We have spoken repeatedly about the difference between climate science scepticism and climate science denial. Scepticism is at the heart of the scientific enterprise; a sceptical approach to knowledge claims is consistent with the contingent, or provisional, nature of scientific knowledge.
Climate scientists are themselves sceptical about climate science in that they know that while they have learned a great deal about how our climate works, there is much that is either unknown or that can be known better. With that in mind, I provide for your enlightenment a skceptic’s guide to climate science published by the Berkeleyearth.org. It’s interesting that the Professor of Physics Richard Muller, the founder and scientific director, is a self-admitted ‘converted sceptic’. Indeed, he once believed that the gaps in the scientific knowledge of climate change were so large that he doubted the very existence of global warming. In this op-ed in the New York Times, Muller writes:
Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming.
Although there is strong scientific evidence of human-induced global warming, there are still many issues that are scientifically not settled. Read the following short, but instructive document to learn how to become an informed climate science sceptic. The alternative is to look as uninformed as this guy:
Clouds, Clocks, and Sitting at Tables 