Why I’m agnostic re climate change science

I’m agnostic regarding the claimed need for GHG reductions: without scientific training I’m not qualified to judge. Therefore I’m neither convinced nor unconvinced.

I agree with this perceptive Scott Adams article:

Some extracts:

Non-scientists don’t have the tools to form a useful opinion on climate science.

And I can say with complete confidence that if you are a non-scientist, and you have certainty about your opinion on climate science, you are hallucinating about the capacity of your own brain.

Another tell involves claiming non-scientists can dig into the science and figure out how credible it is on their own. If that were true we wouldn’t need highly trained scientists. We could all just wing it using our common sense and whatnot. We can’t. Non-scientists can understand a simple argument from scientists but we don’t have enough context to know what is MISSING from the scientist’s argument. Without that bit of context there can be no credibility.

As a non-scientist, I don’t know what I don’t know.

… a bright, well-informed non-scientist has no realistic chance of reaching an independent opinion on climate change that is better than a guess.

… the illusion that my non-scientist brain can use its “common sense” to evaluate the credibility of experts in the field. Your brain doesn’t have that feature. What you do have is an illusion that makes you think your brain has that feature.

… any non-scientist with a strong opinion on climate science is experiencing an illusion of certainty supported by lots of confirmation bias.

Here’s another article on much the same topic:

In Praise of Ignorance

An extract:

To paraphrase Woody Allen, the most beautiful words in the English language are not “I love you,” but “I don’t know.”

I was impressed by Amy Coney Barrett’s comments on climate change in her confirmation hearings (October 2020) re her nomination for the US Supreme Court:

‘I don’t think my views on climate change or global warming are relevant to the job I would do as a judge. Nor do I feel like I have views that are informed enough.’

‘I’m certainly not a scientist. I mean, I’ve read things about climate change. I would not say I have firm views on it.’

‘I don’t think I’m competent to opine on what causes global warming or not.’

34 Comments

  1. I first published this nearly five years ago (on a website where I’ve been cancelled) and, as it still represents my view, I’m happy to publish it again now.

    It’s interesting that, when in discussion (dispute?) with activists in the past (it’s a response that’s less common today) I often found that, after they’d tried and failed to establish that I was an evil denier, they would retort that, if therefore I accept the CAGW hypothesis, why was I being so difficult and controversial? But, when I explained that I neither rejected nor accepted the hypothesis – i.e. that I was agnostic about it – they were often puzzled or even angry: how could I be agnostic about something that was agreed by most scientists and accepted by almost all the relevant authorities? Referring them to this paper (which of course refers to the many non-scientist activists as well as to me) usually resulted in their not knowing how to respond and backing off with little more to say. So it was useful.

    Liked by 1 person

  2. The argument from ignorance and argument from authority, are seemingly hybridized. The result is apparently a combination of blind faith and a closed mind.

    Liked by 1 person

  4. In a rational world, one ought to be able to be agnostic about climate change while rejecting an energy policy that is manifestly stupid due to its expense, its unreliability, its environmentally-damaging nature, its vulnerability (think subsea cables) to bad actors, and the fact that it makes us increasingly dependent on foreign countries.

    In a rational world one ought to manage to be worried about the “climate crisis” (sic) whilst also being able to get one’s head round the fact that a rush to renewables isn’t a sensible policy for a major global economy. One also ought to be able to understand that the UK’s action, being close to unilateral, will make absolutely no difference to the climate.

    Unfortunately, when trying to discuss these things with climate alarmists, it’s apparent that faith trumps reason, and we aren’t living in a rational world after all.

    Liked by 3 people

  5. What is missing in this discussion is a clear definition of what is a “scientist” and what is a “non-scientist”.

    I say this because it has NOTHING to do with your degrees, credentials, or publication count as y’all seem to think.

    Science is a PROCESS, not a thing. Anyone who follows that process is a scientist. How good a scientist they are is the question, not whether they’re a scientist or not.

