I’ve never had any illusions that scientists are other than human, often wrong and silly, and occasionally guilty of deliberate fraud. (I recently wrote about a recent major scientific fraud here, and there have of course been many others.) Science is a human enterprise, so that’s what you’d expect.

You’d particularly expect it in a field where (1) the data is extraordinarily difficult to collect and interpret, and (2) big political interests are vested in the results. Climate change meets both criteria. I have stayed clear of the topic for just those reasons. I’m pretty sure I have never written anything about GW. When it first came to prominence I looked through some of the claims, said to myself: “Youse guys are going to measure the mean temperature of the entire atmosphere to a tenth of a degree, then make corresponding estimates for twenty, fifty, . . . years ago? Uh-huh.” I also noticed the things everyone else who looked at the numbers noticed: e.g. that they showed the planet actually cooling from 1945 to 1965, when big swathes of the world were industrializing like gangbusters and pumping out corresponding amounts of CO2. Uh . . . huh.

This has always seemed to me an area where nothing much definite could be said — certainly nothing definite enough to commit great tranches of public money. If I’ve ever said anything about GW, that’s probably what I said, since it’s what I think.