Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry Says Climate Science Has Become ‘Pseudo-Science’
A true expert fights to take climate science back from the cultists.
As I noted in my previous posts on the East Coast heat wave, the term “heat dome” is part of the language manipulation being embraced by the mainstream media and climate cultists to gin up fear about weather and enforce ecoactivist policies.
For quite some time, I have been taking our language back and countering the global warming inanity by using the term “pseudo-science.” I am grateful to see that a growing number of scientists and analysts have begun to label the theory of human-caused global warming as “pseudo-science.” This perspective enforces the reality that the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change is not settled, and that the evidence supporting it is flawed or insufficient.
To my profound delight, I have noted that one of the most preeminent scientists in this field is using the term. In a recent interview published on “Watts Up With That” blog, Curry argues that climate science has become “pseudo-science.”
Interviewer: What’s the state of science under these conditions, or climate science in particular?
Dr. Judith Curry: It’s not science anymore; it’s become a pseudoscience. You know, the hardcore, physics-based climate dynamics, you know, such as what we had in the 1980s or whatever, I mean, that’s just a small sliver of what we now define as climate science.
I mean, what the students are getting their PhDs in—they analyze the output of these climate models, looking for some sort of catastrophe that they can identify and write a paper on, without ever even, you know, critically evaluating these models or how they should be used. I mean, it’s just sort of nonsense, and it’s received so much funding. And also, the journalism has been—you know, like 15 years ago, there were only a handful of journalists who specialized in climate or even the environmental beat, so to speak.
Now, you know, until recently, you had, like, 35 people in the climate bureau at a major media outlet, and there were some that were funded by these billionaire donors—Carbon Brief and some of these other things—that were publishing, had huge staffs, and publishing a lot of material, and it was funded by activist donors. It’s not what I would call honest or investigative journalism; it’s journalism that’s designed to advocate for a particular political position.
𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗳𝗲𝘀𝘀𝗼𝗿 𝗝𝘂𝗱𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗖𝘂𝗿𝗿𝘆: 𝗖𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗛𝗮𝘀 𝗕𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗣𝘀𝗲𝘂𝗱𝗼 𝗦𝗰𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲
Renowned climatologist Dr. Judith Curry warns that climate science has devolved into pseudoscience, driven by careerism and political pressures rather than… pic.twitter.com/5PMpcuWjXH— Watts Up With That (@wattsupwiththat) June 25, 2025
Curry is a stellar example of scientific bravery. Curry’s skepticism about the magnitude and certainty of human-caused climate change led to her being marginalized by many mainstream climate scientists. She has described herself as being “tossed out of the tribe” within the climate science community, noting that her views made her a pariah at major climate conferences and in academic circles.
She hosts a blog called Climate Etc. that is a wonderful source for thorough and reasoned analysis on all aspects of climate science. In fact, a recently posted article entitled “A Critique of the Apocalyptic Climate Narrative” is a great overview of a work she and coauthor Harry DeAngelo, published in the Journal of Applied Corporate Finance.
The article challenges the prevalent view head-on that asserts climate change poses an imminent existential threat to humanity and that urgent, large-scale suppression of fossil fuels is the only viable policy response. Curry and DeAngelo argue that the current “apocalyptic” narrative is misleading and socially destructive, as it overstates the risks of continued global warming fail to stress the substantial costs and disruptions that rapid fossil fuel reduction would impose on society.
They emphasize that fossil fuels remain essential for producing food (via ammonia-based fertilizers), steel, cement, and plastics, and that eliminating them before viable alternatives are available would significantly reduce quality of life and economic prosperity. In fact, their assertion is confirmed by the recent need for “Clean Energy” Maryland to be rescued by Pennsylvania during the recent heatwave.
Curry and DeAngelo also highlight problems if policy-makers continue to push for a green-energy utopia.
From a capital markets perspective, the current green-investment situation accordingly has elements of a stock-price bubble that is supported by a false narrative. One can expect that bubble to sustain or grow provided that many people continue to buy into the premise of an urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels and as governments add more subsidies to renewable-energy projects.
The danger is that the bubble will pop or dissolve as it becomes increasingly clear that the Apocalyptic climate narrative is an extremely effective form of environmentalist propaganda that markedly overstates the risks to humanity of continued global warming.
I am glad to see real climatologists fighting to take climate science back from the cultists. It is my dearest wish the “global warming” madness is eventually deemed a pseudo-science in the same way astrology and phrenology are.
