A common accusation levelled at so-called climate change ‘deniers’ is that their position is profoundly anti-science. It is therefore more than germane to point out that an anti-science sentiment lies behind the belief that climate change poses an existential risk to mankind. Ironically, activists such as Greta Thunberg, who say we must ‘listen to the scientists’ and prepare for Hot House Earth, are promoting a belief that is advocated by experts who will tell you that you should not listen to the scientists. They say this because they believe that the scientific method has led to a consensus that underplays the climate change risks. The scientific method, it is claimed, is inherently overcautious. Furthermore, there is said to be a tendency for important fringe ideas to be marginalised by a dominant orthodoxy. Yes, the same dominance that may have driven out scientists who were climate change sceptics is also driving out those who believe in climate Armageddon. The former was a good thing, we are told, but the latter is a very bad thing.
You either respect the scientific method and accept the scientific consensus, or you don’t. It isn’t good enough that climate change ‘deniers’ be castigated for being anti-science when an anti-science position is also taken by activists espousing extreme alarm.
The ‘expert’ case for ignoring the scientists
To illustrate how belief in the existential nature of climate change risk presupposes a rejection of mainstream climate science, I bring to your attention a 2018 document that is typical of the climate alarm canon. It is titled ‘What Lies Beneath’ and carries the subtitle, ‘The Understatement of Existential Climate Risk’. It is written by David Spratt and Ian Dunlop of Breakthrough – National Centre for Climate Restoration, a high-profile think tank based in Melbourne, Australia. To add to the report’s intended gravitas, a foreword has been supplied by the much-acclaimed Hans Joachim Schellnhuber – the gentleman responsible for persuading the world’s governments to arbitrarily accept 1.5 deg C as the dangerous limit for global warming. So whilst the thinking outlined in What Lies Beneath may be overtly anti-scientific, it has to be appreciated that its logic is shared by Schellnhuber, and hence is one that lies at the heart of the policies that are emerging annually from the various COPs.
Without having to delve into the body of the document, it is revealing enough to note the message conveyed by Schellnhuber’s foreword. He starts with a firm endorsement of the Breakthrough report:
What Lies Beneath is an important report. It does not deliver new facts and figures, but instead provides a new perspective on the existential risks associated with anthropogenic global warming.
And is that because it was written by climate scientists who are best qualified to comment on climate change risk? No, on the contrary:
It is the critical overview of well-informed intellectuals who sit outside the climate science community which has developed over the last fifty years.
Schellnhuber thinks the fact that neither of the authors is a qualified climate science expert is a good thing because:
[Climate] Experts tend to establish a peer world-view which becomes ever more rigid and focussed. Yet the critical insights regarding the issue in question may lurk at the fringes, as this report suggests.
Having called for more attention to be paid to the those who are not domain experts (because they are presumed better at rooting out what lurks in the fringes) he goes on to take a swipe at the IPCC itself:
After delivering five fully-fledged assessment reports, it is hardly surprising that a trend towards “erring on the side of least drama” has emerged.
It seems odd that anyone could claim that a drift to “least drama” would be an unsurprising result of gaining more knowledge, but Schellnhuber has a couple of reasons why he thinks this should be so. The first is a supposed preoccupation with determining likelihoods. Or, as he puts it, the IPCC has a ‘Probability Obsession’. He goes on to explain that the discipline of statistics cannot apply to the climate change problem because we are dealing with a complex, non-linear system and there is no precedent for the situation we currently find ourselves in. This, combined with the fact that we cannot perform repeated, planetary-scale experiments, obviates a statistical approach — at least in Schellnhuber’s fringe opinion. As he puts it:
Of course, climate scientists are not trying to treat the Earth like a roulette wheel, yet the statistical approach keeps on creeping into the assessments. How many times did the thermohaline circulation collapse under comparable conditions in the planetary past? How often did the Pacific enter a permanent El Niño state in the Holocene? And so on.
Schellnhuber says that, instead of bothering with probabilities and statistics, it is sufficient to address the possibilities and base one’s risk assessment on that:
So calculating probabilities makes little sense in the most critical instances…Rather we should identify possibilities, that is, potential developments in the planetary makeup that are consistent with the initial and boundary conditions, the processes and the drivers we know.
