Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry told Fox News host Tucker Carlson she was so sick of politicization of global warming in academia she resigned from her tenured position at Georgia Tech.

“I’ve been vilified by some of my colleagues who are activists and don’t like anybody challenging their big story,” Curry told Carlson Friday night.

“I walk around with knives sticking out of my back,” she said. “In the university environment I felt like I was just beating my head against the wall.”

Curry, a skeptic that humans are causing catastrophic global warming, announced Tuesday she was retiring from academic life to focus more on her own climate analytics business and blogging. A big reason she decided to leave, though, had to do with the “craziness” of climate science.

“A deciding factor was that I no longer know what to say to students and postdocs regarding how to navigate the CRAZINESS in the field of climate science,” she wrote in her blog.

“Research and other professional activities are professionally rewarded only if they are channeled in certain directions approved by a politicized academic establishment — funding, ease of getting your papers published, getting hired in prestigious positions, appointments to prestigious committees and boards, professional recognition, etc,” she wrote. “How young scientists are to navigate all this is beyond me, and it often becomes a battle of scientific integrity versus career suicide.”

Curry has been attacked by colleagues for questioning claims made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other scientists who use climate models to claim humans are the main cause of recent global warming.

“There’s far too little funding and effort going into studying natural climate variability,” Curry told Carlson.

“It’s clearly warming, and it’s been warming overall for several hundred years. The key question is how much of the warming, say for the last 50 years, is caused by humans,” she said. “I don’t see a clear signal that it is being caused by humans predominantly.”

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