Michael E. Mann: FiveThirtyEight: The Number of Things Nate Silver Gets Wrong About Climate Change
As a result, Nate's chapter on climate change (Chapter 12: "A Climate of Healthy Skepticism") is marred by straw man claims that don't stand up to scrutiny. These include the assertion that (a) climate scientist James Hansen's famous 1998 predictions overestimated global warming (they didn't)Nate Silver, 2009: Despite Protests, Some Reason for Optimism in Copenhagen
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Nate cherry-picks a single sound bite ("our statements [should not be] so laden in uncertainty that no one even listens.") to once again reinforce the false narrative that scientists are understating uncertainty. The point I was actually making was that we cannot spend so much time talking about what we don't know, that we don't end up telling the public what we do know.
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Most disappointing to me of all was the false equivalence that Nate draws between the scientific community's efforts to fight back against intentional distortions and attacks by an industry-funded attack machine, and the efforts of that attack machine itself. He characterizes this simply as a battle between "consensus" scientists and "skeptical" individuals, as if we're talking about two worthy adversaries in a battle. This framing is flawed on multiple levels, not the least of which is that those he calls "skeptics" are in fact typically no such thing. There is a difference between honest skepticism -- something that is not only valuable but necessary for the progress of science -- and pseudo-skepticism, i.e. denialism posing as "skepticism" for the sake of obscuring, rather than clarifying, what is known.
there is quite a lot at stake here. And the protests -- and the serious, somewhat anxious mood that permeates the Bella Center -- may in some sense be taken as a good sign...Diverse as the participants are here at the Bella Center, perhaps 30-40 percent of the attendees are English-speaking Americans.
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