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Comments
Pseudo science = lots and lots of grift 💰💸🤑
The climate science emperor has no clothes.
There is an old adage, proven true once again….it goes something like this….any field of study whose name is some word in front of the word ‘Science’ is not actually real science.
‘Climate Science ‘ has WAY too much ‘Data Science ‘ to ever be real Science.
Building a model that doesn’t reflect reality isn’t Data Science. In fact, it’s very hard to use the principles of big data analytics on climatology because there are a lot of variables and not nearly enough samples (i.e., the data is wide, but not deep). For data analytics, you really want the opposite: a limited number of variables and a large number of samples. If there are 80 variables of interest, I’d want at least 800 years of good data collected on those 80 variables (just based on the year it takes for the earth to pass around the sun; that ignores the longer-term harmonics that we also know exist). As new as getting accurate global data is, I’d really want to have only a half-dozen or so variables to consider.
This was never about health or our well being, absolutely no altruism was ever involved.
It was ALWAYS about money (yours and mine) and control.
Follow the money.
The Obama administration giving $500M to Solyndra in 2009 was the “canary in the coal mine” on this.
Little bit behind the curve, it’s always been about destroying the modern world and sending us back to the Stone Age but with the Communists in charge
IMO they’re aiming for neo feudalism. The neo clerisy already exists; credentialed class and bureaucracy. The elite wokiestas seemingly imagine themselves becoming the ‘lord of the manor’ with the rest of us as serfs. We can see evidence of this in the immigration issue where these folks whine that without illegal alien labor to exploit with cheap wages they wonder who will ‘pick the crops, mow the lawn, become maids’ and so on.
HOF candidate comment right here.
The other piece of that, of course, is that once you do away with the notion that “all men are created equal”, the most ruthless tend to be the ones who rise to the top, not the soft academics who fantasize they will be the leaders (in fact, to the extent anyone listens to them, the softies are the first ones put against the wall).
Has become?
That presupposes that it was true in the first place.
Which I suggest to you that it was not.
Climate alarmism is a weapon of the environmental NGO to crush capitalism and install communism.
It may have begun with a search for truth. Now it is a search for next years grant.
Sadly, this characterizes most of “science” these days. I suppose unless you are a mathemetician and you can apply you craft with pencil and paper, you need equipment of some sort and that costs.
The very earliest employment of “climate science” and the “global warming” scare was conducted by Thatcher’s government in Great Britain. It was meant to rouse support for nuclear power by labeling fossil fuels as harmful. From there it was relatively easy for others (opposed to nuclear power) to co-opt the message into one that was strictly anti-fossil fuel.
She’s going way back to the 1980’s, when meteorology was based on physics and “climate science” would be a branch of that. Now we even hear meteorologists expressing these alarmist buzzwords.
The problems started with the big prediction models 15 or 20 years ago. Most serious technical people will tell you that such modeling doesn’t work. Simple limited models work. Long term “complete” modeling does not — neither the macroeconomic modeling of the 1970’s, nor the climate modeling of the 2010’s. But at least the macro models tried to be balanced as far as I know.
The climate models had built in biases that, in their original iterations, even I as a technically trained member of the general public could spot from publicly available descriptions of the models. I could see the biases. Later they fixed this by hiding more about the models. 🙂 So now I have no idea if they’re unbiases, because it’s either impossible to know, or too hard and I am on to other challenges, having simply learned not to trust a damned thing from the “climate scientists”.
You can tell the bias by the results. They’re still very biased and overpredict warming massively.
I’d argue that bias is less of an issue than ignoring significant effects: a bias can be “edited out” once you understand how it operates. But failing to account for significant effects means there’s no way to get an accurate result other than blind luck (which rarely happens at all and never happens consistently).
There are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of different climate models being used by climate researchers. Nearly every research group creates its own models. I find this curious. It seems that no research group has any faith in the accuracy of any other research group’s model.
No one becomes famous or gets large amounts of grant money by validating someone else’s model. All these groups get funding on the pinkie swear that their model will be “better” than the others.
How dare she!
Was a almost lifetime recipients of Nat Geo but dumped it at least 10 years ago because it became a Church of Global Warming.
Would see how far in a issue the first Global Warming mentioned h.
I had a similar experience with Scientific American 30 years ago.
