Nice summary of how science works. The problem is a vast majority of folk wouldn’t understand your article or indeed the layman’s version. Hence they go with popular media which is full of bias, opinion and misinformation. Using the scientific consensus to fight against such is always going to be an uphill battle.
But science marches on, with growing amounts of data and evidence, particularly in the climate field, which helps us adjust and refine our understanding. The good news is, most of the world is responding, albeit slower than we really need.
Great description of the scientific process and the ozone hole is an excellent example. This level of the scientific process should be addressed in high school as well as the individual process.
Great post, Andrew. One thing worth adding: the timescales work in our favor for the predictions you describe — the stratosphere/troposphere prediction made in 1967, verified 20 years later. The Arctic-warming-faster prediction from the 1970s, confirmed within a few decades. Most of science gets to operate this way. Theory, experiment, verification, refinement, all within a working scientist’s career.
The harder communication problem is that the most consequential predictions about climate operate on timescales much longer than a scientist’s career — or any policy horizon. The CO₂ we add this decade is still warming the planet a thousand years from now. The sea level commitment from the warming we have already locked in will play out over centuries to millennia. These are physical predictions as solid as the ones you describe, but they will not be confirmed within any living scientist’s career, and they will not be confirmed within any voter’s political horizon. That is the experiment we are running, and it is the part of the science that the public conversation has the hardest time holding onto.
In my years in the Creation v. Evolution forum (talk·origins), we spent a lot of time discussing how science works and trying to convince the Creationists that, no, "creation science" wasn't being blackballed by a conspiracy of nefarious atheists out to disprove God. Scientists weren't just being meany-heads to "creation theorists," but meany-heads to each other all of the time. We likened their demands to be accepted and published without review to their team playing with kiddie-league rules in the NFL.
Unfortunately, Economics doesn't follow the scientific process properly since it takes into account only short term, and their formulations do not realize that Earth is finite, and the emissions, pollution and biodiversity loss can't provide infinite growth. A new Economics should be developed. I call it Fundamental Economics. This is the goal of my Substack.
I loathe the fact that national economies are being compared via "GDP per capita" in a world where income disparities vary so greatly. US income disparity is steeply climbing, for instance, while China's is steeply falling. China has pulled hundreds of millions out of dirt poverty while Republicans are gleefully shredding safety nets wherever they can.
US income disparity is climbing, same than in Europe with governments of all ideologies. It's structural. China has made a good job but it's becoming unsustainable. Right now it's co-leading the worldwide collapse, with US. We need to develop a new model and tools not related to politics; only science, common sense, and humanity. The goal of my newsletter is to develop the new tools and demonstrate that a better future is possible if we change our economic models and make a good use of AI.
I think the clearest point that helps put this into perspective is the fact that the US is only now seeing the temperatures that were felt in the dust bowl of the 1930's and although co2 sets the base line there still needs to be a lot of work done on what sets the extremes. These can with the right intervention make our transition a lot easier especially for those that care about the natural biome. Thanks for the great work.
Based on the number of and tone of the comments, it appears that there is either little interest in or controversy about how science works. Too bad the same can't be said for climate science.
You note one example of how the scientific conclusions in the ARs have changed from one AR to the next. The good news is that climate science is making rapid progress. In fact it is changing so rapidly that the IPCC has to produce a new AR every 7 years or so to keep up with the changes. That means a lot of climate science is not settled - it is a work in progress.
If you read through the IPCC reports, what you'll see is not that our understanding of climate change that has changed over the years but rather that our confidence in what we think has increased over the years. As the attribution example shows, we went from "maybe humans are warming the climate but we're not sure" to "humans are definitely warming the climate".
I agree climate science is a work in progress, and progress has been rapid. That's good news for people who hope for regional-scale projections, so they can invest in adaptation *before* being overwhelmed by rising sea level or unprecedented extreme weather. Narrowing down ECS and sharpening model geographic resolution, among other goals, requires modeling what's still not settled, e.g. cloud behavior and albedo, anthropogenic aerosols, quasi-periodic ocean oscillations, etc.; not to mention projecting over a credible range of future emissions scenarios.
