‘Global warming’ is not unusual, has never been dangerous, and will likely be a net benefit. Nor is climate something humans can control. Climate fears are deliberate disinformation leaving the public with false ideas
By Michael Shellenberger, PUblic News, October 29, 2025
“There’s a doomsday view of climate change,” said Bill Gates on Oct. 27. “Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong…. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.”
In truth, Gates significantly understates just how wrong the doomsday problem is, says one of the world’s most influential climate scientists. “The weakest part of the argument has always been that warming is dangerous,” says Judith Curry, professor emerita at Georgia Tech University, in a new podcast with me. “It isn’t really. More people die from the cold than the heat. So this is probably a net benefit globally. Where’s the danger here?”
Some climate scientists say Curry is a global warming denier, hasn’t done the research that they have done, and participated in a Trump administration misinformation effort.
But Curry recognizes that the Earth is warming and that humans are contributing. Curry points out that “the modern warming started in the mid-19th century, somewhere between 1820 and 1860, following the end of the Little Ice Age. We’ve been warming since then. Nothing particularly surprising or unusual in my opinion. Is increasing CO₂ contributing to that? Yes.”
The fact that warming has been beneficial “doesn’t mean that we should ignore the problem” she stresses and “doesn’t mean that we should keep pouring junk into the atmosphere.
And Curry’s qualifications are exemplary. She frequently testifies before Congress and was one of five American scientists who conducted an independent review of climate science for the Department of Energy. And has done significantly more climate research than many of her critics. “I’m the one who’s done more climate-dynamics research,” she noted.
Impact of warming exaggerated for decades
In truth, scientists have for decades been exaggerating the human impact compared to what nature does. When asked what percentage of the warming she would ascribe to humans, Curry said, “I would say I wouldn’t go much more than 50%.” Curry says, “We’ve mischaracterized the contributions from the sun and also from internal variability of the large-scale ocean circulation.”
As a result, she said, “We cannot control the climate. There’s a whole lot of complicated processes going on in the climate system that have been oversimplified or ignored and fall broadly under the rubric of natural climate variability.”
Curry notes that science supporting the benefits of additional carbon dioxide and warming is strong and not in dispute. “There are lots of benefits in terms of agricultural productivity, greening of the planet, fewer cold events, more rain in certain regions that with high populations that could use it,” said Curry.
We discussed the criticisms of her and four colleagues who wrote the independent review of climate science commissioned by the Trump administration.
“They say, ‘Oh, it’s not just CO₂, it’s also warmer temperatures and more rainfall,’” she said, referring to one of the criticisms by other scientists in Carbon Brief. “‘Aren’t you telling us that’s also caused by CO₂?’ So I don’t get what the gripe is. We’re gone through that section and added some updated references, but the fundamental story is unchanged.”
Alarmist scientists want to end our high-energy civilization
As I documented at length at Forbes in 2019, in Apocalypse Never in 2020, and here at Public since 2021, including earlier this week, climate scientists, activists, and journalists have grossly exaggerated climate change to such an extent that much of what they say today must be considered disinformation, in that they know they are leaving the public with false ideas.
Climate scientists, activists, and journalists have grossly exaggerated climate change to such an extent that much of what they say today must be considered disinformation, in that they know they are leaving the public with false ideas.
“Global greening gets very short shrift in the [United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] IPCC report,” she notes. “They don’t talk about the reduction in mortality from reduced number of cold events. They only talk about the mortality from heat events. It’s part of the rules – we’re only talking about dangerous human-caused climate change, not about any benefits from human cause.”
But what is the reason for this? What explains why the scientific community has misled the public about the nature of the problem for so long?
A big part of the reason is because the scientists want to see particular political actions and use fear to motivate them. “We’ve just been fed a whole bunch of propaganda over the last several decades,” said Curry, “designed to scare us into abandoning fossil fuels.”
The scientists invest in apocalyptic scenarios and pass them off as objective predictions of the future because they want to put an end to our high-energy civilization.
Sea-level rise wildly exaggerated
When it comes to sea level rise, “the biggest issue is the West Antarctic ice sheet, whether this is stable, whether it could collapse. Hypotheses about this have given rise to extreme sea level rise scenarios and a great deal of public hysteria, particularly since 2016 with a publication on this hypothesized mechanism called ‘marine ice cliff instability,’ which could, if it gets past a certain point, then you could see rapid collapse of the West end Arctic ice sheet and, many feet, sea level rises.
