One of my favorite blogs is David Appell’s Quark Soup. I started reading it a year ago, when he was doing yeoman’s work on Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick’s effort to debunk Mann, Bradley and Hughes’ “hockey stick” paleoclimatic reconstruction.

I’m hooked on the comments section of David’s blog. But I’m beginning to think it’s a less-than-useful addiction, in ways that may shed some light on the continuously unpleasant and ultimately unresolvable nature of what I (apparently somewhat unoriginally) have come to call “the climate wars.” I think the climate comment wars in David’s blog also may highlight an interesting problem that is endemic to the arena, which the climate scientists over at the new RealClimate blog already appear to be confronting.

(More below the fold.)
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If people want to learn about Mann’s hockey stick, I think they should go here rather than some of the other places they might accidentally end up.

From today’s Journal, on Michael Crichton:

It is perhaps fitting that Crichton, whose “Jurassic Park” so informed (and uninformed) our public understanding of paleontology, would become our new public expositor on the complex and contentious issues of climate science.

Fitting, but not necessarily helpful.

I’m a pundit!

Steven Milloy, proprietor of a site called JunkScience.com, has earned something of a reputation for tackling what he calls “Junk Science.” Lately, you can find his work on the Fox News web site, including his latest climate change screed. What you won’t find mentioned there is the remarkable tale laid out by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber about how Big Tobacco helped launch Milloy’s career as a science debunker. And we all know about Big Tobacco’s long-standing interest in ensuring that the best science is used to bolster public policy. More recently, Milloy has served as a registered lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, which might seem relevant for a news organization such as Fox to disclose to its readers.

In today’s episode, we see Milloy plying his trade, using the work of Ohio State climate researcher Lonnie Thompson to argue, essentially, “Hey, climate change happens all the time. What’s the big deal?”

Specifically, he quotes Thompson as follows, in an apparent attempt to use Thompson’s words to bolster his argument that our understanding of climate is not good enough to support the claim that greenhouse gases are a bad thing:

?Any prudent person would agree that we don?t yet understand the complexities with the climate system,? said Thompson.

Now let’s look at the entire quote, helpfully linked for us by Ray over at RealClimate:

“The climate system is remarkably sensitive to natural variability,” he said. “It?s likely that it is equally sensitive to effects brought on by human activity, changes like increased greenhouse gases, altered land-use policies and fossil-fuel dependence.

“Any prudent person would agree that we don?t yet understand the complexities with the climate system and, since we don?t, we should be extremely cautious in how much we ?tweak? the system,” he said.

Rather different, don’ t you think?

(The RealClimate crew considers some of Milloy’s other climate writing here.)

My climate science blogging brethren have been typing up a storm about Naomi Oreskes’ Dec. 3 Science essay on the consensus about climate change, and amidst all the noise I missed Roger Pielke Jr.’s thoughtful take (he’s quoting here in his blog from a 2001 Nature paper):

Consider once again global climate change. For many years, policy debate has centred on the degree of certainty that decision-makers ought to attach to competing visions of the future climate. Lost in this doomed enterprise is the point that climate will certainly have an increasingly strong effect on the environment and society, simply because of growing vulnerability related to factors such as population, wealth and use of land. If a goal of climate policy is to reduce the effects of climate on the environment and society, then effective action need not wait until we are more certain about details.

Seen in this light, efforts to reduce uncertainty via ‘consensus science’ – such as scientific assessments – are misplaced. Consensus science can provide only an illusion of certainty. When consensus is substituted for a diversity of perspectives, it may in fact unnecessarily constrain decision-makers’ options. Take for example weather forecasters, who are learning that the value to society of their forecasts is enhanced when decision-makers are provided with predictions in probabilistic rather than categorical fashion and decisions are made in full view of uncertainty. As a general principle, science and technology will contribute more effectively to society’s needs when decision-makers base their expectations on a full distribution of outcomes, and then make choices in the face of the resulting – perhaps considerable – uncertainty.