    As for the claim that:

    “Non-scientists don’t have the tools to form a useful opinion on climate science.“

    that’s as foolish as saying

    “People who aren’t religious scholars don’t have the tools to form a useful opinion about the endless Muslim violence.”

    or

    “People who aren’t English professors don’t have the tools to form a useful opinion about the quality of someone’s writing.”

    or to apply it directly to Scott Adams

    “Non-scientists don’t have the tools to form a useful opinion about whose opinion on climate science is useful.“

    Best to all,

    w.

    Liked by 1 person

  7. Willis, I am intrigued by what you have written, namely:-

    “As for the claim that:

    “Non-scientists don’t have the tools to form a useful opinion on climate science.“

    that’s as foolish as saying

    “People who aren’t religious scholars don’t have the tools to form a useful opinion about the endless Muslim violence.” “

    My first concern is the key word “useful”, which is the word that Scott Adams used in the quote by Robin. The word “useful” prompts the questions: useful to whom and for what purposes? So I wonder whether “informed” might have been a more appropriate word in this context.

    But I think the issue is broader than the specific meaning of the word “useful”. One can have opinions upon many topics, some of which one may be a domain specialist in and yet in others one may know relatively little.

    If one is a domain specialist and following the scientific process (that you have described so well) then you will be policy-neutral as a scientist – but you may be highly partisan as a concerned citizen. And this seems to be key in the climate policy arena; many domain experts are so clearly also concerned citizens and, unfortunately, allow their citizen partisanship to dominate their public discourse (which is then amplified by the mainstream media which so loves an alarmist story).

    The great advantage that these climate domain experts have over non-experts is their awareness that the climate “science” has been subject, for decades, to considerable motivated reasoning in the manner of unbalanced courtroom legal proceedings (c.f. balanced or just proceedings where there is one team for the prosecution and one team for the defence with each team having equal access to both (i) the evidence and (ii) resources to support their case).

    Thus, if I have understood the situation correctly, climate scientists have an awareness of the biased nature of the public climate discourse – a bias that as concerned citizens they are very happy with. In short, climate scientists have ‘useful’ opinions that are informed not simply by the motivated science but also by the knowledge that the public discourse is motivated or biased; non-scientists do not have that awareness (and, indeed, they would deny that such bias exists in the case of, for example, my Guardian reading academic friends!).

    Regards, John C.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. AGW is real, but CAGW can be easily discounted by looking back in Earth’s history to times when the CO2 concentration was higher than humanity will achieve under any circumstances. In those times, catastrophe did not occur.

    Adams should not elevate climate scientists onto a higher tier of existence than the rest of us. As Willis says, credentials don’t matter. If someone flashes their “climate scientist” badge at you, it may well show that they are going to try to support an argument by their standing that they cannot by the available evidence. Everyone is or can be a scientist if they take the trouble to examine the evidence and consider it. No credentials are required. This is the opposite of surgery or flying planes. What Adams does here is equivalent to the faux-admission of weak maths that many of us deploy from time to time.

    Liked by 1 person

  9. … any non-scientist with a strong opinion on climate science is experiencing an illusion of certainty supported by lots of confirmation bias.

    Right, that includes virtually all of our politicians, past and present, who have drafted, voted on and enacted climate policy based on climate science. So can we please just ditch the bloody lot and accept that non-scientists are never going to be qualified to make judgements on the validity or otherwise of what the ‘science says’, even less enact radical policies which will have profound and lasting effects upon the way we live.

    Ah yes, but the politicians are listening to the actual scientists who tell us that the science is settled and irrefutable. And scientists are never wrong, especially climate scientists . . . . . history proves it. Other scientists think they are wrong though. Sceptical non scientists listen to these scientists. Applying Scott Adams’ logic then, sceptic non scientists are the equivalent exact opposite of non scientist politicians convinced that ‘climate change is real’ and that we must do all we can to ‘tackle it’. So by Adams’ logic, they should all just shut up and let the scientists slog it out themselves – and perhaps then we can decide what to do – or not to do – about climate change.