“But this is, just somebody’s hypothesis. There’s no empirical evidence. But, this didn’t stop [Rutgers sea level scientist] Robert Kopp and others from canonizing this idea and incorporating it into their sea level rise projections. So in 2017, NOAA [the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] put out really extreme scenarios like eight feet. And they had a range of them and they dismissed anything less than one foot,” even though “the rate of sea level rise that occurred in the 20th century is seven inches.”
The purpose appeared to be to create media coverage of cities underwater.
“This then became the official stance of the U.S. government and all the NGOs started putting out inundation maps,” she said, “what that means for your coastal city. Private-sector companies popped up like First Street, making all these detailed projections that banks started using, to decide whether they’re going to give a 30-year mortgage. Insurance companies are starting to use this, and this is all based on this science fiction idea of the marine ice cliff instability.”
In reality, Curry says, “even two to three feet” sea level rise is too high of a prediction “since I don’t think we’re going to see that much warming in the 21st Century.
Alarmist goal is to justify radical social change
The goal of such science fiction is to justify radical actions, like increasing reliance on renewables, even though doing so is behind deindustrialization in Europe.
“The damage from climate change is an order of magnitude more from the policies rather than from any actual impacts,” says Curry. “We’ve destroyed the economies in Europe and the industrial base. We’ve slowed down development in Africa by not helping them get grid electricity and on it goes. We’ve spent trillions and trillions of dollars, doing stuff that just makes things worse.”
That’s a feature not a bug of what activist scientists are motivated by anti-human Malthusian ideology.
When asked why activist scientists are determined to deny or downplay the reality of global greening, Curry says, “That realism, she says, violates the rules of official climate discourse. “CO₂ cannot have any benefits. Only harms.”
This black and white thinking around climate change and carbon dioxide is both childlike and Manichean in ways that are typical of religious cults throughout history, preaching apocalypse or Armageddon.
It is notable that many, if not most, of the most active, vocal, and aggressive climate scientists hold the standard anti-civilization left-wing ideology, which comes more from the tradition of Rousseau than from Bacon, and has been the ideology of apocalyptic environmentalists since after World War II.
Many, if not most, of the most active, vocal, and aggressive climate scientists hold the standard anti-civilization left-wing ideology, which comes more from the tradition of Rousseau than from Bacon, and has been the ideology of apocalyptic environmentalists since after World War II.
This Rousseauian ideology starts from the view that modern civilization is bad because it creates inequality, pollution, oppression, etc and that it must thus be radically overturned. It was the basis for the bloody French Revolution, reign of terror, and atrocities by communist dictatorships.
Malthusian ideology corrupts climate science
This ideology corrupts science. “It’s mass delusion,” said Curry. “People in the health field told me that if you want an [U.S. government National Institutes of Health] NIH grant, the best way is to tie it into some kind of a climate impact. So people are making up all these health climate impacts and in order to get money you have to tie it to some sort of sustainability climate thing.”
The good news is that the backlash to climate alarmism and climate policy is underway. “You see a lot of people, the heretics or people my age who are the older generation, who were trained rigorously, who don’t rely on anybody’s funding at this point, and we’re calling BS on” shoddy climate science.
And the Trump administration is cutting bad science. “There’s a lot of fat,” said Curry. “I’m fine with some cuts. The weather forecasting services, the National Hurricane Center, they’re the most important. They need to be preserved and they actually need to be modernized. But there’s a lot of fat and programs that aren’t needed.”
And other scientists reject the marine ice cliff instability scenario. “Most European scientists aren’t really buying it,” Curry said. “They say, ‘There’s no observations of this and we don’t really need it for anything… Basing decisions on this is pretty crazy’.”
Use fossil-fuel wealth to reduce vulnerability to Mother Nature
As such, climate thinking needs to change. “The best way forward is to reduce our vulnerability to whatever Mother Nature might throw at us,” says Curry. “This requires prosperity and wealth, which until now has been largely fueled by fossil fuels, and it requires really a local approach to reducing local vulnerabilities rather than these top-down global solutions with emissions targets and everything else.”
“An abundant, reliable, and inexpensive supply of electricity – that’s the key to prosperity and resilience,” she notes. “Let’s use our ingenuity and our technology to figure out better ways. To reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and the slow creep of sea level rise.”
And Gates’ statement shows that Curry and others have already changed the conversation. “I identify Bill Gates as part of that globalist World Economic Forum type of crowd who are pushing global warming like crazy,” she noted, “so for him to come out and say… we need to focus on the wellbeing of people rather than, some esoteric kind of policies for future generations is rather a big deal.”
This article on Public News is the partial transcript of a video interview of Judith Curry by Michael Shellenberger’s. To see the original interview, click here.