How Climate Scenarios Lost Touch With Reality

DSA ADS Course - 2021

Climate Science, Bad Science, Crisis in Science, Climate Scenarios

Decision-makers and policy-makers depend on professional data scientists to make optimal decisions. Timely self-correcting mechanisms using near real-time data is critical. Failures of climate science and abuse/misuse of scenario planning is instructive of what NOT to do.

Scenario planning is a prudent part of high value data science yet MUST be combined with applied PROBABILITY and analyzed with context to goals and fluid situational reality.

June, 2021

A failure of self-correction in science has compromised climate science’s ability to provide plausible views of our collective future.

The integrity of science depends on its capacity to provide an ever more reliable picture of how the world works. Over the past decade or so, serious threats to this integrity have come to light. The expectation that science is inherently self-correcting, and that it moves cumulatively and progressively away from false beliefs and toward truth, has been challenged in numerous fields—including cancer research, neuroscience, hydrology, cosmology, and economics—as observers discover that many published findings are of poor quality, subject to systemic biases, or irreproducible.