An Irish airman foresees his death

A rare post about climate; I do apologise. But first:

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

Not, you'll be unsurprised to learn, what I actually wanted to talk about. But there is some vague relation. Full version here, if you need a reminder.

What I actually wanted to comment on was "A climate scientist reflects on 30 years fighting the ‘forces of unreason’" by Benjamin Santer. As far as I know Santer is one of the good guys, so I'm only going to quibble.

Quibble one is Participating in an IPCC assessment is an unpaid, multi-year commitment by individuals with precious and finite stores of time and energy. This isn't really true, in my admittedly limited and out of date experience. Participation is, formally, unpaid, at least by the IPCC: but actually you get to do it on your employer's time, so it isn't really pro bono. I guess he is trying to push back against the idea that he's getting consultancy rates for it, but I think claiming pro bono is iffy. It's also close to trivia, so I think he should just not have mentioned it.

Continuing, we have In 1990, we concluded that “The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely for a decade or more.” Put differently, the jury was out on human culpability for climate change. In 1990, it was still too early to tell whether burning fossil fuels had significantly altered Earth’s climate. And this is correct - so much for the fuckwits who claim we knew it all in the 70s, or 80s, or whatever.

Quibble two is But a mere five years later, in the IPCC’s 1995 Second Assessment Report, the scientific jury reached a very different verdict... “The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”... A human-caused climate change signal had been identified. We could see the signal. It was there in data. Humans were no longer innocent bystanders in Earth’s climate system. As I pointed out convincingly in Who Knew What When, "balance of evidence" is weak, as is "suggests" and "discernable influence". Notice how '90 talked about not-unequivocal, and '95 has definitely not got to unequivocal. Per WKWW, the actual shift - in terms of what was written down - was more gradual.

Santer then continues talking about "forces of unreason". He restricts his discussion to physical climatology, so he can find himself on the side of reason without any difficulty. Had he attempted to discuss economics, he would find his allies guilty of unreason; he knows that, so carefully avoids any such discussion.