Of course, a climate scientist would tell you that consistency with initial and boundary conditions is a necessary but far from sufficient restriction upon which the reality of a risk can be established. But then Schellnhuber would say that’s just them being too ‘rigid and focussed’; focused, that is, upon what can be expected rather than what cannot be ruled out.
I’ll not say too much about this other than to point out that risk is a function of likelihood and impact, and so if one is to turn one’s back on the calculation of likelihood, one is no longer doing risk assessment; one is simply putting all your eggs in the precautionary principle basket. It’s undiluted uncertainty aversion and, as such, it represents a retreat from the rationality that comes with the scientific desire to quantify.
Schellnhuber then moves on to what he calls the ‘Devil’s Advocate Reward’. This is a strange one, because he seems to be criticising the scientific method itself for its insistence that all claims be well-evidenced:
In the magnificent tradition of the Enlightenment, which shattered so many myths of the ancient regimes, scientists are trained to be sceptical about every proposition which cannot be directly verified by empirical evidence or derived from first principles (such as the invariability of the speed of light). So, if a researcher comes up with an entirely new thought, experts tend to reflexively dismiss it as “speculative”, which is effectively a death warrant in the academic world. Whereas those who criticize the idea will be applauded, rewarded and promoted!
Of course, it is absolutely essential that new ideas be robustly challenged, particularly if acceptance of them leads one down the road towards something like Net Zero. That’s the beauty of the scientific method; speculations are important but they are only the starting point. But this is not where Schellnhuber’s sympathies lie:
…out-of-the-box thinking is vital given the unprecedented climate risks which now confront human civilisation.
On the contrary, a preference for well-evidenced thinking is vital when confronted with decision-making under uncertainty. Undeterred, however, Schellnhuber finishes with an unqualified call for more alarmism from the fringes:
Therefore it is all the more important to listen to non-mainstream voices who do understand the issues and are less hesitant to cry wolf.
Reading this reminds me of what Roger Hallam, the slightly unhinged co-founder of Extinction Rebellion, said recently, just before he was thrown into jail for his particular version of wolf-crying:
The rapid heating and extreme events of the last year demonstrate that overall predictions of institutionalised climate science were less accurate than the conclusions of generalist scholars and leading climate activists, who better saw the frightening signals through the noise produced from siloes, hierarchies, and privilege.
Their methods may be very different, but Hallam and Schellnhuber are very much on the same page in believing that the scientists are getting it wrong and that the people who truly understand the risk are the ‘generalist scholars and leading climate activists’.
Enough said
I could go through the body of the report and demonstrate how it does indeed say what Schellnhuber says it does. But I won’t bother. Suffice it to say that any report that receives the endorsement of someone holding Schellnhuber’s views is bound to read more like a manifesto for Extinction Rebellion than it does a sober, scientific appraisal of climate change risks. Besides which, the very first ‘well-informed intellectual’ that the report chooses to cite is none other than Naomi Oreskes:
A 2013 study by Prof. Naomi Oreskes and fellow researchers examined a number of past predictions made by climate scientists. They found that scientists have been “conservative in their projections of the impacts of climate change” and that “at least some of the key attributes of global warming from increased atmospheric greenhouse gases have been under-predicted, particularly in IPCC assessments of the physical science”.
This is a surprising claim, to say the least, given the catalogue of failed predictions of disappeared glaciers, ice caps, coastal cities and polar bears that have floodlit the path taken by the climate righteous. Besides which, Oreskes, you may recall, has made a big thing of scientists being too averse to making Type I errors. To her mind, they are setting the bar for statistical significance far too high. This from someone who, in the process, demonstrated that she didn’t even understand what statistical significance meant. To be precise, she seems to believe that the probability of observing data, given the null hypothesis, is equivalent to the probability of the hypothesis being true, having observed the data – a gaffe known as the fallacy of the transposed conditional. So much for the well-informed intellectual.
