Do false, improbable, and over-the-top assertions help or hurt the climate campaign?

We’ve always thought “crying wolf” wrecks your credibility.

Now a group of climate-campaigning activists and scientists agree.

David Wojick reports at CFACT.org:

CLINTEL is a rapidly growing international group, led by prominent scientists, that opposes the ill-founded attempts to scare people into hasty climate policy actions. They also oppose the terrorizing of children as part of the false climate alarm. CLINTEL recently issued a World Climate Declaration denouncing scaremongering and this new manifesto provides detailed scientific backup for the WCD for a wide public. The manifesto is authored by Professor Guus Berkhout, the President of CLINTEL.

The focus of the Berkhout manifesto is on climate related modeling, which it says is “unfit for purpose.” The purpose in this case is predicting future climate change. Modeling dominates climate science. It also provides the scary scenarios that drive hugely expensive and disruptive climate emergency action policies. That the models are faulty is a very important finding.

Global warming campaigners take computer simulations (that run hotter than measured reality to begin with) and focus on the most extreme scenarios which never actually occur.  Other warmists take that way out scenario and use it to model extreme weather or other unfortunate climate outcomes, take the most whacky and improbable outcome, and pronounce us all doomed.

Virtually doomed, anyway.

Their deception relies on a media willing to publish scare stories without ever vetting them, and public ignorance of climate history and science.

All too often they get away with convincing the public their naked climate emperor is decked out in resplendent clothes.

This tactic leaves them vulnerable when folks like us lay out the evidence which reveals how naked the climate emperor all-too-often is.  That’s why they are so desperate to censor and silence us.

We posted another piece at CFACT.org which shows scientists backing away from a scary model projection called RCP8.5:

A sizeable portion of the literature on climate impacts refers to RCP8.5 as business as usual, implying that it is probable in the absence of stringent climate mitigation, the scientists explained. The media then often amplifies this message, sometimes without communicating the nuances. This results in further confusion regarding probable emissions outcomes, because many climate researchers are not familiar with the details of these scenarios in the energy-modelling literature.

We’re not sure if it’s better if climate campaigners go on spinning wild yarns that the public can see through, or if they back away and aim for plausibility.

We are sure that facts matter and we’re going to go right on sharing them either way.