OTOH, there's no reasonable doubt remaining that the globe is warming, it's anthropogenic, and the cost in money and tragedy will mount until extracting and selling fossil carbon is no longer profitable. That much climate science is *settled*. It should be sufficient to motivate collective intervention to decarbonize the US economy, indeed would be if not for the political power bestowed on carbon capitalists by trillions of dollars in annual net profits globally, with tens of billions annually to individual companies and their investors. That's not merely conspiracism on my part: see "Dark Money" author Jane Mayer (https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought).
The main reason why there needs to be a new AR every few years is to include later data. Also as processing capacity becomes greater and faster, models can be run with shorter time intervals, blending pictorial information such as satellite and radar imagery with numerical data
When dealing with AGW doubtmongers who take excerpts from IPCC reports, I tell them I see those IPCC reports as effectively out of date, so I don't really pay attention to them. The accelerating improvement in data collection, the accelerating changes that are being measured, and the slow process with which the committees collate and synthesize the information into carefully worded InterGOVERNMENTal Panel summaries mean that the papers that predate various jaw-dropping record setting events (Canadian wildfires, coral bleaching, ice shelf collapse, etc.) seem...quaint, somehow.
Likewise, any information about renewable energy that's more than a year or two old is not keeping up with our advances in tech or the S-curves of adoption.
Nice summary of how science works. The problem is a vast majority of folk wouldn’t understand your article or indeed the layman’s version. Hence they go with popular media which is full of bias, opinion and misinformation. Using the scientific consensus to fight against such is always going to be an uphill battle.
But science marches on, with growing amounts of data and evidence, particularly in the climate field, which helps us adjust and refine our understanding. The good news is, most of the world is responding, albeit slower than we really need.
Great description of the scientific process and the ozone hole is an excellent example. This level of the scientific process should be addressed in high school as well as the individual process.
Great post, Andrew. One thing worth adding: the timescales work in our favor for the predictions you describe — the stratosphere/troposphere prediction made in 1967, verified 20 years later. The Arctic-warming-faster prediction from the 1970s, confirmed within a few decades. Most of science gets to operate this way. Theory, experiment, verification, refinement, all within a working scientist’s career.
The harder communication problem is that the most consequential predictions about climate operate on timescales much longer than a scientist’s career — or any policy horizon. The CO₂ we add this decade is still warming the planet a thousand years from now. The sea level commitment from the warming we have already locked in will play out over centuries to millennia. These are physical predictions as solid as the ones you describe, but they will not be confirmed within any living scientist’s career, and they will not be confirmed within any voter’s political horizon. That is the experiment we are running, and it is the part of the science that the public conversation has the hardest time holding onto.
GS Callender in 1938 predicted that warming in polar regions would be above the average.
Another observant engineer!!
In my years in the Creation v. Evolution forum (talk·origins), we spent a lot of time discussing how science works and trying to convince the Creationists that, no, "creation science" wasn't being blackballed by a conspiracy of nefarious atheists out to disprove God. Scientists weren't just being meany-heads to "creation theorists," but meany-heads to each other all of the time. We likened their demands to be accepted and published without review to their team playing with kiddie-league rules in the NFL.
As Cheryl Rofer put it, "Russell Vought wants to install political commissars to decide on federal science grants." For example:
"Why the National Science Foundation is ripping monitoring instruments out of the ocean"
https://thebulletin.org/2026/06/why-the-national-science-foundation-is-ripping-monitoring-instruments-out-of-the-ocean/
I'm going to cry into my pillow, now.
Unfortunately, Economics doesn't follow the scientific process properly since it takes into account only short term, and their formulations do not realize that Earth is finite, and the emissions, pollution and biodiversity loss can't provide infinite growth. A new Economics should be developed. I call it Fundamental Economics. This is the goal of my Substack.
https://josemdelavina.substack.com/p/fundamental-economics-a-challenging?r=m5a3k&utm_medium=ios
I loathe the fact that national economies are being compared via "GDP per capita" in a world where income disparities vary so greatly. US income disparity is steeply climbing, for instance, while China's is steeply falling. China has pulled hundreds of millions out of dirt poverty while Republicans are gleefully shredding safety nets wherever they can.
