Climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry has had enough of academics politicizing her field.
She’s leaving academia for the private sector, which she said on Jan. 3, “seems like a more ‘honest’ place for a scientist working in a politicized field than universities or government labs.” Curry resigned her tenured position as of Jan. 1, with “no intention of seeking another academic” position in a university or government agency.
Curry explained her decision to retire from academia on her Climate Etc. blog writing that she felt “growing disenchantment with universities, the academic field of climate science and scientists.”
In her view, the “politicized academic establishment” for climate science has limited avenues for students to receive funding, get papers published and obtain prestigious positions. Students often found themselves in a conflict between maintaining their scientific integrity and “career suicide.”
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Lamenting the state of climate science, Curry said she no longer knew how to advise students “navigating the CRAZINESS.”
During her career, Curry faced her own backlash for dissenting from the liberal orthodoxy on climate change. According to E&E News, she criticized well-known climate alarmists like Michael Mann, disagreed with doomsday depictions of climate change’s impact and cast doubt on how much humans contributed to the problem.
Curry also criticized attempts to prevent climate change and its impacts. She reasoned that even if alarmist claims were true, both Obama’s policies and the Paris Climate agreement were inadequate to address the problem.
“The one thing we know is that the commitments we’ve made, in Paris, will probably prevent about two-tenths of a degree of warming by the end of the 21st century. What is the point of that?” Curry asked in a Jan. 4, interview with E&E News.
Just a week before Curry’s announcement, academia’s intolerance for climate skepticism manifested itself again in the Huffington Post. A liberal history professor at California State University, Sacramento argued that President-Elect Donald Trump’s views on climate change disqualified him from using Twitter.
Of course, the liberal news, not just academia, have played a huge role in hyping climate alarmism and blaming humans for the danger. The Washington Post’s Wonkblog, for example, warned on Aug. 31, that “manliness may be hurting the planet.”
Even if academia did allow climate skepticism to flourish, it’s doubtful liberal media would balance their coverage of the issue. In the past, liberal media avidly promoted former Vice President Al Gore’s apocalyptic climate views and ignored criticism of his film An Inconvenient Truth.
In the five years after An Inconvenient Truth was released, 98 percent (266 out of 272 stories) of network news shows excluded criticism of the movie’s scientific claims — in spite of multiple inaccuracies.
The MRC also found in six months of 2007, that the three broadcast networks regularly censored climate skeptics, while overloading stories with alarmists. On average, there were 13 alarmist views for each skeptic featured with CBS alone including nearly 38 alarmists to every skeptical voice.
