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Originally Posted by **********
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That's great. You're awesome according to you.
If you want to live in an echo chamber of chicken littles you go ahead. Other people in the real world are trying to make sure that the real scientific method isn't being abused and misused to implement faulty and costly policy decisions. If you think that climate alarmists are beyond manipulating data to bolster their case then you are even more naive than you appear.
Are climate sceptics the real champions of the scientific method?
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Beyon a depressingly binary characterisation of simply pro or anti-science, I'd argue sceptics cannot simply be written off as anti-science or conspiracy theorists (although I am sure one or two may fall into that category). Rather, they see themselves as upholding the standards of what they'd call "real science".
Many climate sceptics worry climate science cannot be dubbed scientific as it is not falsifiable (as in Popper's demarcation criterion). They claim that while elements of climate science may be testable in the lab, the complexity of interactions and feedback loops, as well as the levels of uncertainty in climate models, are too high to be a useful basis for public policy. The relationship of observations to these models are also a worry for climate sceptics. In particular, the role of climate sensitivity.
As well as their use of models, the quality of observations themselves have been open to criticism; some of which have been attempts to clean up issues deriving from the messiness of data collection in the real world (eg the positioning of weather stations), while others have focused on perceived weaknesses in the proxy methods required to calculate historic temperature data such as cross-sections of polar ice sheets and fossilised tree rings.
Such claims are of variable quality, but what unites them is a conviction that data quality in various branches of climate science are below those required by "real science". This poses the question as to when climate science becomes real science and whether only then it can be used in climate policy making. The next question then is through what process of negotiation that stage could or, indeed, should be reached.
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