Thank you Judith A. Curry!

Judith A. Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is doing us all a great favor by stepping into the public arena with her blog (Climate Etc.) and blasting all the bad politico-science gibberish of the IPCC.

Her style and sting are priceless.

Here is just one example of her remarks on the small matter of the on-going 15-year global temperature "hiatus", as avoided in characteristic style by the IPCC in its latest bible of wisdom. After a detailed summary of what the IPCC said (did not say) on the "hiatus", this (from the September 30, 2013 "IPCC’s pause ‘logic’" blogpost at Climate Etc.):

My original intention for this thread was to go through and try to map the IPCC’s logical argument.  I quickly got dizzy owing to seemingly unwarranted assumptions and incomplete information (such as: did the climate models use the correct external forcing for the first decade of the 21st century, or not?).  I was then going to illustrate how any reasonable propagation of uncertainty of individual assertions/arguments through their main argument would produce much lower confidence in their overall conclusions.  For example, they seem to have eliminated high CO2 sensitivity as a problem.   Not to mention high confidence in increasing trend following 2012 (this high confidence comes right after blowing the prediction of the previous decade).  And of course not to mention the relevant journal articles that didn’t get mentioned.

Apart from these obvious flaws, reading that text and trying to follow it is positively painful.  Can someone remind me again how and why all this is supposed to be useful?

Refreshing. Finally, we have a public scientist willing to take on her colleagues head on, on their own turf, from the position of an active researcher with impeccable credentials.

Why are there so few such individuals in science?! Why has it taken decades for establishment science to start spawning more of these much needed internal critics. And why did we have to wait for the IPCC and its gravy wagon followers to embarrass themselves to this degree before more than a few scientists start being concerned about the reputation of climate science?

There is not enough negative feedback against politically organized science. That seems clear. All those who said nothing and/or went along should be penalized with funding reductions.