    Of course, it’s not as simple as this absurd simplification would suggest and, as Willis says, any person who has the ability to follow the scientific process and to trace the scientific line of reasoning which generates scientific results and conclusions, is perfectly entitled to challenge those results and conclusions if he/she can see a fault in that line of reasoning, whatever his/her qualifications or ‘relevant experience’ and expertise.

    Liked by 2 people

  10. The joy of Cliscep – this is a fascinating discussion.

    Where I think agnosticism on climate change is valuable is when it comes to the debate about climate change policy. It’s a simple matter to demonstrate that UK energy policy would never have been given serious consideration were it not for the supposed “climate crisis”; and it’s easy to demonstrate that UK energy policy is not being followed around the world and therefore is not making the slightest difference to the climate, even on the basis insisted on by climate alarmist scientists.

    It rather pulls the rug from beneath the carpet of the doomsayers who say we have to commit economic suicide in order to save the planet, and it also means that however hard they try they can’t paint you as a denier in the pay of big oil.

    Having said all that, the debate as to whether we non-scientists can plausibly get involved in the scientific debate is an interesting one. I (a lawyer) have been involved in discussions with the climate concerned about aspects of the law, and I didn’t respond by saying that their views were invalid because they’re not lawyers. And the climate concerned often rush off to Court to try to impose their views on the rest of us. Yes, they’re supported by activist lawyers, but isn’t that at least part of the point? Many climate scientists are political activists too. Are we non-scientists not entitled to consider their behaviour and utterances and conclude that they have abandoned the scientific method?

    Liked by 2 people

  11. It may be useful at this point to quote Prof. Richard Lindzen who wrote, “What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world – that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison.” https://www.azquotes.com/author/30824-Richard_Lindzen

    Regards, John C.

    Liked by 3 people

  12. I don’t personally recommend it, but if you are a ‘non scientist’ and you lack the inclination or time or aptitude to dig deeper and form opinions based on your own ‘research of the research’, then Lindzen is as respectable a scientist as any on the opposing side (in many cases more so), so you can parrot his opinion as climate scepticism and be equally as justified in your opinion as any non scientist on the opposing side who is also parroting the opinion of climate scientists. The fact that Lindzen is in a minority and the ‘official’ climate scientists form a majority is irrelevant – because we are talking about science, which is not decided upon consensus and never has been.

    Liked by 2 people

  13. An anecdote

    Many years ago I – a lawyer – was the newly appointed Managing Director of a failing company that produced high precision marine navigation instruments. It was a subsidiary of a major UK aeronautical and general engineering Group. Every six months the MDs of the Group’s subsidiaries had to appear before a committee of the main Board for a review of their business. I was due to attend such a meeting within a couple of weeks. We had, I was told, a serious problem that might well come up at the meeting. It was this: the Ministry of Defence was unhappy because a device we had developed for Royal Navy submarines that integrated an azimuth with a vertical gyro to form part of an inertial navigation system was exhibiting excessive amounts of drift. I didn’t understand this at all so, prior to the meeting, I spent several hours with the Technical Director in an attempt to acquire at least a basic understanding of it. In due course, I attended the meeting and, sure enough, the problem came up. The committee chairman (Sir Arnold Hall – one of Britain’s most eminent aeronautical engineers and scientists) asked me what I knew about it. So I started to review my recently acquired knowledge. I’d only been going for a short time when Sir Arnold stopped me by saying: ‘Robin, you don’t know what you’re talking about do you?’ I answered: ‘No sir I don’t’. ‘Quite so’, he said – ‘never do that to me again.’

    It was a harsh lesson: I was told later by one of the other committee members that, if I’d answered otherwise, I would almost certainly have been fired. But it stood me in good stead. Thereafter, I‘ve never assumed a serious understanding of technical matters. Yet I was able to make the business a success – as I did with other technology based businesses of which I took charge over the years.

