Climate science today is suffering from an acute crisis of confidence. You could point to the “ClimateGate” conspiracy-that-wasn’t, or the occasional mis-statements, over-estimates and outright exaggerations in the writings and statements of prominent climate change activists, from Tim Flannery to the IPCC itself. But put aside the ad hominem attacks, ignore the wilfully misconstrued attacks on the impartiality of science, and at the root of the problem is the nature of the science itself. Climate science, like so much else in our modern world, relies upon models in order to predict outcomes on the basis of changed starting conditions.
In this, climate science is not dissimilar to virtually any other discipline of science. There are very few sciences that rest solely upon observation of the natural world. Our understanding of everything from meteorology to the physics of light and electromagnetism, from chemistry to biochemistry, to genetics and growth… virtually every scientific endeavour operates within modelled frameworks that allow us to understand, make sense of and frame the raw data. But in the case of climate science, the politics and entrenched interests with an intent to discredit the science have latched upon the “falsifiability” component of modern scientific practice as a means to challenge the outcomes. Climate science appears to be uniquely privileged in this way: we don’t hear armchair critics arguing that the law of gravity might be wrong because it’s built on models.
Random Pariah 