I hope the Climate Activists are proud of the effect their lies are having on the younger generation

Nick1967: 
 

Does it really matter who is wrong or right?  

Yes, it does. We need to know how the physical world works. First, so we can make life better for everyone (supplying enough food, caring for health). Second, so that in the course of doing the first we don't wreck it (for example, by basing the world's diet on beef). 

The other point is that climate scientists have been hassled and intimidated and threatened by politicians and others for pursuing their science and informing us of the results. Some of that is treated in Michael Mann's 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (Columbia University Press). It is thoroughly disgusting. It is not the first time it has happened. Most obviously, it happened with the “Tobacco Wars”. That issue was resolved in two ways. First, tobacco companies may have been powerful (large companies usually do have a short line to politics) but in the end there are just too many good scientists who produce evidence, and more evidence and more evidence. Second, investigation into what the companies themselves knew showed they knew all about tobacco causing cancer and other diseases. In other words, there was in fact consensus. 

I think lessons were learned from the tobacco wars. Climate scientists early on agreed that there needed to be a global consensus-building organisation which published regular reports on the state of the science. That is the IPCC. 

The other, interesting lesson is the connection between the two. Not a scientific connection, but a personnel/political connection, laid out in detail in Oreskes and Conway's 2010 book Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury). 

So what will be the next big thing? How can we deal with it more humanely? As it turns out, Covid-19. This is different because of course it really is an emergency. There is no time for the careful consensus building over decades which characterises the IPCC. The usual pseudoscientific tropes have reemerged with the Covid-19 situation. But it is different from tobacco/cancer or anthropogenic climate change in that there are no major powerful interests vested in denying the existence of the disease. I think, also, that medical-scientifically we have been incredibly lucky with it. The fact that there were vaccines on the roll within months, and that some of them are more efficacious than any existing vaccine for any other illness you can think of. (That of course is not happenstance - it is the result of brilliant science and careful development over decades, and we are lucky in that in some sense the science was “ready for it” when Covid-19 came along. It is no coincidence that the ChAdOx1-based malaria vaccine has shown this year similarly high efficaciousness in its first trials. Hill, Gilbert and Pollard are well on the way to saving the world twice in two years!)

Then there are other matters to which science is important, indeed crucial, but in some sense peripheral, such as nuclear-fission power plants (NPPs). There are people who argue that we need them as part of sustainable development - indeed, you will find people arguing that elsewhere on this forum. And then there are people who argue that NPPs are not sustainable, for two reasons. One of which is waste disposal, which has not ever been solved. The other is the existential risk they pose when they go awry. 

(For me personally, that is the longest connection to scientific-engineering controversy, since I started working at the CEGB running computer code for the finite-element stress analysis of pressure vessels fifty years ago, before I went to college.)

Concerning controversy, there is the mother of them all, of course, evolution/creation of species of living creatures. 170 years and still going strong. Many of the tropes and argumentation styles that one finds in climate-change controversy were developed here (including those used by at least one nominal contributor to the current discussion) and have been thoroughly discussed and analysed by eminent philosophers of science. One imagines there is not a lot to say there that hasn't been said, but actually there is always stuff coming down the pike. 

Then of course there is science itself. What is it? How come it finds the truth? (If there indeed is any such thing as truth to be found, say some.) 

 

 You can't go wrong with the SDGs and good governance so why not adopt them as soon as possible.  

We can certainly agree on that. Others will say it “costs too much”. The paucity of that argument has been pointed out through Covid. As Keynes is reported to have said, nothing ever costs too much if it is effective and feasible (I have just looked for the quote. Can't find it.)

BTW, there is a nice paper in Nature from 2019 by Santer et al celebrating three key happenings in climate science in 1979, one of which was Hasselmann's fingerprinting technique. Nature have made it open-access to celebrate Hasselmann's Nobel Prize. It is short and very readable:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0424-x.epd

Nick1967: 
 

Does it really matter who is wrong or right?  

Yes, it does. We need to know how the physical world works. First, so we can make life better for everyone (supplying enough food, caring for health). Second, so that in the course of doing the first we don't wreck it (for example, by basing the world's diet on beef). 

The other point is that climate scientists have been hassled and intimidated and threatened by politicians and others for pursuing their science and informing us of the results. Some of that is treated in Michael Mann's 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars (Columbia University Press). It is thoroughly disgusting. It is not the first time it has happened. Most obviously, it happened with the “Tobacco Wars”. That issue was resolved in two ways. First, tobacco companies may have been powerful (large companies usually do have a short line to politics) but in the end there are just too many good scientists who produce evidence, and more evidence and more evidence. Second, investigation into what the companies themselves knew showed they knew all about tobacco causing cancer and other diseases. In other words, there was in fact consensus. 

I think lessons were learned from the tobacco wars. Climate scientists early on agreed that there needed to be a global consensus-building organisation which published regular reports on the state of the science. That is the IPCC. 

The other, interesting lesson is the connection between the two. Not a scientific connection, but a personnel/political connection, laid out in detail in Oreskes and Conway's 2010 book Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury). 

So what will be the next big thing? How can we deal with it more humanely? As it turns out, Covid-19. This is different because of course it really is an emergency. There is no time for the careful consensus building over decades which characterises the IPCC. The usual pseudoscientific tropes have reemerged with the Covid-19 situation. But it is different from tobacco/cancer or anthropogenic climate change in that there are no major powerful interests vested in denying the existence of the disease. I think, also, that medical-scientifically we have been incredibly lucky with it. The fact that there were vaccines on the roll within months, and that some of them are more efficacious than any existing vaccine for any other illness you can think of. (That of course is not happenstance - it is the result of brilliant science and careful development over decades, and we are lucky in that in some sense the science was “ready for it” when Covid-19 came along. It is no coincidence that the ChAdOx1-based malaria vaccine has shown this year similarly high efficaciousness in its first trials. Hill, Gilbert and Pollard are well on the way to saving the world twice in two years!)

Then there are other matters to which science is important, indeed crucial, but in some sense peripheral, such as nuclear-fission power plants (NPPs). There are people who argue that we need them as part of sustainable development - indeed, you will find people arguing that elsewhere on this forum. And then there are people who argue that NPPs are not sustainable, for two reasons. One of which is waste disposal, which has not ever been solved. The other is the existential risk they pose when they go awry. 

(For me personally, that is the longest connection to scientific-engineering controversy, since I started working at the CEGB running computer code for the finite-element stress analysis of pressure vessels fifty years ago, before I went to college.)

Concerning controversy, there is the mother of them all, of course, evolution/creation of species of living creatures. 170 years and still going strong. Many of the tropes and argumentation styles that one finds in climate-change controversy were developed here (including those used by at least one nominal contributor to the current discussion) and have been thoroughly discussed and analysed by eminent philosophers of science. One imagines there is not a lot to say there that hasn't been said, but actually there is always stuff coming down the pike. 

Then of course there is science itself. What is it? How come it finds the truth? (If there indeed is any such thing as truth to be found, say some.) 

 

 You can't go wrong with the SDGs and good governance so why not adopt them as soon as possible.  

We can certainly agree on that. Others will say it “costs too much”. The paucity of that argument has been pointed out through Covid. As Keynes is reported to have said, nothing ever costs too much if it is effective and feasible (I have just looked for the quote. Can't find it.)

BTW, there is a nice paper in Nature from 2019 by Santer et al celebrating three key happenings in climate science in 1979, one of which was Hasselmann's fingerprinting technique. Nature have made it open-access to celebrate Hasselmann's Nobel Prize. It is short and very readable:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0424-x.epd