    The subject article is a recent manifestation of the lesson I learned all those years ago. I hope this anecdote can at least be regarded as a part response to the interesting points made by Willis, Jit, Jaime, John and Mark.

    Liked by 1 person

  14. While it might be wise for the scientifically unqualified to be agnostic about the actual science, in a democracy, when it comes to the question of what to do about it, we all have an equal say.

    Liked by 1 person

  15. “Non-scientists can understand a simple argument from scientists but we don’t have enough context to know what is MISSING from the scientist’s argument. Without that bit of context there can be no credibility.“

    Fortunately for us all, there is a breed of non-scientist that has the ability to understand complex scientific arguments and to simplify them for the rest of us, without missing out any important context. These are known as ‘science journalists’, from whom most of us are gaining our knowledge of climate science and our understanding of the need to reduce GHGs. Nobody could possibly accuse them of lacking credibility.

    Only joking. This is what I really think of them:

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/08/25/so-what-happened-to-the-journalism/

    Liked by 2 people

  16. John, as with citizen journalists who have stepped in to fill the gap left by media journalists, so also with science journalists. You’re one of them I think!

    Like

  17. Mike,

    The problem is, although we can all have our say about what to do about ‘it’, if you can’t really accurately quantify and verify what ‘it’ actually is, then the legitimacy of doing anything about ‘it’ becomes questionable.

    Like

  18. Robin – thanks for your post/thoughts. I can’t seem to link to the Scott Adams article for some reason!!!

    Anyway, Climate Audit by Steve Mac got me started looking more closely into MMGW claims that were widely being covered in the news/media at the time (2000ish).

    Steve was prompted to use his math/statistics skills (as a non scientist) to question the validity of the “hockey stick” & the rest is history as I’m sure you know.

    He always made it clear that as you quote above ‘I don’t think I’m competent to opine on what causes global warming or not.’ He just pointed out that some Scientists overreach & need checks.

    Can’t resist a comment from the CA blog from many years ago –

    “Posted Nov 24, 2009 at 3:54 AM | Permalink | Reply Not sure what this email is about but it doesn’t sound very good.

    From: “Michael E. Mann”To: Tim OsbornSubject: Re: reconstruction errors Date: Thu, 31 Jul 2003 11:18:24 -0400

    Tim,
    Attached are the calibration residual series for experiments based on available networks
    back to:
    AD 1000
    AD 1400
    AD 1600
    I can’t find the one for the network back to 1820! But basically, you’ll see that the
    residuals are pretty red for the first 2 cases, and then not significantly red for the 3rd
    case–its even a bit better for the AD 1700 and 1820 cases, but I can’t seem to dig them
    up. In any case, the incremental changes are modest after 1600–its pretty clear that key
    predictors drop out before AD 1600, hence the redness of the residuals, and the notably
    larger uncertainties farther back…
    You only want to look at the first column (year) and second column (residual) of the files.
    I can’t even remember what the other columns are!
    Let me know if that helps. Thanks,
    mike
    p.s. I know I probably don’t need to mention this, but just to insure absolutely clarify on
    this, I’m providing these for your own personal use, since you’re a trusted colleague. So
    please don’t pass this along to others without checking w/ me first. This is the sort of
    “dirty laundry” one doesn’t want to fall into the hands of those who might potentially try
    to distort things…”

    Scientists just having a laugh, not so funny in NZ UK now.

    Liked by 1 person

  19. dfhunter,

    I’ve just checked in case a mistake was made when embedding the link, but it doesn’t look like it, and the other link in Robin’s piece works. I suspect the link worked when Robin first wrote his piece five years ago, but no longer does so. Having just googled for the Dilbert Blog, I found something that probably explains it, namely:

    Starting today, this blog is moving to http://dilbert.com/blog/.

    Liked by 2 people

  21. Mike Stoddart (19 Jul 25 at 2:31 pm), you wrote, “… in a democracy, when it comes to the question of what to do about it, we all have an equal say.” Well, that is true when it comes to a general election. But what happens afterwards? Will the politicians respect the vote? Will they even try to respect the vote?

