by Judith Curry
Given the new media, it’s amazing how much trouble a common-sense grandmother about climate change can cause without leaving the house.
I’m at an inflection point.
After resigning from Georgia Tech in 2017, I was very busy building my company Climate forecast application network. Not to mention busy with some very active Atlantic hurricane seasons.
In 2020, I signed with Anthem Press to write a book Climate uncertainty and risk. The Covid era seemed like the perfect time to write a book. I submitted the book to Anthem in August 2022; it is still in the process of peer review, which is going very slowly. Writing the book was an enjoyable experience (I’ll be writing more about the book soon after it’s actually published).
Now I’m trying to figure out what’s next (besides continuing to build my company) and I’m testing out some new media options. One might ask what am I trying to achieve here?
i like to do evil science: where complex issues and politics intersect, and so does public communication. I am appalled by the state of both the scientific and policy debates around climate change. I hope that my little voice can help bring some common sense to this situation. My company’s work and my personal interests are driving me towards energy, agriculture, and extreme weather adaptation. Now that I’ve left the academy, I can be 100% myself; I want to bend my wings a little bit and I want to help people. And last but not least, I need to hone my interviewing and public writing skills in preparation for the publication of my book next summer.
Blog
Starting in ~2018, this blog has gone into snooze mode somewhat for the reasons mentioned above. Posts are mainly by guest experts or Review Week posts. Reviews Week posts serve the important function of hosting articles that might be related to my book. Now that the book has been submitted, I have written more blog posts (no more Reviews of the Week articles).
For a while, blogs became obsolete, as podcasts and twitter became popular. WUWT remains the only heritage climate blog with a significant following. Substack.com was once a game changer, providing an organizational framework for lengthy blog posts (where writers could also get paid). I’m a paid subscriber to about half a dozen Substack blogs and an unpaid subscriber to another half a dozen.
In the climate space, Roger Pielke Jr (paid) and Andy Revkin (non-paid) have moved to Substack. At this point, I plan to keep the Climate etc and completely under my own control, thus avoiding any possible censorship or institutional pressure.
Bottom line: I will increase the number of blog posts. I love the community at Climate Etc. and greatly appreciate your participation through comments and direct email me. I especially appreciate expert guest article contributions. I feel like I have a community of electronic friends from all over the world.
Videos/Podcasts
I’m not good at audio interviews, either written or audio interviews. I almost never respond to such requests anymore. However, I like the long podcast interview (over 30 minutes). I am being invited to do more of this; I’ve postponed much of this to the new year, when a better time will be to talk about my new book.
In recent weeks, I have conducted two lengthy interviews:
Both are interesting and different from each other. I hope there will be a sequel to the EISM interview; After the interview, we both realized that we had missed the most relevant topic for our interaction – risk management.
If you only have time to watch one, check out BizNews, where the interviewer gave me quite a bit of freedom. This interview went viral on youtube, with 500,000 views in 7 days. The harbinger of trouble ahead is a “Text definition“The climate change statement from the United Nations is attached to my interview, designed to tell people the “truth” about climate change (when in reality, the statement describes “ facts” on UN climate policy). On the seventh day, when the video hit 500,000 views, it seemed to have disappeared from YouTube. Searching for “Judith Curry”, “Judith Curry weather”, “Judith Curry BizNews” does not show the video. Now, you can only find it by searching “BizNews TV, then you can find it on the channel under “Popular Videos”. (note: you can also find it from a google search for “Judith Curry BizNews”)
My BizNews interview was banned by YouTube. They don’t ban it outright, but make it impossible to find. If the interview was titled “Common Perceptions on Climate Change” instead of “Dissident Climate Scientist Judith Curry. . .” it probably won’t get banned (but it also probably won’t get 500k views)
One lesson to learn from these interviews is that I need to make sure these interviews actually make it to my calendar (I expect an e-calendar invitation; problems arise when invitations arise. came 10 minutes before the interview and I forgot all about it). With at least a little advance notice, I could have avoided doing the interview in a crumpled T-shirt and possibly losing my eyeglasses with reflective plastic lenses.
Also, when reading BizNews comments (around 8K, almost all positive), it seems like I need to stop laughing ‘chuckles’. There was also the annoying rubbing of my nose (especially noted in the WUWT comments). Hopefully that gets better when I’m (hopefully) out of shingles. I have postherpetic trigeminal neuralgia (severe nerve pain on the left side of the face centered on the nose), which has been going on since August (light plastic glasses are more comfortable).
