Has The Over-selling Of “Climate Change” Hurt Science?

Well, that supposes that “climate change” is actually about science

(Forbes)  Will the overselling of climate change lead to a new scientific dark age? That’s the question being posed in the latest issue of an Australian literary journal, Quadrant, by Garth Paltridge, one of the world’s most respected atmospheric scientists.

Paltridge was a Chief Research Scientist with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).  The latter is Australia’s equivalent of the National Science Foundation, our massive Federal Laboratory network, and all the governmental agency science branches rolled into one.

Paltridge lays out the well-known uncertainties in climate forecasting. These include our inability to properly simulate clouds that are anything like what we see in the real world, the embarrassing lack of average surface warming now in its 17th year, and the fumbling (and contradictory) attempts to explain it away.

You can see that paper and more links here.

Climate scientists have been profoundly defensive about the known problems. Paltridge elegantly explains that this has to be the case, and describes the likely horrific consequences when the day of reckoning finally arrives.

That day is coming closer, because, as Paltridge notes, people are catching on:

“…the average man in the street, a sensible chap who by now can smell the signs of an oversold environmental campaign from miles away, is beginning to suspect that it is politics rather than science which is driving the issue.”

It is politics. If Warmists truly believed, they might change their own behavior to match their rhetoric, as I’ve written ad nauseum. Instead, they make excuse after excuse why they won’t and don’t, but why you should, preferably forced by Government.

“A new and rewarding research lifestyle emerged which involved the giving of advice to all types and levels of government, the broadcasting of unchallengeable opinion to the general public, and easy justification for attendance at international conferences—this last in some luxury by normal scientific experience, and at a frequency previously unheard of.”

Most refuse to debate, and use words and phrases designed to shut down debate. Yet they love all those government funds and cushy conferences held around the world.

“In the light of all this, we have at least to consider the possibility that the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem—or, what is much the same thing, of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem—in its effort to promote the cause. It is a particularly nasty trap in the context of science, because it risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavour.” [emphasis added]

I’m not so sure I agree, because people are quickly grasping that the “climate change” movement has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with far left politics. But, certainly, Warmists using science to push their politics can hurt for a short time.

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