There is an interesting article in Reason by Ron Bailey, titled "What Climate Science Tells Us About Temperature Trends" (h/t Judith Curry). It is lukewarmish, but, as it's author notes, that is movement from a more sceptical view. It covers a range of issues.
His history shows up, though, in prominence given to sceptic sources that are not necessarily in such good faith. True, he seems to reach a balance, but needs to be more sceptical of scepticism. An example is this:
"A recent example is the June 2019 claim by geologist Tony Heller, who runs the contrarian website Real Climate Science, that he had identified "yet another round of spectacular data tampering by NASA and NOAA. Cooling the past and warming the present." Heller focused particularly on the adjustments made to NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) global land surface temperature trends. "
He concludes that "Adjustments that overall reduce the amount of warming seen in the past suggest that climatologists are not fiddling with temperature data in order to create or exaggerate global warming" so he wasn't convinced by Heller's case. But as I noted here, that source should be completely rejected. It compares one dataset (a land average) in 2017 with something different (Ts, a land/ocean average based on land data) in 2019 and claims the difference is due to "tampering". Although I raised that at the source, no correction or retraction was ever made, and so it still pollutes the discourse.
A different kind of example is the undue prominence accorded to Christy, and Michaels and Rossiter. He does give the counter arguments, and seems to favor those counters. Since the weighting he gives to those sources probably reflects the orientation of his audience, that may in the end be a good thing, but I hope we will get to a state where these recede to their rightful place.
His conclusion is:
"Continued economic growth and technological progress would surely help future generations to handle many—even most—of the problems caused by climate change. At the same time, the speed and severity at which the earth now appears to be warming makes the wait-and-see approach increasingly risky.
Will climate change be apocalyptic? Probably not, but the possibility is not zero. So just how lucky do you feel? Frankly, after reviewing recent scientific evidence, I'm not feeling nearly as lucky as I once did."
Some might see that as still overrating his luck, but it is an article worth reading.
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