[kerp322]

The article had a promising start, and I had hoped it would offer some valuable insights to the present day anti-science movement in America, but it instead delivered the same kind of unscientific extrapolation it sought to criticize.

I am tempted to cut it some slack since it was written in the early 2000s, but i think the author fundamentally misunderstands the role of computer models and predictions in climate science. These models have always been treated with great scrutiny even by climate scientists, and in the present day thousands of plausible futures are considered in ensemble when thinking about the future of climate change. No, these models are not used to prove anthropogenic influence on climate. That was already accomplished without predictive models. Models are used as exploratory tools for planning and policy.

Despite the article’s issues, i did appreciate the author’s suggestions for removing bias from science:

“ Sooner or later, we must form an independent research institute in this country. It must be funded by industry, by government, and by private philanthropy, both individuals and trusts. The money must be pooled, so that investigators do not know who is paying them. The institute must fund more than one team to do research in a particular area, and the verification of results will be a foregone requirement: teams will know their results will be checked by other groups. In many cases, those who decide how to gather the data will not gather it, and those who gather the data will not analyze it.”