by Judith Curry
Consensus denial: attacking the expert consensus on human caused global warming. – Dana Nuccitelli
Oh my, things are really heating up in anticipation of the final release of the IPCC WG1 Summary for Policy Makers.
In a recent post Who is on which ‘side’ in the climate debate, anyways?, I argued that it is getting very difficult to tell who is on which side of the climate debate: virtually all academic climate scientists are within the 97% consensus regarding the infrared emission of the carbon dioxide molecule and the warming effect on the planet. Further, virtually all agree that the planet has been warming, and that humans have had some impact on the climate.
So, exactly what differentiates the two sides in the debate? I think Dana Nuccitelli (for once) hits the nail on the head: consensus denial. Exactly what is consensus denial? Here are some characteristics of the social aspects of consensus denial:
- Denial that experts selected by an organization (i.e. the IPCC) with substantial infiltration by ‘big green’ are objective arbiters of climate science.
- Denial of the trustworthiness of the experts owing to the behaviors revealed by the Climategate emails and the explicit policy advocacy by IPCC participants, most particularly by those in leadership positions in the IPCC
- Denial that a scientific consensus seeking process makes sense for an exceedingly complex problem like climate change that is dominated by uncertainties.
- Concern that an explicit scientific consensus building process in a politicized environment is introducing biases into the science and amplifying them.
- Concern over how the community of climate scientists allowed intolerant activists who make false claims to certainty to become the public face of the field – Roger Pielke Jr
- [Concern that] what is commonly called the “mainstream” view of climate science is contained in the spread of results from computer models. What is commonly dismissed as the “skeptical” or “denier” view coincides with the real-world observations. – Ross McKitrick
- The idea of producing a colossal document of near biblical infallibility is a misrepresentation of how science works, and we need to look very carefully about what the IPCC does in the future. – Myles Allen
- The “truth” about global warming, if it exists, lives somewhere in a constantly shifting probability cloud. – Indian Express
- Concern that policies based on consensus science that are advocated to mitigate global warming are technologically, economically and politically infeasible.
- Concern that policies based on consensus science that are advocated to mitigate global warming, even if implemented, would be ineffective in controlling climate and extreme weather events
Ross McKitrick sums up the IPCC ‘consensus’ science in this way:
As the model-versus-reality discrepancy plays out, the last place you will learn about it will be in IPCC reports.
So who’s denying science? It doesn’t seem to be the ‘consensus deniers.’