The departure of Judith Currey from her safe, tenured position at Georgia Tech should provide a wake-up call for the field of climate science, a discipline that has been rocked by corruption and well-founded accusations of political bias. Currey, while an eminent climate scientist, does not subscribe to the revealed orthodoxy that global warming is human caused and will inexorably cause the death of humanity unless it is addressed with draconian policy measures. For her pains, she had been subjected to savage abuse in the media and scientific community.
So she has decided that her efforts would be best made outside the academia bubble.
Those who have been following the ebb and flow of the climate change debate are familiar with Climategate, the incident in which emails were revealed that suggested that a conspiracy was afoot to alter the data that indicated that there was less than meets the eye about global warming and efforts to silence dissenters. More recently, a controversial climate scientist named Michael Mann filed a defamation suit against journalists to silence criticism of his work which many feel is a threat to the First Amendment.
Currey, not willing to adhere to orthodoxy and wanting to go where the science directs her, has clearly had enough trying to fight the Leviathan from within.
Groupthink, the corruption of government grants, and ego have combined to make free scientific inquiry into the subject of climate change all but impossible.
Mark Steyn, one of the targets of Mann’s lawsuit, suggested when he was guest hosting on the Rush Limbaugh show that more than a little bit of sexism and misogyny motivated some of the attacks on Currey.
Considering the traditional problems faced by women in the STEM fields, the accusation would seem to be plausible.
In any case, climate science has been broken and ways to fix it don’t appear to be apparent. When the media collaborates with the global warming dogma by spreading the meme that those who dissent, no matter what their credentials, are “deniers,” the equivalent of people who deny the Holocaust, then they cannot be counted on to provide the watchdog role that could shine a light on the problem. Perhaps the Trump Administration could start offering incentives by freeing up government grant money to scientists who want to delve into the natural causes of climate change.
