We just watched with front row seats what happens when once trusted scientific authorities rely on poor data, poor communications, and poor models. The general populace starts to distrust and reject them. This is the danger of every apocalyptic climate prediction that fails to come to pass. The desire to scare people into action only tends to push people into distrust and indifference.
1: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
I think climate change is a problem (not a crisis) but it's important to note that if a scientist questions climate science, he becomes a pariah. In such an environment, it's hard to know how much confidence we should have in consensus.
> Models have for a long time shown that the overall global temperature will rise and observations over the years have proved the models reflect reality. Are all models 100% correct with predictions? No, but the trend the models show is proven, even if there is a margin of error which is typically always acknowledged during modelling.
My understanding is that we observe some climate trend over N years and then select the best model proposed in the past. This is where the "oil companies knew about climate change!" accusation comes from. But it's much harder to select the model before taking the measurements and climate models have obviously performed much worse at that.
As a climate scientists I will tell you this is untrue and a harmful legend, as climate science is mostly atmospheric physics, biology and chemistry, it's pretty much very easy to disagree with anyone if you have a good argument supported by data. If you have strong scientific arguments, it does not matter even if the whole world is against you. On the contrary, this will likely make you famous and secure your career. Scientists (at least the curios ones) love to be proven wrong.
That’s a nice idealistic thing to say.
Academia has shown this to be false again and again.
Most groundbreaking ideas or arguments which go against the current wisdom get buried in the best case, and the proponents scorned and driven out of research in the worst case.
It has been like this since the beginning of organized scientific communities, which is understandable. Scientists are humans with the usual shortcomings like ego and pride.
1. Some of the time, scientists behave in an objective manner
2. Theories that are correct have predictive power and are therefore useful (i.e. get results, enable new technologies) and therefore tend to win out
3. "Science advances one funeral at a time" -Max Planck
Other climatologists say otherwise:
https://reason.com/2017/01/04/georgia-tech-climatologist-jud...
There's also a long list of people who were listed as IPCC reviewers, who claim they pointed out serious flaws in the research, were ignored, and whose names were then put on the final report anyway.
2. Given (1) I don't really care what reason.com is, but at any rate, I think right wing think tanks are far less biased and far more reliable than universities, government agencies and left wing think tanks, so that's not a useful or convincing response. Climatology is flooded with money due to their claims of doom, so they're as biased by money and profit as it is possible to be. My experience was that their opponents are barely funded at all and object due to a belief that things labelled as scientific should actually be so.
People who have never done science really like this idea of the general scientific community being some sort of secret society that agrees to support eachothers ideas.
If you put 5 scientists in a room, you can't get them to agree on >anything<. The idea that disagreement is enough to get you outcast from "science" is complete nonsense.
This isn't only true in science, it's true in virtually all parts of human societies. It's hard to go against the grain and you're naive if you think doing so doesn't blight careers.
Also, I'm not saying "heterodox scientists have secret, bulletproof analyses to disprove climate change," I'm saying that there are significant incentives against publishing climate-crisis-skeptical research. I'm unsure how anyone can disagree with that. Acknowledging it doesn't mean denying climate change is real or accepting that its risks are exaggerated.
Questioning the accuracy as a form of dismissal raise the question of what level of accuracy you'd want before accepting the results, and what level of accuracy any countering research should have. Research like this paper also has margins of error, are often single studies or analysis and therefore aren't proven to be accurate themselves. Science evolves all the time, a large amount of the science we experience or rely on day to day cannot be fully modelled with high accuracy but we don't discount reality because the models don't match it.