One point that it looks like Curry takes aim with more generally is the degree to which there is a consensus about global warming among scientists. She says that 97% of scientists can't believe in it because they haven't studied it or built their own models, etc -- they have "second order belief"

That's an important epistemological point to make. I guess we should all make our own GCMs to confirm for ourselves that we believe in AGW?? Sure maybe if we all had unlimited time. In science we share a common set of methodological beliefs and assumptions-- maybe there's a breakdown for her there, but I'd like to think the at the research institutions and tools that exist help accurately propagate true findings to the public especially in a matter that's as pressing to our long term wellbeing as climate change!

Research institutions did a pretty poor job of telling us cholesterol consumption causes atherosclerosis. Largely because we discounted minority scientific opinion.

> One point that it looks like Curry takes aim with more generally is the degree to which there is a consensus about global warming among scientists. She says that 97% of scientists can't believe in it because they haven't studied it or built their own models, etc -- they have "second order belief"

In the post below, her primary complaint about the 97% stat is that it doesn't specify the amount of climate change that those people attributed to humans: "After discarding the abstracts that were judged to have taken no position, Cook (2013) reported a 97% consensus that anthropogenic GHGs were causing global warming. However, three-fourths of that consensus was judged to be implied and more than 98% of the agreement was expressed non-quantitatively. Consequently, no widespread consensus exists in these abstracts that humans are responsible for most of the global warming; only that humans are responsible for an unspecified amount of global warming."

https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/20/what-is-there-a-97-consen...

I think the 97% stat provides a useful opportunity for those of us who would like to get to truth of the matter but haven't studied climatology and have no interest in spending years studying the subject just to determine the truth of this particular issue. So much of the argument about the subject is "they're wrong, I'm right" followed by technical explanation that you cannot tell who to trust. But you can understand how the 97% claim was reached. It provides a useful opportunity to gauge who to trust on the subject, although admittedly still requires careful consideration and more time that most will commit.

This John Stuart Mill quote seems apt: "People more happily situated, who sometimes hear their opinions disputed, and are not wholly unused to be set right when they are wrong, place the same unbounded reliance only on such of their opinions as are shared by all who surround them, or to whom they habitually defer: for in proportion to a man's want of confidence in his own solitary judgement, does he usually repose, with implicit trust, on the infallibility of "the world" in general. And the world, to each individual, means the part of it with which he comes in contact; his party, his sect, his church, his class of society: the man may be called, by comparison, almost liberal and large-minded to whom it means anything so comprehensive as his own country or his own age. Nor is his faith in his collective authority at all shaken by his being aware that other ages, countries, sects, churches, classes, and parties have thought, and even now think, the exact reverse. He develops upon his own world the responsibility of being in the right against the dissentient worlds of other people; and it never troubles him that mere accident has decided which of these numerous worlds is the object of his reliance, and that the same cause which make him a Churchman in London, would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Pekin."

This is, like, the worst, most unconvincing way to make the (legitimate) point that she's wrong on climate science.

If I wrote a long essay, seasoned with the same phrasing, terminology, and reasoning used by credible academics, that proclaimed the spaghetti monster was real, you would be wise to dismiss my argument out-of-hand without personally reading it unless you were persuaded otherwise by someone or something else. Wasting your time on the off-chance that I had something relevant and substantive to offer would be a poor gamble.

Ad hominem is an informal fallacy, not a logical fallacy. A logical fallacy always makes an argument invalid. An informal fallacy makes an argument extremely suspect, but context matters. Unless you can instantly read and criticize all the arguments published everyday, or unless you're immortal and don't care about timely application or responses to arguments, you must structure your approach to acquiring knowledge. Alternatively, you could go through life haphazardly, allowing coincidence or, more often, wealth and social station to dictate the ideas you're exposed to.

Your point would stand if climate skeptics were earnest and constructive participants. But they've shown themselves not to be.

In short, credibility matters. Climate skeptics as a group lack credibility, and climate skeptic arguments as a class lack prima facie credibility. In the context of climate change discourse, pointing out (with citation) that an author is a bone fide climate skeptic (a label and affiliation with substance in our times) is totally legitimate, IMO.

I appreciate that some people with idle time are willing to dive in and provide more substantive criticism. But such earnest people aren't always around, and even reading their analyses takes time. I think it's fair to argue credibility, just like it's fair to argue credibility wrt EmDrive without painstaking analysis of wild quantum mechanical hypotheses.

This would be fair if she wasn't arguing that the credibility of healthy skepticism shouldn't be tarnished in science.

"Climate believers" attack her credibility, she defends her credibility, but her arguments are invalid from the start because she's not credible?

The group of people who want to research the grandiose climate change narrative from a skeptical angle are attacked because of political reasons not because what they are doing is wrong scientifically.

Climate science should be thankful she exists, not offended.

Sorry? Sure, don't feel the need to believe any of their refutations, but you can follow their links to her statements and decide whether or not you agree with her take.

My point was that what you wrote was the opposite of convincing. If I start googling everything myself, then sure. I wouldn't have had any problem with your comment if you just wrote "here are her views, and here are the rebuttals", like the page you linked to does, and like the other commenters have already done in this thread. As it stands, your comment isn't ad hominem, but saying she is a bit of a skeptic is wrong-headed as a way to point out that she's wrong on climate science, it does less than nothing to advance that point.

Okay, that makes sense, I agree with you there. Thanks for making that point. What maybe would have been better and a less normative way to make the point is that she has as track record of writing and making statements that advance claims that are outside the mainstream of climate science.

They are not just outside the mainstream, but fundamentally not backed up by known physics and statistics.

This is an ad hominem attack and has no bearing on this specific article about what climate models are.

In an ideal situation for science writing, who someone is, their agenda, etc, shouldn't matter for interpretation right? But here having read the piece without that context, and then having someone point out who the author was really changed my interpretation- for better or for worse.

Many of the points she makes about statistical validity make sense - complex, non linear systems are difficult to predict, models need to be validated on data different from their training sets, etc. So those points, without digging into the real meat of how they're applied to these models specifically -- which she knows lawyers won't, serve to mislead.

I think what's also at the heart of this discussion though is whether what she's writing really is science or if it's opinion/has an agenda. When one puts oneself in the position of writing an overview like this, well then maybe it's one's responsibility to present (as well as complicate) the general consensus rather than present an argument that is not that mainstream as more of a consensus then it really is.