    In short, in our current settlement here in the UK, I feel we have had a huge democratic deficit arise over several decades. We are currently far from Aristotle’s ideal polity and, as professor Richard Lindzen has noted (see above at 19 Jul 25 at 6:58 am), we have “enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the [Western] world that CO2 from human industry [is] a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin.”

    We (throughout the Western world) have a very long way to go in order to correct matters. But are there enough people willing to clean the Augean stables? Or is the current situation too deeply embedded in our political culture for change to occur? Regards, John C.

    Like

  22. dfhunter, I attended a talk given by Steve McIntyre in London in 2010, a few months after Climategate. I recall that some people in the audience were disappointed when he declined to say whether or not he supported the AGW hypothesis.

    Liked by 1 person

  23. But that’s the problem with people who don’t understand the scientific process Robin. It’s not a fan club. There are not supporters on both sides. The correct question would have been to ask him whether he thinks the data (the evidence) supports the AGW hypothesis. His answer may have been rather more interesting and less disappointing.

    Liked by 1 person

  24. Jaime, I think you know my view: I believe McIntyre’s approach was the correct one.

    Like

  25. As always, I think Robin and Jaime are both right in their own ways.

    I don’t think attacking the science and attacking the policy need to be mutually exclusive. We should concentrate on our strengths and each do what we do best. That way we can attack the madness on two fronts.

    Liked by 1 person

  26. Jaimie,

    “It’s not a fan club.”

    Indeed it isn’t, but try telling that to the IPCC. Recall what two of its lead authors, Gary Yohe and Michael Oppenheimer, had to say about it:

    Achieving consensus is, to be clear, one of the major objectives of IPCC activities. Paragraph 10 of the amended Procedures Guiding IPCC Work, for example, states that “In taking decisions, and approving, adopting and accepting reports, the Panel, its Working Groups and any Task Forces shall use all best endeavors to reach consensus.”

    Like everyone else on this website, I am not a climate scientist and so I do not have any expert insight to call upon when deciding the rights and wrongs of climate physics or the need to reduce greenhouse gasses. However, one does not need such an insight to understand that the IPCC’s commitment to using “all best endeavors to reach consensus”, combined with its subsequent use of levels of consensus as a metric for scientific confidence, is a highly problematic practice that undermines its credibility as a scientific authority. So, ultimately, it isn’t one’s own ability to adjudicate on the science that is at issue here, it is one’s ability to adjudicate upon the IPCC’s own methods of adjudication. The reluctance of non-scientists to call out the IPCC and challenge its claims of scientific rigour is one of the reasons why we now find ourselves in this mess. The world is unduly enchanted by the concept of scientific expertise and so fails to hold its practitioners to the necessary scrutiny. That’s why, despite remaining agnostic regarding the climate science, I refuse to be agnostic regarding the climate scientists. And that’s before we even start on the way in which the media reports the science.

    Liked by 5 people

  27. There are a number of points of difference between Robin’s anecdote and climate science that are worth highlighting here, I think.

    The first and most obvious is that if an inertial navigation device doesn’t work, then there is no hiding from that fact. In contrast, computer models making predictions out to 2100 are impossible to assess in 2025.

    Robin had a domain expert, with no bias, to provide advice on the device in question. This advice could be considered trustworthy. Contrast this to governments, who take advice on climate science from a range of sources, some less trustworthy than a rattlesnake, many with far-fetched ideas about their own smarts, as well as noisy demands from those with no official role. Are the domain experts themselves trustworthy? It is hard to believe that they are. One of the qualities that definitely does not hinder progression in climate science is hysteria. Lukewarmers are likely to be pushed aside as the sharp-elbowed doom-mongers move to the fore. Who publishes in the prime journals? Who gets the big grants? Who gets the coveted “impact factors” and the ear of the media? And yet domain “expertise” in climate science is not what it is in, for example, engineering. There is a kernel of fact that is difficult to understand (and I would allege that few climate scientists of the many there are do understand it), upon which an entire scaffold of theoretical impending disaster has been built, piece by rickety piece.

