Hulme on Nurse
Jan 25, 2011
Bishop Hill in BBC, Climate: Hulme, Royal Society

Mike Hulme has published some thoughts on the Horizon programme, little of which will be disputed by sceptics. Here's a snippet:

I do not recognise [Nurse's] claim that “climate science is reducing uncertainty all the time”. There remain intractable uncertainties about future predictions of climate change. Whilst Nurse distinguishes between uncertainty arising from incomplete understanding and that arising from irreducible stochastic uncertainty, he gives the impression that all probabilistic knowledge is of the latter kind (e.g. his quote of average rates of success for cancer treatments). In fact with climate change, most of the uncertainty about the future that is expressed in probabilistic terms (e.g. the IPCC) is Bayesian in nature. Bayesian probabilities are of a fundamentally different kind to those quoted in his example. And when defending consensus in climate science – which he clearly does - he should have explained clearly the role of Bayesian (subjective) expert knowledge in forming such consensus.

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