Georgia Tech Professor Judith Curry

The last time Georgia Tech hurricane expert Judith Curry drew attention from the popular media she was a little miffed.

In 2005, Curry and a colleagues testified before a Senate committee on a study they’d authored, which found that global warming was making hurricanes stronger. An aide to Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., responded by accusing them of “espousing minority views that a vast majority of scientists dispute.”

Curry, who chairs Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, was puzzled afterward that the press focused on the politics surrounding the aide’s outrageous comments rather than on the groundbreaking study, which after all was published only days after Hurricane Katrina had struck New Orleans. She still says climate-change deniers “slandered” and “libeled” her and her colleagues.

Now, however, Curry’s diving willfully into the eye of the media storm surrounding the politics of climate change — and she’s again drawn attention from national media, including the New York Times.

The occasion: A global controversy that erupted Nov. 19 over the publication of stolen e-mails from a climate-change research center in Great Britain. Many of the emails are, to say the least, embarrassing. In some, mainstream scientists express contempt for climate change skeptics. In others, it’s clear that some scientists were trying to avoid releasing background information on their research to their critics. In one e-mail, the director of the research center appears to be celebrating the death of a skeptic.

Three days later, Curry posted a critique of her colleagues on, of all places, a skeptic-run blog called Climate Audit. If mainstream scientists stopped “circling of the wagons … in response to the politically motivated attacks against climate science,” she argued, the skeptics will “will quickly run out of steam and become irrelevant”:

But the broader issue is the need to increase the public credibility of climate science. This requires publicly available data and metadata, a rigorous peer review process, and responding to arguments raised by skeptics. The integrity of individual scientists that are in positions of responsibility (e.g. administrators at major research institutions, editorial boards, major committees, and assessments) is particularly important for the public credibility of climate science.

A few days later, Climate Progress — a blog that supports action on climate change — posted Curry’s “open letter to graduate students and young scientists in fields related to climate research,” where she acknowledges there that she’s “received significant heat from some colleagues” for posting on Climate Audit and for inviting skeptics to speak at Tech. But, she says, “we need to try things like this if we are to develop effective strategies for dealing with skeptics and if we are to teach students to think critically.”

She also draws a useful distinction between climate-change “skeptics” and outright “deniers.”

While both sides have commended Curry for arguing for openness, plenty of folks on both sides seems to wholly agree with her. She explicitly disagrees with many skeptics on the climate change research itself, while many climate scientists argue that she’s being naive. Among them is Steve Easterbrook, who a University of Toronto professor who specializes in climate change software:

It isn’t “skeptics” doing honest scientific enquiry that they are fending off; it’s a well funded PR campaign aimed at confusing the issue and discrediting scientists. And scientists in general have absolutely no idea how to deal with this. All our training tells us that taking the high ground is the appropriate thing to do. But you can’t fight a PR machine just by being open and honest – it will steamroller you flat.

What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Climate change could cause snowstorms
2. 10 best 2009 tall tales by climate change deniers
3. Tech’s Curry on NPR and in Time
4. Stolen e-mails overshadow real ‘Climategate’
5. Tom Price’s moment of climate-change silence