Defending Climate Science in A Hostile World

Climate science and climate scientists are facing a hostile world where even government agencies can produce, distribute, and self-reference official documents that are littered with scientific “findings” that are, in fact, statements of misinformation and disinformation. Staying “within our knowledge sandboxes”, the science community must assume the additional responsibility of defending what is actually known, unknown, and why. Most directly, meeting this challenge is accomplished by showing why faulty findings are completely false, extremely suspect because they are the product of judicious cherry-picking, or just misleading in their emphasis of persistent uncertainties without reference to relevance to something that matters. In other instances, official documents can motivate an updated assessment that replaces cherry-picked samples with complete data sets and exhaustive traceable accounting to the underlying literature.