Science and scepticism

Recently, a friend sent me a very interesting article (in Romanian). The author, a professor of geosciences at the City University of New York, uses Russell’s teapot as an analogy for the current state of climate science. Otherwise said, claiming to stand for freedom of thought and inquiry, he accuses climate scientists of making unfalsifiable claims that are not supported by empirical evidence.

This was disturbing to me. After all, I would not be too happy to have changed the direction of my life towards the reduction and mitigation of climate change for nothing. It made me spend a few restless nights peering into this article and the climate ‘realist’ movement in general.

So what are the points made by climate ‘realists’? Well, even though the planet is indeed warming (would be a bit weird to claim it is not), according to them this change in temperature is overwhelmingly caused by natural phenomena such as solar cycles or orbital variations. Most of the carbon going into the atmosphere is of natural origin (such as plant decomposition), they say, and anyway, carbon dioxide concentrations lag behind temperature changes by six months. Not to mention that they believe that climate models that scientists fawn over are so flawed that they’re not worth using.

Yes, dear reader, of course all the claims in the previous paragraph are incorrect

Yes, dear reader, of course all the claims in the previous paragraph are incorrect. I’ve found that climate denial, and then scepticism, and then realism (the name depends on how visible the effects of climate change become) rely on decades of rhetorical tricks, crass methodological errors, cherry-picking empirical data, and, most importantly, a fundamental lack of curiosity. If one of the most prominent climate realists being pushed online does not know the difference between standard deviation and root mean square error, then what does that say about those who use his arguments?

Climate denial has existed ever since oil companies found out about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, and will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. But it’s never been as widespread as today. The climate ‘realists’ are represented by legions of think-tanks, independent ‘inquirers’, and blogs, with their own extensive network of climate realist websites, climate realist papers, and (of course, non-peer-reviewed) climate realist journals. They create a false narrative of science that completely opposes the one that already exists, which is the modern discipline of climatology, based on decades of empirical measurements, knowledge of fundamental physical phenomena, and breakthroughs in computing and modelling techniques.

Real climate experts derive knowledge from empirical evidence, based on which they make a scientific claim. But climate ‘realists’ start out by making a claim and then find a source that proves it afterwards. And as long as the citation looks academic, does it matter that the author wouldn’t pass WI2180LR-II Probability and Statistics?

Well, I think it matters. I am not against being sceptical – scepticism is the foundation of good science, and it is healthy when faced with so many conflicting narratives. But you can’t only be sceptical towards those you don’t like.