Making Science Public » Are climate sceptics the real champions of the scientific method?

"At the Science in Public conference, which we hosted in July, Alice Bell convened a panel on science and the green movement. Following the conference Alice asked me to contribute to a series of posts on the same theme for the Guardian’s Political Science blog, focusing on my research area of climate scepticism. The post caused something of a stir, drawing over 700 comments and plenty of positive and negative comment ‘below the line’ as well as on other blogs (see bottom for links). The article is reposted in full here ... Many climate sceptics worry climate science cannot be dubbed scientific as it is not falsifiable (as in Popper’s demarcation criterion). They claim that while elements of climate science may be testable in the lab, the complexity of interactions and feedback loops, as well as the levels of uncertainty in climate models, are too high to be a useful basis for public policy. The relationship of observations to these models are also a worry for climate sceptics. In particular, the role of climate sensitivity.  As well as their use of models, the quality of observations themselves have been open to criticism; some of which have been attempts to clean up issues deriving from the messiness of data collection in the real world (eg the positioning of weather stations), while others have focused on perceived weaknesses in the proxy methods required to calculate historic temperature data such as cross-sections of polar ice sheets and fossilised tree rings.  Such claims are of variable quality, but what unites them is a conviction that data quality in various branches of climate science are below those required by 'real science'. This poses the question as to when climate science becomes real science and whether only then it can be used in climate policy making. The next question then is through what process of negotiation that stage could or, indeed, should be reached ..."