. If the climate sensitivity is on the high end, we could be approaching a catastrophe. But as I understand it, the evidence supports it being a climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide on the low end. But these climate models just are not fit for most of the purposes for which they're used."

"There's a worldview that didn't like fossil fuels. They wanted to get rid of fossil fuels, didn't like capitalism. Sort of the early ideas, which are now encapsulated in the World Economic Forum, for example. The globalist view that we need non-governmental world control for these big environmental climate, and health problems"

"They're not increasing [extreme weather events]. This is the issue. They're not increasing. Even the most recent IPCC assessment report, the only thing that they found that was a detectable change that was above and beyond natural variability was more heat waves and fewer cold waves. That's the only thing that they found with any kind of confidence. Nothing about floods, nothing about droughts, nothing about hurricanes, nothing about tornadoes, nothing about any of these things. They vary, but it's really within the bounds of natural climate variability." 

"there have been detailed studies in the US looking at long-term data. They see heat waves increasing in the eastern part of the US, but decreasing in the western part of the US. Even though the average temperature is increasing, the extremes aren't increasing in the West. So, you know, none of these things are simple. The US is one of the places where they have long data records that you can look at. But in a lot of places in the world, the data records are pretty sparse or short-term."

"If you look at a short data record, say since 1970, you might find a trend, and then you can say: oh, it must be fossil-fueled warming. But if you go back to the 1950s or the 1930s, you can see the extreme events were even worse."

"Between 1945 and 1976, the temperature was actually decreasing a little bit. So to claim that warming started in 1950 when the fossil fuels picked up, well, it wasn't really warming during that period. There was really a shift around 1976, 1977, and that's when the warming took off. So we're looking at a warming spike that's less than 50 years. But if you look back in the record, especially the paleoclimate record, far enough back, you don't have good resolution. It's maybe 300 or 500 years. So if there was some sort of spike, 2,000 years ago or 3,000 years ago, like this, we wouldn't know it because we can't resolve it from the paleoclimate proxies."

"In the first part of the 20th century, say from about 1905 to 1945, you saw a rate of change, 40 years, that was comparable in rate to this warming since the 1970s. And that had almost nothing to do with CO₂ emissions. It was mostly the Sun and large-scale ocean circulations, and a lack of volcanic eruptions."

"The other game that they played was to use this extreme emissions scenario to force these climate models with a huge amount of CO₂ to get a huge amount of warming. And the UN climate negotiators have now dropped the extreme emissions scenario, saying it's not plausible. You'd have to increase coal burning by 600%, these kinds of scenarios. And so they've dropped the extreme emission scenario"