Testimony presented to the Climate Change Hearing, House Committee on Government Reform

• Main Author: Judith A. Curry
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2006
• Subjects: Sea ice
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.464.8904; http://curry.eas.gatech.edu/climate/pdf/testimony-curry.pdf

Global warming and skepticism As a climate scientist, I have devoted 25 years to conducting research on a variety of topics with the goal of addressing uncertainties in the climate system so as to improve our understanding and our ability to simulate and predict the climate system using models. My research has focused on the impact of clouds on the earth’s energy balance, the exchange of energy between the ocean and the atmosphere, the influence of aerosols on cloud and radiation characteristics, the thermodynamics of sea ice, and most recently the impact of warming sea surface temperatures on the characteristics of tropical cyclones. Scientific researchers naturally focus their research on uncertainties, and scientific understanding progresses as new ideas are developed and tested. Skepticism and the competitive clash of ideas move knowledge forward. Constructive skepticism is a mainstay of the scientific method and it has a long and noble tradition in science. The history of my personal skepticism regarding anthropogenic greenhouse warming is described in the following paragraphs. At the time of Dr. James Hansen’s 1988 testimony that global warming was underway, I thought that there were too many uncertainties in both the observational record and the climate models to