A Veneer of Certainty Stoking Climate Alarm (arsehole free zone)

[cancel2 2022]

A Veneer of Certainty Stoking Climate Alarm

In Private, Climate Scientists Are Much less Certain than They Tell the Public

Rupert Darwall • November 27, 2017

View Full Document as PDF

Foreword by Judith Curry, President of the Climate Forecast Applications Network and former Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology

While the nations of the world met in Bonn to discuss implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement, the Trump administration was working to dismantle President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and to establish a climate “red team” to critically evaluate the scientific basis for dangerous human-caused climate change and the policy responses.

The mantra of “settled science” is belied by the inherent complexity of climate change as a scientific problem, the plethora of agents and processes that influence the global climate, and disagreements among scientists. Manufacture and enforcement of a “consensus” on the topic of human-caused climate change acts to the detriment of the scientific process, our understanding of climate change, and the policy responses. Indeed, it becomes a fundamentally anti-scientific process when debate, disagreement, and uncertainty are suppressed.

This essay by Rupert Darwall explores the expressions of public certainty by climate scientists versus the private expressions of uncertainty, in context of a small Workshop on Climate organized by the American Physical Society (APS). I was privileged to participate in this workshop, which included three climate scientists who support the climate change consensus and three climate scientists who do not—all of whom were questioned by a panel of distinguished physicists.

The transcript of the workshop is a remarkable document. It provides, in my opinion, the most accurate portrayal of the scientific debates surrounding climate change. While each of the six scientists agreed on the primary scientific evidence, we each had a unique perspective on how to reason about the evidence, what conclusions could be drawn and with what level of certainty.

Rupert Darwall’s essay provides a timely and cogent argument for a red/blue team assessment of climate change that provides both sides with an impartial forum to ask questions and probe the other side’s case. Such an assessment would both advance the science and open up the policy deliberations to a much broader range of options.

- Judith Curry, Reno, Nevada, November 7, 2017


https://cei.org/content/stoking-climate-action

[Celticguy]

Considering there is no science to support it they should be skeptical.

[cancel2 2022]

Considering there is no science to support it they should be skeptical.

That's not strictly true, there is science but it comes with so many caveats and provisos that it becomes hostage to the media, politicians, tree huggers and other assorted reptiles.

[Русский агент]

"Consensus" is a hallmark of the liberal hive mind, isn't it?