![\"Polar](\"http:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Polar_Bears-300x197.jpg\")
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W<\/span>e\u2019ve all come across the images of polar bears drifting on ice floes: emblematic victims of the global warming that\u2019s melting the polar ice caps, symbols of the threat to the earth posed by our ceaseless energy production\u2014above all, the carbon dioxide that factories and automobiles emit. We hear louder and louder demands to impose limits, to change our wasteful ways, so as to save not only the bears but also the planet and ourselves.<\/p>\n In political discourse and in the media, major storms and floods typically get presented as signs of impending doom, accompanied by invocations to the environment and calls to respect Mother Nature. Only catastrophes seem to grab our attention, though, and it\u2019s rarely mentioned that warming would also bring some benefits, such as expanded production of grains in previously frozen regions of Canada and Russia. Nor do we hear that people die more often of cold weather than of hot weather. Isolated voices criticize the alarm over global warming, considering it a pseudoscientific thesis, the true aim of which is to thwart economic modernization and free-market growth and to extend the power of states over individual choices.<\/p>\n Not being a climatologist myself, I\u2019ve always had trouble deciding between these arguments. And then I met Judith Curry at her home in Reno, Nevada. Curry is a true climatologist. She once headed the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, until she gave up on the academy so that she could express herself independently. \u201cIndependence of mind and climatology have become incompatible,\u201d she says. Do you mean that global warming isn\u2019t real? I ask. \u201cThere is warming, but we don\u2019t really understand its causes,\u201d she says. \u201cThe human factor and carbon dioxide, in particular, contribute to warming, but how much is the subject of intense scientific debate.\u201d<\/p>\n