The important criticism of climate science is very different from the criticism that Spencer Weart choses to respond to. Compare the financial crisis and the c

The important criticism of climate science is very different from the criticism that Spencer Weart choses to respond to. Compare the financial crisis and the climate crisis. The origin of the financial crisis lies in people believing. Believing that house prices never fall, believing that structured financial products reduce risk. Critics do not impugn the motives of the believers. Helping minorities to buy houses, moving financial risk to those who can shoulder it, these are noble aims. Critics complain that those in charge should have been intellectually rigorous but were merely well meaning and enthusiastic and that this was sufficient to cause disaster. Contrast this with the climate crisis. Climate science is excused its bumbling amateurism on the grounds that ad hoc adjustments to the data are not sinister. The excuse for losing the raw data and the calibration scripts is that, far from attempting a fraud, the researchers are well meaning and enthusiastic. We want to know whether the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming is true. The allegation against against climate scientists is that they should have been intellectually rigorous but that they stand revealed as, at best, merely well meaning and enthusiastic. This works no better in science than it does in finance.