Stephen H. Schneider Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Professor, Department of Biology and Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment

“Destroying these guys face to face is usually a piece of cake–they are wrong and usually know less by far than we do, so with a few exceptions, are very easy to debate. The problem is we are not there most of the time for such things and in truth, here comes a big dilemma, I don’t like to debate them-why inflate an intellectual nobody like Lord Monckton to some kind of legitimate prominence given their publication records in serious science–slim to none. We have entry barriers in science to be qualified to even enter a debate over the details–no medical team would let anybody else in so why should we when there really is a thing called climate science expertise. That is a problem in civil society where the notion of citizen scientist is appealing to some, and abused by others. That problem of framing of who is a legitimate debater is not going away anytime soon, and is deliberately exploited by the deniers to get equal status at the bargaining table for outrageous and ridiculous arguments–same as creationists or tobacco defenders. And in the US at least the media buy this way too often–especially now after most have fired their science specialists capable of discerning the quality of an argument. I don’t know how we get around this Mark. Stephen Schneider, p. 172

” … we need to follow the science and not bury our leads every time we talk to the media with two paragraphs of caveats before we even mention irreversible climatic impacts possibilities. Keep the caveats, that is ethically required by honest scientists, just not first maybe?”
Stephen Schneider, p. 173

“A mega heat wave this summer is worth 3 orders of magnitude more in the PR wars–too bad we have to wait for random events since evidence doesn’t seem to cut it anymore with the MSM (oh, sorry, jargon, main stream media). Stephen Schneider, p. 200

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As we all know “exact science” is an oxymoron–but of course there are well established parts not in need of priority rethinking. Nevertheless, we are almost always in the business of refinement of belief with evidence.

But in systems science with few, if any, controlled experiments at scale, where it takes a community sometimes decades to collectively “falsify” some error–like the 4 groups and 20 years it took to show initial assessments of atmospheric cooling from satellite retrievals were based on subtle errors in the original work–we work on the basis of an accumulated preponderance of evidence, and then any new study–pushing that needle of preponderance one way or the other–doesn’t push it very far until a careful and lengthy assessment is performed.

So to me, we are all skeptics–as I was in 1971-73 when I “flipflopped” (as the deniers blogs daily label it) from cooling to warming and proudly published first what was wrong with my own early analysis (all recounted in chapter one of my new book, Science as a Contact Sport) or when my team at NCAR in 1985 took “Nuclear Winter” to Nuclear Autumn” (and I may soon go back again after latest works and move half way back to the original).

That is skepticism–our pride and job. But to claim there is no preponderance of evidence when that is simply because systems science comes in well established, competing explanations and speculative bins, is not skepticism, but denial, pure and simple.

The well-established still exists regardless of remaining uncertainties in the total story, as does the need not to overstate what is well known when what is well established is only part of the story. Proper assessment distinguishes between these categories and assesses confidence that can be had in each tentative conclusion given what is currently known–and that is often a subjective expert group exercise, like at NAS or IPCC assessments–and requires extensive and broad-based peer review for evolving credibility.

So you are hardly abandoning your proper focus on skepticism at SI by rejecting those who insist all details must be fully understood before one accepts some qualified conclusions conditional on the degree of confidence we can have in them based on the strength of the preponderance of evidence. So skeptics yea! deniers boo!!.

Glad you guys are there to keep up that proper scientific tradition. I fear the division of the country into two–to oversimplify–camps: doubt-test paradigm and faith-trust paradigm. Pretty irreconcilable and I’m afraid quite a big part of the fall of science these days in its influence in public discourse–shouting matches in climate change discussions half the time, a very dangerous state of non-communications.

Overthrow of deep belief by accumulating evidence is pretty threatening to maybe half our fellow citizens, and it will not be an easy sell to turn that around anytime soon, whether on evolution or anthropogenic climate change-both beneficiaries of a strong preponderance of evidence, but not all details remotely known and some probably unknowable.

Good luck with it, it won’t be easy either to get that subtle a message about the distinction between true skepticism and ideologically convenient denial through the media these days. Cheers anyway, Stephen Schneider, p. 228