For these reasons, I am content to leave it here, allowing my readers (if they are so inclined) to pick through the report for themselves. But if you get to the end thinking, “I’ll never get that time back again”, then don’t tell me I didn’t warn you. All you are likely to discover is that what lies beneath isn’t the scientifically sound revelation you might have been hoping for.
Climate Scepticism 
Thanks for digging into this thorny issue of scientific certainty and how the meeting of minds is achieved. Another recent paper provides additional insights, and also refers to Oreskes’ appeal to expert collective authority. But there are conditions to be met before granting such trust. The paper is:
https://iai.tv/articles/scientific-consensus-needs-dissent-auid-2926?_auid=2020
My synopsis is:
https://rclutz.com/2024/08/24/being-properly-skeptical-of-expert-consensus/
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For Schellnhuber, climate science is like the Roman arena and we are the spectators looking in. His is the gladiatorial approach; he wants to give us as much blood and gore as possible, so he strides out into the arena:
“Are you not alarmed?” he shouts.
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What bothers me about all this is the way climate scientists (who one might expect to seek to maintain the validity of their findings) so often criticise though who are sceptical about the scale of the problem they claim to have revealed, yet don’t criticise (and sometimes even support) alarmists who are equally critical of the climate science narrative.
Any scientist who criticises those who say climate science is too alarmist, but who doesn’t criticise (or even applauds) those who say it isn’t sufficiently alarmist, need to take a long, hard look at themselves.
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Mark,
Absolutely.
As I was reading Schellnhuber’s foreword I was struck by how similar some of his concerns were to those often expressed on this site. For example, his concerns of ‘a peer world-view which becomes ever more rigid and focussed’ seem equally valid to the sceptic’s eye. The only difference is that he feels scientific consensus downplays voices of extreme pessimism, yet there seems to be no corresponding sympathy from him for anyone who feels it also drives out voices of extreme optimism. He would argue that the error he points out carries real danger, whereas the alternative error has no downside. Try telling that to the public when they pick over the remnants of the UK following Net Zero.
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In other words it is being argued that risks attendant upon climate change are best estimated by “generalists” and climate activists rather than climate ‘experts’. I’m not sure how this judgement comes about. Of course the judgement concerns estimating risk, something I have learned to be highly suspicious of after reading this blog for several years.
It would be interesting to learn of other sciences where it is being proposed that generalist views or even outside predictions are deemed superior to those of experts. I know of none.
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Alan,
I could be generous towards Schellnhuber and argue on his behalf that he is only calling for a more interdisciplinary approach – which is a reasonable enough call to make. I suppose a lot depends upon what he meant by ‘on the fringes’.
He is himself a physicist who specialises in non-linear systems and I guess he would therefore argue that, to the extent that tipping points may dominate the risk profile, he is just as qualified to talk about climate risk as is the average climate scientist. However, I don’t think it ends there for him. He just doesn’t like the idea that climate risk assessment is based upon probabilities rather than possibilities and that he feels is his sound criticism. Unfortunately, that would be him, as a physicist, trying to tell risk specialists how to do their job. His recent attempt to formulate an equation for Emergency based upon “standard risk analysis and control theory” is a classic example of why it is rarely a good idea to give a non-domain expert the job.
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Of course Naomi Oreskes is following in the footsteps of the IPCC itself which was also set up as a confirmatory exercise and hence with a remit that ignores those two crucial elements needed to “untranspose” the transposed conditional (a.k.a. the prosecutor fallacy – equating the probability of the evidence given the accused is guilty with the probability that the accused is guilty given the evidence). Namely contributions from the probabilities that the evidence may also be consistent with other hypotheses and from other evidence that is not consistent with the chosen hypothesis.
Apologies if this is in bad taste so soon after the sad fate of the Bayesian and its crew.
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Max,
You’re quite right. The IPCC itself transposed a conditional in its summary for policy makers when it said we are 95% confident that more than half of the warming is anthropogenic. Suddenly, the a priori probability that the models are 100% correct isn’t supposed to be an issue!
As for bad taste, I wouldn’t worry about that on this website. We all have our sins to confess.