    Should we trust climate science? How can we? Whenever a sceptic finds the time and motivation to deeply scrutinise the most alarming studies, their apocalyptic news evaporates like the dew of the morning. We know that climate science is a social enterprise, and that the only news that matters is “it’s worse than we thought.” Small wonder that there is motivation to produce studies making such reports. Everything is terrible, and it is only going to get worse, they tell us – but we look out of the window and see that, so far at least, nothing bad has happened. As Rode & Fischbeck say of climate science,

    “There is no rational model of decision making that attributes increasing credibility to forecasts upon successive failures.”

    [See my comment under Tony’s 2021 article here.]

    There are a number of reasons why climate change is seized upon so often as the scapegoat for disasters local or national. One of the top is that blaming climate change absolves local officials of culpability in whatever transpired. This factor and others results in a snowball of doom-saying that is ever further from reality.

    Climate science is built on the true idea that a CO2 molecule interacts with IR photons. That’s a tiny dot of paint in the middle of the Jackson Pollock that climate science has become.

    Liked by 4 people

  28. Thanks Mark & Robin for links/tips to the Scott Adams article from 2016.

    Having had a read, I find it a balanced/thoughtful article. Just to give 1 partial quote –

    “For example, if you did not have a deep understanding of the science of persuasion you would have no basis to judge the credibility of climate scientists. You might mistakenly believe it is deeply unlikely for so many professionals to be wrong, and your misunderstanding would bias you toward agreeing with the majority. But trained persuaders who understand economics, incentives, and confirmation bias would put less credibility in the majority opinion because we know how often the majority has hallucinated in ways that look a lot like the climate science situation.”

    “the science of persuasion” – Nudge Nudge wink wink Gov.

    Like

  29. Robin Guenier : 20 Jul 25 at 5:28 pm

    From a scientific perspective I believe Steve McIntyre’s perspective is the correct one. To understand a problem we need to follow the evidence, not filter it through prior beliefs. From a policy perspective this is even more important. A key error in the support of UK net-zero is the belief that it is combatting climate change. But UK emissions policy makes no significant difference to global emissions, and it is not in line with the emissions policies (or lack of emissions reduction policies) of countries with 85% of global emissions. So for UK policy the climate difference between Greta Thunberg (climate apocalypse) and Donald Trump (climate hoax) is between virtually zero and zero difference to climate change. Logically, any money spent by the UK on reducing emissions is wasted.

    Liked by 3 people

  30. Jit explains the mechanics of my approach. John is very correct in pointing out that the IPCC’s Project Consensus is not science and thus you can use that simple fact to cast doubt upon all of what is cast as ‘consensus climate science’ in a general way, without digging into the details. But that’s not my approach. One can remain technically agnostic about the vast and bloated corpus of settled ‘climate science’ yet still pick holes in significant studies by domain ‘experts’ which are being used to drive the narrative:

    Are the domain experts themselves trustworthy? It is hard to believe that they are. One of the qualities that definitely does not hinder progression in climate science is hysteria.

    Should we trust climate science? How can we? Whenever a sceptic finds the time and motivation to deeply scrutinise the most alarming studies, their apocalyptic news evaporates like the dew of the morning. We know that climate science is a social enterprise, and that the only news that matters is “it’s worse than we thought.” Small wonder that there is motivation to produce studies making such reports.

    Scrutinising the most alarming studies – especially extreme weather attribution studies – is what I do (as a non expert, but scientifically literate citizen journalist). In doing so, they reveal themselves as very shoddy often or, just as often, they do not match up to the media hype which promotes them, or even the hype of the authors themselves, who also reveal themselves to be climate activists first, scientists second. Thus, by association, the entire climate consensus project is brought into disrepute once again.

