There’s a book review at RealClearEnergy you might find interesting. Here’s its opening paragraph:
On January 8, 2014, at New York University in Brooklyn, there occurred a unique event in the annals of global warming: nearly eight hours of structured debate between three climate scientists supporting the consensus on manmade global warming and three climate scientists who dispute it, moderated by a team of six leading physicists from the American Physical Society (APS) led by Dr. Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist at New York University. The debate, hosted by the APS, revealed consensus-supporting climate scientists harboring doubts and uncertainties and admitting to holes in climate science – in marked contrast to the emphatic messaging of bodies such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Read the whole thing.
To some degree the article and the book it reviews is a dialogue between Richard Feynman’s axiom of absolute intellectual honesty and science and striking some balance between such honesty and mitigating risk. My question is somewhat different: how do you mitigate the risk of eschewing absolute intellectual honesty in favor of politically and economically motivated goals?
I have read some of Koonin’s claims, then read the original paper he criticized. It often doesn’t say what he claims. Citing one guy who says their is a dual issue isnt that helpful unless this is something widely believed and then we should look at the details of what they are talking about. That would be intellectually honest but we ca be pretty sure your cited author would never do that.
Steve
“..how do you mitigate the risk of eschewing absolute intellectual honesty in favor of politically and economically motivated goals?”
C’mon. You know the answer to that.
Models are simply functions (equations that always produce one and only one result), and accurate models can predict the future and the past. This is why properly engineered bridges do not collapse.
(Paper and chalkboards were the ‘computer models’ of the past.)
Like political science and economics, climate science is based upon datasets (numbers), and when the datasets change, the models no longer work. Physics and thermodynamics are based upon reality, and therefore, the models always work.
Almost all ‘climate scientists’ are primarily mathematicians, and their expertise is statistics. As soon as it is examined by physicists, the wheels fall off the climate science bus. Unfortunately, the CO2 Malthusian hysteria bus is being driven by politicians and actors.