/rant
I am discussing the same thing in my Substack with the added layer of governance.
US income disparity is climbing, same than in Europe with governments of all ideologies. It's structural. China has made a good job but it's becoming unsustainable. Right now it's co-leading the worldwide collapse, with US. We need to develop a new model and tools not related to politics; only science, common sense, and humanity. The goal of my newsletter is to develop the new tools and demonstrate that a better future is possible if we change our economic models and make a good use of AI.
I think the clearest point that helps put this into perspective is the fact that the US is only now seeing the temperatures that were felt in the dust bowl of the 1930's and although co2 sets the base line there still needs to be a lot of work done on what sets the extremes. These can with the right intervention make our transition a lot easier especially for those that care about the natural biome. Thanks for the great work.
Blind humans running toward the wall.
How can't they see they are killing LIFE on this planet?
It's how human brains' perception and self-delusion work.
I myself once believed I could communicate telepathically with an incorporeal creator of two trillion galaxies.
Based on the number of and tone of the comments, it appears that there is either little interest in or controversy about how science works. Too bad the same can't be said for climate science.
Take for example the top rated post here at TCB, https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/climate-skeptics-have-new-favorite . It must have been the controversial subtitle, "It actually makes the case that CO₂ is the dominant control on Earth’s temperature"
You note one example of how the scientific conclusions in the ARs have changed from one AR to the next. The good news is that climate science is making rapid progress. In fact it is changing so rapidly that the IPCC has to produce a new AR every 7 years or so to keep up with the changes. That means a lot of climate science is not settled - it is a work in progress.
If you read through the IPCC reports, what you'll see is not that our understanding of climate change that has changed over the years but rather that our confidence in what we think has increased over the years. As the attribution example shows, we went from "maybe humans are warming the climate but we're not sure" to "humans are definitely warming the climate".
I agree climate science is a work in progress, and progress has been rapid. That's good news for people who hope for regional-scale projections, so they can invest in adaptation *before* being overwhelmed by rising sea level or unprecedented extreme weather. Narrowing down ECS and sharpening model geographic resolution, among other goals, requires modeling what's still not settled, e.g. cloud behavior and albedo, anthropogenic aerosols, quasi-periodic ocean oscillations, etc.; not to mention projecting over a credible range of future emissions scenarios.
OTOH, there's no reasonable doubt remaining that the globe is warming, it's anthropogenic, and the cost in money and tragedy will mount until extracting and selling fossil carbon is no longer profitable. That much climate science is *settled*. It should be sufficient to motivate collective intervention to decarbonize the US economy, indeed would be if not for the political power bestowed on carbon capitalists by trillions of dollars in annual net profits globally, with tens of billions annually to individual companies and their investors. That's not merely conspiracism on my part: see "Dark Money" author Jane Mayer (https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/kochland-examines-how-the-koch-brothers-made-their-fortune-and-the-influence-it-bought).
The main reason why there needs to be a new AR every few years is to include later data. Also as processing capacity becomes greater and faster, models can be run with shorter time intervals, blending pictorial information such as satellite and radar imagery with numerical data
When dealing with AGW doubtmongers who take excerpts from IPCC reports, I tell them I see those IPCC reports as effectively out of date, so I don't really pay attention to them. The accelerating improvement in data collection, the accelerating changes that are being measured, and the slow process with which the committees collate and synthesize the information into carefully worded InterGOVERNMENTal Panel summaries mean that the papers that predate various jaw-dropping record setting events (Canadian wildfires, coral bleaching, ice shelf collapse, etc.) seem...quaint, somehow.
Likewise, any information about renewable energy that's more than a year or two old is not keeping up with our advances in tech or the S-curves of adoption.