The problem with some of these interviews is that they last longer than 60 minutes. No one has much time to listen, while they can read text much faster (which is why I rarely listen to podcasts myself). I guess multi-tasking (listening while driving, walking, or at the gym) might work. I’m not a podcast listener myself, except when driving on long road trips.
I signed up for twitter in 2009, but didn’t really “get it”. I didn’t actively use my account until about 2012. I mainly use twitter as a source of information and links to articles (this is the source of nearly all the entries in Reviews in the Review). week). I’ve been tweeting CE blog posts and reposting something from time to time. Over the years, my account has attracted 30 thousand followers. About 2 years ago I noticed that my follower count was stagnating and my account rarely received any notifications about someone liking or retweeting or responding to my posts. I. Oh good.
So around November 1st, Elon Musk bought and took over twitter. A week later, my followers, likes and retweets started to skyrocket. BishopHill tweeted “First tweet from @curryja that I discovered a long time ago.” So what happened? Looks like my twitter account has been “shadow banned” so no one can see my tweets unless they actually search. Banning darkness is not as serious as banning it outright. Many doctors and epidemiologists have been completely banned on twitter for questioning the “party line” on Covid. Tom Nelson (climate science) is now back on twitter after being banned. And what’s going on in the climate space and Covid is nothing compared to what’s going on in the sex/gender space.
Elon Musk is asking journalists to dig into all of Twitter’s old files and emails to understand all the underground censorship practices that twitter has been involved in. You can read the first part of the findings here [LINK]; looks like this effort is being sabotaged internally twitter [LINK] Despite the large number of twitter employees who have been fired by Musk, it seems that he has not fired enough. This is Part II of the twitter files. It’s clear that more sequels are coming. Our tweeps are just intrigued by all of this. ps things are starting to break fast; this is Part III on January 6.
There’s no doubt that Musk is creating chaos on twitter, but it desperately needs fixing. Musk’s strategy of breaking things up, trying new things, giving them up if they don’t work, and then repeating has worried many advertising clients.
Several celebrities and scientists have left twitter; it is clear that the idea of Musk and the uncensored freedom of speech of the leftists has caused great “violence” to their souls. Many climate scientists have left, although those with large # of twitter followers like Mann and Hayhoe have stayed. Climate scientists left twitter to join Mastodon, an open source microblogging software, with individuals hosting topical microblogging. I took a look; complex and heavy madness.
The great thing about twitter is that you can’t keep yourself completely silent, no matter how many people you block. The closed-minded, group-thinking, whiny climate scientists won’t do themselves any good by locking themselves up in Mastodon. But the twitterverse doesn’t seem to lack them; I hope they are having fun talking to each other.
I’m an ardent supporter of what Musk is trying to do, and mostly I’m grateful that I’m no longer banned by twitter. I look forward to the sequels of the twitter files, hoping to explain the ball ban among other things.
Twitter is an indispensable tool for evil scientists.
The Musk/twitter story is raising important questions about freedom of speech and censorship, especially in the social media landscape. This is not a simple problem. No sane person wants to participate in or advertise on a platform with hate speech, threats of harm, violent or pornographic images. But where do you draw the line? This theme deserves its own theme; It will be interesting to see how this develops.
a comment
I have been asked in the past by the WSJ, Financial Times, and Fox News to write (and do so from time to time) on specific topics. I’m not very excited about doing these things. They are difficult to write, with strict word limits, and are not always about the topic that I most want to write about at that particular time. The editor chooses a different title all the time, sometimes a gratifying title and doesn’t really reflect the actual article IMO.
SkyNews in Australia has asked me to contribute an occasional (once a month) column/op-ed on climate and energy topics relevant to Australia. The environment in the US is very toxic and noisy on the subject, so writing outside the US makes sense to me. Trust is a big deal for me, I feel comfortable working with SkyNews.
Articles are supposed to be between 500-600; difficult for me because I am a long term writer. I’m working on this by writing a longer essay and then breaking it up into individual coherent sections that are part of a larger topic and longer series. Writing style is also a challenge, needing to use words sparingly with simple sentence structure (which is good discipline for me anyway).
My first article was published this week, maybe I should make separate topics on these articles.
Inference
Well, let’s see how this all goes. At least right now, this is fun and exciting, and I have a glimmer of hope of making a difference. More importantly, I expect my 2023 to focus on marketing my new book, which is unique and I hope to make an important contribution to the climate change literature and dialogue. Queen.