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Of course Schellnhuber is at the forefront of alarmism. Recently he was called out by Dr. Kröpelin, an award-wining geologist and climate researcher at the University of Cologne and specializing in studying the eastern Sahara desert and its climatic history. He’s been active out in the field there for more than 40 years.
In the Auf 1 interview, Dr. Kröpelin contradicts the alarmist claims of growing deserts and rapidly approaching climate tipping points. He says that already in the late 1980s rains had begun spreading into northern Sudan and have since indeed developed into a trend. Since then, rains have increased and vegetation has spread northwards. “The desert is shrinking; it is not growing.”
When asked about dramatic tipping points (8:00) such as those claimed to be approaching by the Potsdam Institute (PIK), Kröpelin says he’s very skeptical and doesn’t believe crisis scenarios such as those proposed by former PIK head, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber. He says people making such claims “never did any studies themselves in any climate zone on the earth and they don’t understand how complex climate change is.”
Except for catastrophic geological events, “it’s not how nature works,” Kröpelin says. “Things change gradually.”
The claims that “we have to be careful that things
don’t get half a degree warmer, otherwise everything will collapse,
is of course complete nonsense.”
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Ron,
Thank you for your comment; I think it gets to the nub of the issue.
On the face of it, my accusation that Schellnhuber is being anti-science for accusing the IPCC of having a ‘Probability Obsession’ may seem harsh. After all, a claim for the possibility of a tipping point that is ‘consistent with the initial and boundary conditions, the processes and the drivers we know’ would be a scientific claim. Furthermore, one could take on board what Nassim Taleb has said regarding the difference between ‘extremistan’ and ‘mediocristan’. Or, as he put it in his book, Skin in the Game:
So Schellnuber would argue that he is just invoking the precautionary principle in order to address ruin scenarios, and that he is doing it for sound scientific reasons.
The problem, however, is that he seems to think that you don’t need to be a domain expert to dream up these ruin scenarios – in fact you would be better off not being a domain expert. What he advocates is uncertainty aversion, but he needs to appreciate that the uncertainties may be such that we may think we are dealing with a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk when we are not. The ruin scenario might, in fact, be a complete fiction. Whatever the case, the last people we should be trusting with such a judgement are the non-domain experts looking ‘at the fringes’. That’s what makes his position essentially anti-science.
The IPCC does well to obsess over probabilities if it wants to proceed on the basis of risk rather than uncertainty. It just needs to take account of the impact of non-ergodicity (which I suspect it does) and use a sound methodology for assessing the confidence it has in its own statements (which I think it doesn’t). A little bit of evidence theory wouldn’t go amiss, for example.
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We are fast approaching the crunch point for climate science. When all is said and done, despite the obvious economic, technological, practical and political absurdity of the pursuit of Net Zero, Labour are going full speed ahead and energy bills are going to keep rising, because very expensive energy is an integral part of the plan (see my recent comment on another post). Mr Milibean and the entire climate crisis cult will be forced eventually to justify ‘the science’ behind the mad rush to Net Zero because this is the fundamental foundation upon which the rest of the nonsense rests.
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Jaime,
this is the fundamental foundation upon which the rest of the nonsense rests.
I couldn’t agree more. But the problem is the extent to which the foundation is now culturally underpinned, to the extent that the very idea of challenging it in any way is now axiomatically treated as irrational.
The process by which this state of affairs can be engineered is distressingly easy to implement. First highlight a particularly extreme aspect of the challenge and demonstrate its flaws. Outlawing that aspect of the challenge is then easily accepted by society since most people can see that the challenge was self-evidently unsound. Then give that aspect of the challenge a label – let’s say ‘denialism’. After that, quietly and insidiously extend the applicability of the label to cover other and more probing aspects of the challenge. Because society is comfortable with that label being used to outlaw, anything that can be labelled as such can then be treated as such under existing ‘laws’. You don’t need to publicly debate the merits of the more probing challenge, just campaign to make the label stick to it.