    Liked by 2 people

  31. I should just point out that my approach is fundamentally the same as Steve McIntyre’s approach, although Steve was a lot more methodical and detailed in his criticism of Mann’s hockey stick. Is such an approach infallible? Of course not. it’s a work in progress and I learn more as I go along. On the rare occasions the domain ‘experts’ have deigned to engage with me (Richard Betts, Andrew Dessler, Zeke Hausfather, Paul Williams), I’ve learned more, and am grateful for the interaction, but notably none have succeeded in robustly defending their science. Dessler came close on one occasion, schooling me in stratospheric water vapour radiative forcings, but ultimately, he failed to address the central issue of Hunga Tonga and its possible effect upon global temperature. If you want to remain agnostic that’s fine, but gnosis (knowing) is what drives science and progress, whoever is doing (or attempting to do) the knowing. We are not going to get rid of Net Zero without also demolishing the necessity argument for Net Zero and too few people even now are willing to engage in that task, such is the power of the IPCC enforced consensus.

    Liked by 3 people

  32. Jaime,

    “One can remain technically agnostic about the vast and bloated corpus of settled ‘climate science’ yet still pick holes in significant studies by domain ‘experts’ which are being used to drive the narrative.”

    Of course you can, and indeed you must. I hope my comment wasn’t taken to imply otherwise. This isn’t a question of claiming to have a better understanding of climate science than the climate scientists. Ultimately we are dealing with decision making under uncertainty, which requires expertise in areas for which climate scientists are not renowned. Climate scientists could learn a lot from experts outside of their field (such as risk scientists) but they don’t seem to have done so. Instead, they seem to have teamed up with psychologists, who have managed to turn risk management into nothing more than an exercise in psychological manipulation. As a result, much of what the IPCC has written on the subject of risk and uncertainty does not stand up to scrutiny. Risk experts such as Professor Terje Aven have pointed this out; for example when saying:

    In this article, we have argued that the IPCC assessment reports fall short of a theoretically and conceptually convincing foundation when it comes to the treatment of risk and uncertainties…The important concepts of confidence and likelihood used in the IPCC documents remain too vague to be used consistently and meaningfully in practice.

    And he can say all of this without having to be a climate scientist. He just has to be careful that his criticisms are not misinterpreted. For example, he warns:

    The critical remarks on the treatment of uncertainty and risk should not be interpreted as an expression of skepticism toward the main insights from IPCC climate change reports or even misjudged as a critical position toward the major assumption of anthropogenic climate change. This is also not our main field of expertise. The main purpose of this article is to contribute to strengthening the quality of the complex and ambiguous assessment of future climate change by suggesting improvements in the analytic handling of risks and uncertainty.

    When he talks of ‘suggesting improvements’ I suspect that he is being more than a little diplomatic. We can start by looking at extreme weather attribution…

    https://cliscep.com/2024/11/18/what-climate-scientists-dont-seem-to-get/

    Liked by 3 people

  33. I’m a ‘non-psychologist’ – yet Frontiers in Psychology retracted Professor Lewandowsky academic psychology paper, for being complete unethical crap, when I complained. He tried to pull only credentialed academics can see his data, as did Bristol Uni, and Dorothy Bishop. Science is a process, and if you can point holes, in where the ‘scientist’ screwed up, then you are as much as a ‘scientist’ as the are. I have 2 science degrees, does that make me a ‘qualified scientist’ or do you just have to public unreproducable crap in academic journals, to be call a ‘scientist. (or crap like Fergusson with his pandemic models, bird flu, swine flu, covid) So I’m with Willis on this..

    Liked by 1 person

  34. I’m also not a ‘qualified journalist’ – but articles I have written and contributed to have been reported in the Mail on Sunday, etc. Scott Adams is just wrong. Just big appeals to authority, even a child can say the Emperor has no clothes. Look up Professor Wadham prediction of an Ice free arctic by 2013 – in the Guardian. oops.

    Liked by 1 person

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