SciAm ran the first science article I saw about “global warming.” After reading it, I called global BS. SciAm by then was already politicizing science and it wasn’t long before I allowed my subscription to lapse. Its articles were also becoming less informative and substantive, and more like something I might read in Popular Science, being written by “science writers” rather than “scientists.”
But here is the real sad non pseudo science
america capitulated to the left in 2020
including myself as I forced myself to get the vax b/c of (possible) business I had to take care of and was fearful that the wave of fascism that was sweeping the country was going to prevent me from taking care of business
so lefty won as only a few well publicized incidents of defying lefty takeover were shown
we got our asssssesss kicked
I’m not disputing this, but I think solar panels will, within five years, be the cheapest source of energy. And very practical in tropical regions. I think we are near a tipping point.
The key factors are materials cost and manufacturing efficiency.
As a bonus, people will be able to go off grid.
What is the basis for your conclusion. Please factor in energy storage while you’re at it because without it solar panels are nonviable.
At the micro level – Solar panels will likely be the cheapest source of electricity. However, at the grid utility scale level, solar panels while being the least expensive for the generation costs, will cause total generation costs to skyrocket. Based on the LCOE computations -yes least expensive. The problem is that there is considerable costs that are omitted in the LCOE computation, specifically the stability costs, backup costs and redundancy required.
Also worth noting is the average capacity factor for solar in minnesota and other northern states in the winter is about 7-8%
What about the lifetime expectancy? What about the recycling cost? What about the storage aspect? What about the fact that China is the major if not only producer making us subject to their whims?
Not a chance. The movement toward small-scale nuclear along with “fossil” fuels will destroy demand for fad sources, especially when the Greenies start to realize the environmental costs of disposing of those giant plastic blades and solar panels, just as the fad for electric cars is fading. Besides, the claim of “cheaper” has always depended on ignoring all of the manufacturing costs, both environmental and financial, and government subsidies.
Innovation for the efficiency of the panels and improvement in battery tech, if they arrive, might make solar more viable. Cheaper? Lots of material costs go into panels and batteries. Then there’s the maintenance costs. How about repair costs from wind, hail or limbs hitting them? What about removal/replacement and disposal costs?
The solar systems will get more efficient over time and individuals should be able to decide if they want to install them on their home or business. However, I haven’t seen any cost measurement that includes mining and transport through and of life disposal costs that shows solar is cheaper. I suspect the first wave, early adopters of widespread solar being replaced and the disposal costs associated will reveal problems. Plus solar doesn’t work well enough without subsidies, solar installation industry is gonna have a hard time surviving without tax subsidies.
There is a lot of room for improvement in the efficiency of solar panels (the very best in use are on the order of 20%). The problem is that no one has demonstrated a physical process to do it–at this point, your highly efficient panels are constructed of pure unobtainium.
BECAME “Psedo-Science”??
It hasn’t become pseudo science, it has always been so!
For years, one could read the IPCC’s climate report and find it nothing like what was being promoted by extremists (incl. extremist scientists). It was full of qualified statements about the potential effects of increased levels of CO2, not supportive of the absolutist messaging that was being fed to the public. An effort was being made to play it straight.
The climate screamers hate Curry. They really really hate her. As much as the Trans activists hate Rowlings.
After spending hundreds of billions of dollars, now, it’s bad.
I question the tense.
You can certainly scratch her off the list of Nobel Prize nominees. Or any other prize. The truth hurts.
Global Warming “science” has always been a sick joke. They manipulate the data before presenting it “as evidence”, refuse to let anyone ever see their studies, lean on the Vostok ice core data as their main “proof” that CO2 drives temperature (LOL) while that same Vostok data more obviously shows the gigantic periodic swing of temperature cycling every 100,000 years or so and placing us at its last unstable, violent peak, and worst of all, basically use models (which are all jokes) as their “proof” of future temperature trajectories of the Earth.
The most pathetic part of that last piece – using computer models as their “evidence” – is particularly retarded since it was Lorenz, working on meteorological computer models who was one of the founders of chaos theory, as he realized that there was a wall after which computing power would do nothing to improve the prediction power of a computer model for a chaotic system, which these ecological systems certainly appear to be.
The minute it became clear that these climate scientologists were using computer models as “proofs” of their theories it was clear that it was all garbage of the worst sort. And that’s aside from the fact that most of these models were not even half-decent attempts at modeling the climate system but mere curve-fitting programs with enough arbitrary settings to be able to tune anything anyone wanted.