Curry certainly has the credentials. She is a
professor and chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She also runs a side business as a private weather forecaster. But she doesn't deny the basic principles of climate change.
"If all other things remain equal, it's clear that adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will warm the planet," she told the committee.
But, she went on, not all things are equal. She says there's so much uncertainty about the role of natural variation in the climate that she doesn't know what's going to happen. She says a catastrophe is possible, but warming could also turn out to be not such a big deal.
And she focuses on uncertainties and unknown unknowns far more than on the consensus of climate scientists, who say we know enough to be deeply worried.
"I've been trying to understand how there can be such a strong consensus, given these uncertainties," she told the committee.
Her message that day on Capitol Hill was, in essence, that while humans may be contributing to climate change, we simply don't know how the climate will behave in the coming decades, so there may be no point in trying to reduce emissions.
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