‘Racist’ is another label that comes to mind that has been used in this way, as is ‘far-right’, ‘extremist’ and even ‘hate’. It all gets very Orwellian. Although I say it myself, I think my article is a reasonably probing analysis that deserves to be taken seriously. But it doesn’t need to be if someone in a position of influence can ‘inoculate’ the reader by calling it a new form of ‘denialism’. I’m trying to demonstrate how such a label can be turned on the labeler, but I’m not confident that it’s a workable ploy in this day and age. I fear that if we are to make any progress in challenging the scientific foundation of Net Zero, society is first going to have to drop its natural habit of arguing by labels.
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John,
The phony ‘settled science’ of climate catastrophism has indeed become culturally underpinned. But what is also culturally embedded, to a far greater degree, and we tend to forget this, is the rationalistic, scientific approach itself and the hunger for facts and hard evidence. The Age of Enlightenment, which began as an innovative new approach to problem solving and thinking 350 years ago, is deeply embedded in the Western psyche. The Settled Science of Climate Change pretender has surfed that cultural wave for a while, masquerading as real, empirical science, but recently, the mask has slipped badly and the public is once again hungering for knowledge and facts in preference to transparently politicised propaganda coming from politicians, establishment agencies and ‘scientists’ themselves. In this respect, I think it is very significant that Ned Nikolov’s new paper has generated such great interest in so short a period:
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Jaime,
Once again, agreed. I should have pointed out that the labelling trick works for both positive and negative labelling.
First highlight a particularly sound aspect of the climate change argument. That aspect of the argument is then easily accepted by society since most people can see that the argument was self-evidently sound. Then give that aspect of the argument a label – let’s say ‘settled science’. After that, quietly and insidiously extend the applicability of the label to cover other and less sound aspects of the climate change argument. Because society is comfortable with that label being used as a mark of validity, then anything that can be labelled as such can then be validated as such under existing ‘laws’. You don’t need to publicly debate the merits of the less sound aspects of the argument, just campaign to make the label stick to it.
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Sorry, typo in previous comment now corrected.
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Jaime – thanks for the heads up on that paper & partial quotes from it.
Sounds interesting, but the link you give, gives me – “Error 404 – File not found”?
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Jaime – ok, I found it through the X link at the bottom 🙂
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John/Jaime – “What Lies Beneath” – apt partial quote from that paper –
“Both time series exhibit virtually identical El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycles, which suggests that ENSO events are externally driven by solar forcing via albedo variations rather than caused by internal factors such as the release of heat from the Equatorial Pacific Ocean as currently believed. Our model explained 100% of the Earth’s multidecadal warming trend and 83% of the GSAT interannual variability over the past 24 years. These results prompt the following question: If the observed solar forcing fully accounts for the global temperature rise since 2000, what is the role of the anthropogenic radiative forcing attributed to increasing greenhouse gases in recent warming?”
1 more partial quote –
“The above interpretation with respect to the missing effects of anthropogenic forcing and amplifying feedbacks are also supported by the inability of climate models to explain the 2023 unusual heat anomaly through greenhouse-gas variations and reductions of human aerosol emissions. Dr. Gavin Shmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, acknowledged this fact in a recent Nature World View article, where he stated: “In general, the 2023 temperature anomaly has come out of the blue, revealing an unprecedented knowledge gap perhaps for the first time since about 40 years ago, when satellite data began offering modellers an unparalleled, real-time view of Earth’s climate system””
Well worth a read & surprised it has survived this far.
ps – it’s models again, but maybe better?
