A sequence of tweets from Ben today, strung together with threadreaderunwrap. The key point is that you don’t need to be an expert scientist to see that many of the claims made by climate scientists are unjustified or nonsense.

Here, @ScottAdamsSays that the debate between ‘scientists’ and ‘sceptics’ (his framing) is impossible for a layperson to fathom, because by the end of examining the claims and counter claims lies something he cannot understand or establish the truth of.

But this is wrong. The example he gives is of ice melt.

But we know that Arctic ice did not disappear in the summer of 2013. We do not need to establish the truth of that claim — and many other similar claims about the Arctic. But those were claims made by scientists.

The same is true of many claims made in the climate debate, which you neither need expert knowledge or endless volumes of data to assess.

It is climate scientists who have stuck their heads out further than their necks can support.

Moreover, the climate debate was rehearsed a number of times, by the same organisations, institutions and individuals, in earlier decades. They made the same order of predictions, none of which were revealed to have any skill.

The second order of claim that the layperson can ask, and find out the truth of for himself is, even if the Arctic ice melted, ‘so what?’.

The scientist might argue, ‘it will be bad for polar bears’. But this, too, turns out to be false.

It does not take an endless journey to find and understand claims in the climate debate. This took me a day, eight years ago.

In truth, a melting Arctic is only of symbolic consequence.

Even if the scientific claims are difficult, the lay person can still ask why there is so much exaggeration from scientists, in the media, and from political perspectives hidden behind ‘science’.

You don’t need to be a scientist to understand that, for all its objectivity, ‘science’ is often a fig leaf. In fact, scientists are perhaps the last to grasp this point.

Here’s another instance of scientists making claims about Arctic ice melting that turn out to be hasty, and far from the rigorous scrutiny that we expect of ‘science’.

Ultimately, @ScottAdamsSays is wrong on this point, because sceptics are not in fact a camp as he has framed them.

They are the same as him, trying to understand the claims made by climate scientists (and others). They are just further down the road than him.

There is only one identifiable ‘camp’. And that is a broad movement of people, some of whom are scientists, who are infinitely better resourced, and who do not think they need to explain themselves to their critics, but that their view should prevail over others, nonetheless.

When a researcher steps outside the consensus, he or she will find peers turning on them. It turns out that institutional science is not able to transcend the problems of the political sphere.

You don’t need to be a scientist to see it.

No doubt, the scientists involved in attacking Crockford for her views believe themselves to be unimpeachable — it is obvious from their argument.

But what they reveal is that they have a much weaker grasp of what they claim to have insight into.

Where does that leave the layperson, on his journey to the Truth?

In the same place as the scientists.

More often than not, they don’t know either.