Climatologist Dr Judith Curry: “There’s no emergency”

Dr Judith Curry (Pic by BizNews)

"The 1970s and 1980s was a relatively benign period of weather. And so, if you just do the trend since 1970, 'Oh, the weather is worse now.' Well, yes, but it’s not worse than the 1930s or 40s or even the 50s.
    "And people are much more prosperous. Globally, poverty is way down. Life expectancy is up. We’re doing very well as we reduce poverty and human development advances. A lot of that has been fueled by petroleum and coal. Are there better fuels out there? Well, hopefully in the future ... But ... [y]ou can’t run an industrial economy on wind and solar, at least not in the way it’s currently envisioned. It requires a huge land footprint.
    "People haven’t thought this out, and there’s no emergency. Economically, we’re all expected to be four times better off worldwide by the end of the 21st century. And a little bit of that might be shaved off because of damages from global warming. But we’re all going to be better off moving forward through the 21st century unless we do really stupid stuff like destroy our energy infrastructure before we have something better to replace it with. That’s the biggest danger. The biggest climate risk right now is a so-called transition risk; the risk of rapidly getting rid of fossil fuels....
    "Even if we’re going to transition to all wind and solar, we’re going to need a lot of fossil fuels to accomplish that, to do all the mining and establish the supply chains and all the transport and everything else. So, in the near term, even if the plan is to go to all renewable wind and solar, then we’re going to need a lot of fossil fuels to get us there. People just repeat these mantras without any thought. It’s not a good place."

~ Dr Judith Curry from her interview: '“There’s no emergency” – dissident climatologist Dr Judith Curry on the ‘manufactured scientific consensus’ on climate change'