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OK – 1 more long partial quote which could be added to the NZ threads – from – Conclusions
“The lack of evidence for heat trapping by greenhouse gases in the climate system during the 21st Century raises an important question about the physical nature of the Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI). The latter is defined as the difference between the absorbed shortwave and outgoing LW flux at the TOA. EEI has been observed and calculated by various monitoring platforms for several decades. This index became a research focus in climate science during the past 15 years, because it has been perceived as evidence of anthropogenic heat accumulation (energy retention) in the Earth system that would commit the World to a prolonged future warming, even after human carbon emissions have reached a net-zero level. As a result of such a view, EEI is now called the “most fundamental indicator for climate change” [33]. However, our analysis of observed data, model calculations, and standard thermodynamic theory showed that EEI has been misinterpreted by the science community, since it arises from adiabatic dissipation of thermal energy in ascending air parcels in the troposphere due to a decreasing atmospheric pressure with height (see discussion in Section 4). Hence, integrating EEI over space and time in an effort to calculate some total “energy gain” by the Earth system, as done by researchers in recent years, is physically misleading, because EEI includes energy that was adiabatically lost to the system during the convective cooling process. Our analyses also showed that this energy imbalance results from a varying sunlight absorption by the planet and would only disappear if the Earth’s albedo stops changing and the uptake of shortwave radiation stabilizes, which is unlikely to ever occur. The reduction of human greenhouse-gas emissions cannot and will not affect EEI. Nevertheless, the Earth has gained a considerable amount of thermal energy over the past 45 years due to a sustained increase of shortwave-radiation uptake, which is a completely different mechanism from the theorized trapping of radiant heat by greenhouse gases, since it does not involve a hidden energy storage.
These findings call for a fundamental reconsideration of the current paradigm of understanding about climate change and related socio-economic initiatives aimed at drastic reductions of industrial carbon emissions at all costs. An important aspect of this paradigm shift should be the prioritized allocation of funds to support large-scale interdisciplinary research into the physical mechanisms controlling the Earth’s albedo and cloud physics, for these are the real drivers of climate on multidecadal time scales.”
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I don’t understand this. Energy is not lost by convection – it’s moved.
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dfhunter,
Nikolov and Zeller are not mainstream climate scientists and they are engaging in out-of-the-box thinking, and so you would think that they are exactly the sort of guys Schellnhuber would want to encourage. But alas they are not crying wolf and so are undeserving of his endorsement. Instead, their work has been more or less panned by the mainstream with Schellnhuber saying nothing in support. With my untrained eye their theory does look simplistic, but who am I to judge? We have to let the scientific community do that and, if Desmog is anything to go by, the verdict has not been at all favourable.
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dfhunter,
I haven’t looked at the Nikolov/Zeller paper at all, merely cited it here as evidence for members of the general public increasingly beginning to question The Science and looking for alternative rational, plausible, scientific explanations for observations than those fed to us by the establishment.
Your quote from the paper:
Decreased albedo is almost definitely part of the story, but what drives that decreased albedo is not adequately explained. Nikolov dismisses the Tonga eruption as the cause of the warming in 2023:
If Nikolov is correct, he needs to explain why earth’s albedo suddenly decreased in spring 2023 to cause unprecedented (in the observed record) warming.
https://x.com/NikolovScience/status/1770807106754445655
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Moonbat is worried. Just 18 months ago, the Graun and others were celebrating the vanquishing of climate science deniers, telling us proudly that the battle for widespread acceptance of the Settled Science had been won and all that remained now was to see off the pesky climate mitigation deniers. Alas, declaration of victory was premature and now climate science deniers are “back with a vengeance” and the only way to counter their Big Oil funded misinformation is a state sponsored campaign with the aim of boosting belief in the ‘correct’ science, thus prompting public support for climate action.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/28/dear-ministers-i-am-a-climate-crisis-campaigner-nationalise-me-right-now
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Jaime,
Believe it or not, I haven’t taken any particular notice of Monbiot in the past. But reading that article, it is quite evident that he is a sandwich short of a picnic. Or, to use the correct terminology, he is paranoid and delusional. Nobody should be letting him anywhere near a keyboard. I think he needs help. I honestly do.
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This Monbiot passage is revealing:
Lurking in many people’s minds, I suspect, is the thought: “If the environmental crisis were really so serious, someone would stop me. Surely I wouldn’t be able to drive this SUV, or take a dozen flights a year, or eat beef or dredged scallops whenever I want? No one I’m prepared to listen to is telling me to stop. So the issues the greens keep blethering about cannot be real.”
So the environmental crisis must not be so serious as nobody is stopping Monbiot from eating beef etc. Nevertheless Monbiot is a true believer and clearly wants government to restrict activities of the populace to ensure Net Zero compliance. Maybe the conspiracy theorists are right and it’s all about government control.
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