Since it’s Friday and we’re sure you all have big plans for the weekend that you can’t wait to get started on, because weekends are totally different from weekdays when you’re working from home, we’ll keep it short today with a simple reminder that deniers aren’t debating in good faith.
Yesterday Twitter user @DawnTJ90 shared quote cards with various climate scientists pictured and their affiliations listed, seemingly expressing doubt and derision for climate models. One takes a quote from Katharine Hayhoe, “we have to understand natural variability better than we do today,” and puts it under the heading “Climate Prediction Fails,” with the tweet claiming she “admits climate models are inept.” Another portrays Dr. Kevin Trenberth as giving a list of “Climate model failures,” like precipitation, aerosols and clouds. A third uses a quote from Dr. Kate Marvel supposedly saying “Clouds are a hot mess.”
What’s the deal? To their credit, Dawn includes “Carbon Brief Jan 2018” as a citation. While vague, it was enough to lead us to the source, an in-depth look at how scientists think climate models need to be improved.
It reveals that while the direct quotes Dawn posted are accurate, the hyperbolic paraphrasing surrounding and describing the quotes are not. Since quote-mining and misrepresentation is a cornerstone of denial, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
What’s slightly more interesting here is that it demonstrates that even as deniers accuse the climate science community of overemphasizing the certainty or accuracy of models, they will still turn around and use any honest discussion about how to improve climate models as admissions of their failure and worthlessness.
No matter what a climate scientist says about climate models, deniers are either going to attack them for overstating their value, or misrepresent their valid critiques as though they’re admissions that models are useless.
While the last thing deniers are going to do is the actual work and scholarship it takes to model the climate, there’s one thing they always succeed at: modeling misbehavior.