Thou shalt not… call us deniers

Busy weekend, so posting is a little sparse. However, Willis Eschenbach’s post on WUWT in response to Kevin Trenberth’s ludicrous statement that the burden of proof in climate science should be reversed (in other words it should be for the sceptics to prove little or no human influence rather than the other way round – climate madness of the week) contained a wonderful set of recommendations for climate scientists, which I have renamed The Commandments. There’s way more at WUWT, but here they are in all their glory:

You want to regain the trust of the public, for yourself and for climate science? It won’t be easy, but it can be done. Here’s my shortlist of recommendations for you and other mainstream climate scientists:

•  Stop trying to sell the idea that the science is settled. Climate science is a new science, we don’t even have agreement on whether clouds warm or cool the planet, we don’t know if there are thermostatic interactions that tend to maintain some temperature in preference to others. Or as you wrote to Tom Wigley, Dr. T,

“How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter.  We are not close to balancing the energy budget.  The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geoengineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not!  It is a travesty!” [SOURCE: email 1255550975]

Curious. You state strongly to your friend that we’re not close to knowing where the energy is going or to balancing the energy budget, yet you say in public that we know enough to take the most extraordinary step of reversing the null hypothesis … how does that work again?

At this point, there’s not much about climate science that is “unequivocal” except that the climate is always changing.

•  Don’t try to change the rules of the game in mid-stream. It makes you look desperate, whether you are or not.

•  Stop calling people “deniers”, my goodness, after multiple requests that’s just common courtesy and decency, where are your manners? It makes you look surly and uncivilized, whether you are or not.

•  Stop avoiding public discussion and debate of your work. You are asking us to spend billions of dollars based on your conclusions. If you won’t bother to defend those conclusions, don’t bother us with them. Refusing to publicly defend your billion dollar claims make it look like you can’t defend them, whether you can or not.

•  Stop secretly moving the pea under the walnut shells. You obviously think we are blind, you also clearly believe we wouldn’t remember that you said we have a poor understanding of the climate system. Disabuse yourself of the idea that you are dealing with fools or idiots, and do it immediately. As I have found to my cost, exposing my scientific claims to the cruel basilisk gaze of the internet is like playing chess with Deep Blue … individual processors have different abilities, but overall any faults in my ideas will certainly be exposed. Too many people looking at my ideas from too many sides for much to slip through. Trying anything but absolute honesty on the collective memory and wisdom of the internet makes you look like both a fool and con man, whether you are one or not.

•  Write scientific papers that don’t center around words like “possibly” or “conceivably” or “might”. Yes, possibly all of the water molecules in my glass of water might be heading upwards at the same instant, and I could conceivably win the Mega-Ball lottery, and I might still play third base for the New York Yankees, but that is idle speculation that has no place in scientific inquiry. Give us facts, give us uncertainties, but spare us the stuff like “This raises the possibility that by 2050, this could lead to the total dissolution of all inter-atomic bonds …”. Yeah, I suppose it could. So what, should I buy a lottery ticket?

• Stop lauding the pathetic purveyors of failed prophecies. Perhaps you climate guys haven’t noticed, but Paul Ehrlich was not a visionary genius. He was a failure whose only exceptional talent is the making of apocalyptic forecasts that didn’t come true. In any business he would not have lasted one minute past the cratering collapse of his first ridiculous forecast of widespread food riots and worldwide deaths from global famine in the 1980s … but in academia, despite repeating his initial “We’re all gonna crash and burn, end of the world coming up soon, you betcha” prognostication method several more times with no corresponding crashing burning or ending, he’s still a professor at Stanford. Now that’s understandable under tenure rules, you can’t fire him for being a serially unsuccessful doomcaster. But he also appears to be one of your senior AGW thinkers and public representatives, which is totally incomprehensible to me.

His string of predicted global catastrophes that never came anywhere near true was only matched by the inimitable collapses of the prophecies of his wife Anne, and of his cohorts John Holdren and the late Stephen Schneider. I fear we’ll never see their like again, a fearsome foursome who between them never made one single prediction that actually came to pass. Stop using them as your spokesmodels, it doesn’t increase confidence in your claims.

•  Enough with the scary scenarios, already. You’ve done the Chicken Little thing to death, give it a rest, it is sooo last century. It makes you look both out-of-date and hysterical whether you are or not.

•  Speak out against scientific malfeasance whenever and wherever you see it. This is critical to the restoration of trust. I’m sick of watching climate scientists doing backflips to avoid saying to Lonnie Thompson “Hey, idiot, archive all of your data, you’re ruining all of our reputations!”. The overwhelming silence of mainstream AGW scientists on these matters is one of the (unfortunately numerous) reasons that the public doesn’t trust climate scientists, and justifiably so. You absolutely must clean up your own house to restore public trust, no one else can do it. Speak up. We can’t hear you.

•  Stop re-asserting the innocence of you and your friends. It makes you all look guilty, whether you are or not … and since the CRU emails unequivocally favor the “guilty” possibility, it makes you look unapologetic as well as guilty. Whether you are or not.

•  STOP HIDING THINGS!!! Give your most private data and your most top-secret computer codes directly to your worst enemies and see if they can poke holes in your ideas. If they can’t, then you’re home free. That is true science, not hiding your data and gaming the IPCC rules to your advantage.

•  Admit the true uncertainties. The mis-treatment of uncertainty in the IPCC reports, and the underestimation of true uncertainty in climate science in general, is a scandal.

•  Scrap the IPCC. It has run its race. Do you truly think that whatever comes out of the next IPCC report will make the slightest difference to the debate? You’ve had four IPCC reports in a row, each one more alarmist than the previous one. You’ve had every environmental organization shilling for you. You’ve had billions of dollars in support, Al Gore alone spent $300 million on advertising and advocacy. You’ve had 25 years to make your case, with huge resources and supercomputers and entire governments on your side, and you are still losing the public debate … after all of that, do you really think another IPCC report will change anything?

Brilliantly put, and it’s all anyone could ask.