It’s about the policies, not the science:
What isn’t solid, however, are all of the “fiddly bits.” How fast is warming happening? Will it speed up, and by how much? What the economic and environmental impacts be? What other factors besides anthropogenic ones might be contributing to the warming?What complex little mechanisms might slow the process down, or speed it up? And so on. It’s inherent in the nature of a system as complex as climate that these questions will be hard to pin down.
Because the uncertainty is about these “fiddly bits,” and not about the fundamentals, the worry is not about what the science says but about what the policy should be. The process by which greens dream up and then implement policies to address the problem of global warming makes the sometimes messy IPCC process look like a finely tuned, well-oiled machine by comparison.
Global greens develop stupid, horrible, expensive, counterproductive climate policy agendas, and then try to use the imprimatur of “science” as a way to panic the world into adopting them. All too often, in other words, they fall prey to the temptation to make what the science says “clearer than truth” in Acheson’s phrase, in order to silence debate on their cockamamie policy fixes. A favorite tactic is to brand any dissent from the agenda as “anti-science.” It is not only a dishonest tactic; it’s a counterproductive one, generating new waves of skepticism with every exaggeration of fact.
Yup. Every time someone calls me “anti-science” because I’m appropriately skeptical of lousy science and worse prescriptions, it simply increases my resistance to their idiotic policy nostrums.
[Update a few minutes later]
Climate scientists must not advocate policies:
I believe advocacy by climate scientists has damaged trust in the science. We risk our credibility, our reputation for objectivity, if we are not absolutely neutral. At the very least, it leaves us open to criticism. I find much climate scepticism is driven by a belief that environmental activism has influenced how scientists gather and interpret evidence. So I’ve found my hardline approach successful in taking the politics and therefore – pun intended – the heat out of climate science discussions.
They call me an “honest broker”, asking for “more Dr Edwards and fewer zealous advocates”. Crucially, they say this even though my scientific views are absolutely mainstream.
But it’s not just about improving trust. In this highly politicised arena, climate scientists have a moral obligation to strive for impartiality. We have a platform we must not abuse. For a start, we rarely have the necessary expertise. I absolutely disagree with Gavin that we likely know far more about the issues involved in making policy choices than [our] audience.
As well you should, because you’re right — you don’t.
I don’t have any problem with scientists advocating policies or having their own interests. What saps credibility for me is when they abuse their position (either to rhetorical advantage or to further their own interests) or they make unscientific arguments.
It’s no different from getting petitions signed by Nobel Prize winners. A Nobel Prize winner in physics is no more and no less likely to have an educated opinion on (to pick an example at random) banning land mines than a name picked out of the phone book. But saying that 6 or 16 or 60 Nobel Prize winners have signed your petition is supposed to impart some mystical aura of infallibility. Nonsense.
And, half the time or more, they are Nobel Peace Prize winners, who actually need no other qualification than being popular with the Norwegian Nobel committee. The hoi polloi don’t know the difference between it and the Science prizes.
And, so you have the spectacle of idiots proclaiming that Michael Mann cannot be questioned because he won a Nobel. The fact that he wasn’t even actually a named recipient just makes it all the more farcical.
Lay people, in general, particularly the young, have a very distorted view of science. They play with their little gadgets, and they see all the technology around them, and they take it for granted that science has been on a steady, forward march for the past several centuries.
They do not have any insight into the vicious academic wars which took place to get us to our present state of knowledge. They have no inkling that most of what is taken for granted and deemed obvious now was at one time considered way out of the mainstream. That do not know that having an overwhelming consensus in favor of an incorrect theory is, in fact, usually the case just before a major paradigm shift.