A Climate Scientist provides much needed perspective

 Here is a link to an interview of Judith Curry by Christopher Balkaran. JC is a climate scientist who is objective and has no agenda.

Here are some excerpts.

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A model that simulates the warming since 1970 based on CO2 emissions does not constitute proof that CO2 has caused the warming. The latest post on my blogs cites some papers that show that solar variability can explain pretty much all of the recent warming. So you can have models that get the right answer or something close to the right answer for the wrong reasons.

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And then if you go to energy security, I mean, what is the point of all this? If we destroy the energy security of the planet, by having electricity that’s intermittent, unreliable and too expensive, that’s not helpful to anyone. We’re headed towards a real reckoning here, you can’t run industrial economies on wind and solar. People are starting to realize this.

Within the last few months alot of people and some governments are suddenly saying nuclear is the answer. Well, yeah, it sort of is, but why are you just realizing this now? The realities of wind power are being realized. In the North Sea, they have all these offshore wind turbines. In 2020 these produced 25% of England’s power, which is fabulous. But in the first 10 months of 2021, they produced 7% of the power. So England and the rest of Europe is scrambling, having to pay too much money for natural gas and then with all the political problems with the natural gas supply from Russia. So, being able to produce your energy from within your country has a lot of appeal.

The one advantage of solar and wind as it gave some local autonomy to the countries, but wind and solar are not enough to run an industrial economy. And nuclear power gives you the best of both worlds. And also if the countries were to frack for natural gas, that’s another energy source that could be more local. The most important issue is energy security, so that its abundant and reliable, and you’re not held hostage to other countries or crazy price spikes.

I have no problem with going to cleaner energy sources. Everybody would prefer clean over dirty energy. But energy security has to be first and foremost, we have to have reliable, affordable energy. Otherwise, none of this makes sense.

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Oh, but the science is ‘settled’ everyone knows that. They’ve been so brainwashed about global warming that there’s only one thing that’s going to change it. if I’m right about natural variability having sort of a cooling effect in the coming decades, this will be the one piece of evidence that people will have to pay attention to. If that transpires, I would say that would be the single most effective thing at bringing this dialogue back to some level of rationality, but how much confidence do I have in that prediction? How much money am I going to bet on that? I don’t know, but it’s a very plausible scenario that natural variability will lead to cooling in the coming decades, or at least slow down the warming. So we’ll see if that transpires. If it does, that would be the single most effective thing at bringing the dialogue back to normal in some sensible way, so people look at this problem more broadly. On the current path, we are not managing this risk in a sensible way that would leave our countries stronger and less vulnerable to whatever my transpire in the future.