So what happened to the science?

There is an excellent guest comment today at the WUWT blog by John Ridgway. There are no graphs, but essentially very sound reflections on the social impacts on a science that gets politicized, as climate science has become.

Let me just cite a few of  what I think are the best remarks in this very readable article:

1. I suspect the problem is that climatologists are making predictions that cannot be readily falsified through appropriate experimentation
2. The lack of falsifiability sets the scene for the achievement of consensus by other means, resulting in a certitude that cannot be taken at face value
3. it is a logical non sequitur to suggest that a model that performs well for the purposes of hindsight will necessarily be reliable for the purposes of making predictions.
4. With the Hockey Stick to hand, the IPCC no longer needed to bury the uncertainty in the body of its reports, since the graph proved that the uncertainty simply didn’t exist…it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the data had been mercilessly tortured for a confession
5. the consensus, rather than being a result of minds being changed during debate and inquiry, instead emerges following a form of sociological natural selection
6. in climatology the situation is worsened by a politically motivated denial of uncertainties and a lack of commitment towards openness and the reproducibility of results

Please read this comment with an open mind!

PS: here for your information how the Mann’s hockey-stick reconstruction differs from that of Loehle (source):

 

Advertisements