Judith Curry, the climate scientist who started a blog with the stated aim of building bridges between climate scientists and climate skeptics, has revealed that she never intended including those scientists who blog at Real Climate.
This all comes out in the post she finally decided to run on “hide the decline” and the use of tree ring proxies. Gavin Schmidt from Real Climate turned up in comments, and a good slanging match evolved from there.
But I can’t see how anyone can read Curry and think she is genuinely open minded. Her initial post indicates that she is not widely read on the topic, but that she is sceptical that work to date has any value. She ends with (my emphasis):
If there is a problem, lets get to the bottom of it and fix it.
But when Schmidt turns up and complains that, as she’s saying that she agrees with the never-fail- to-bore windbag McIntyre , she’s accusing the scientists concerned of being outright dishonest, rather than having a mere difference of opinion as to how to display information, she responds with:
If you don’t like dishonest, try misguided and pseudoscience.
Gavin further down:
your method of argument in the top post and the conclusions you draw can be argued and drawn for any subjective decision about pretty much any presentation of complex data. Once you do it based on your prior prejudices against one set of researchers, the flood gates are open to apply it to anyone. We therefore end up with a situation where any difference of opinion is put down to dishonesty, and the process of objective scientific analysis has been tossed to the wolves.
You see your stance as brave, while in fact it is just lazy. I’m sure your students are proud.
And further down, when Curry starts making the big sweeping statements that her initial post indicated were only hunches, Gavin writes:
You betray complete ignorance of any of this literature. “Statistical models that make no sense in terms of calculating hemispheric or global average temperature anomalies” – got a cite for that?
curryja | February 22, 2011 at 8:52 pm | Reply
Another zinger, I’m dying here.
And yes, as is her habit, she excuses sweeping statements by telling us her detailed criticisms are coming in a later post.
Her real attitude to Real Climate is shown towards the end of the thread we get this from Curry:
I find it of primary importance to build bridges with the broader community of scientists (including skeptics), the public, and policy makers. I stopped bothering with the RC crowd in summer 2007, when i received an unpleasant email from Mike Mann chastising me over congratulating Steve McIntyre on winning the 2008 Science Webblog Award. It was at that point that I stopped having anything to do with RC (other than my driveby comments about Montford’s book last summer). So I have built a bridge in the form of a platform for dialogue, they can meet me half way or not (pretty much not, the prefer the circling wagons strategy). But that is not the bridge that I am particularly interested in.
But the best summary of Curry’s disingenuous approach in her blog is from dhogaza:
Absolutely spot on.Judith Curry … you’ve used this “my eyes glaze over”, and “it’s outside the arena of my personal expertise” argument before.
Yet … whenever you do, you come down on the side of the denialists.
Your personal philosophy seems to be…
“If I don’t understand it, the anti-science people are probably right”.
Ponder what this means to your personal reputation (whatever is left of it).
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