MT Paying $30K To Well-Known Climate Denier To Testify In Youth Climate Lawsuit
Montana has hired a climate scientist turned climate contrarian to be an expert witness in an upcoming trial challenging the state’s promotion of fossil fuels. Climatologist Judith Curry has already billed the state around $30,000 for a report filed in the case Held v. State of Montana, according to the deposition she made in December to an attorney for the 16 young Montanans suing the state. Curry also claimed that she charged $400 an hour for her consulting work, although she did not disclose the full amount Montana will pay her for appearing in court.
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Curry held faculty positions at the University of Colorado Boulder, Penn State University, and Purdue University prior to her tenure at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she chaired the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences from 2002 to 2014. She has also been a fellow of the American Meteorological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Geophysical Union. Late in her academic career, Curry began taking public positions on climate change that aligned more with climate science denial rather than credible climate science. In a 2007 op-ed for The Washington Post, Curry stated that “the current debate is whether warming matters, and whether we can afford to do anything about it.” A decade later — in 2017, the year she retired from Georgia Tech — Curry blogged that “we don’t know how much of recent warming can be attributed to humans.” But in 2014, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had concluded that human factors are “extremely likely” to be the dominant cause of observed warming — accountable for more than half of the rise in global average surface temperature — since the mid-20th century.
In the report she submitted to the court last fall, Curry claimed that there were too many uncertainties in climate science to judge the origins of climate change. She significantly downplayed the role of human activity in causing climate change, while emphasizing natural climate variability as an important factor in causing it. Curry did not acknowledge in her report that her views contradict the longtime consensus among the vast majority of climate scientists that burning coal, oil, and gas for energy has been the leading driver of climate change.
“She does not have a leg to stand on,” climate scientist Kevin Trenberth told DeSmog. Trenberth, who has known Judith Curry since the 1990s, is scheduled to appear as an expert witness for the youth plaintiffs at the trial. “She always blames everything on natural variability and greatly underplays human induced climate change.” In a filing with the court last fall, Trenberth stated that Curry’s shift towards climate contrarianism “coincided with her career moving away from original research and peer-reviewed publishing in academia toward private weather and climate forecasting for companies through her business CFAN, including those in the fossil fuel energy industry.”
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https://www.desmog.com/2023/05/15/judith-curry-denier-montana-climate-trial/
