The last couple of weeks have not been a good time to be a climate change sceptic. On 20 October the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project (BEST), led by self-described climate change sceptic Professor Richard Muller, reported the conclusions of its independent assessment of land temperature records.
Muller's team, which included fellow sceptic Professor Judith Curry, found that the BEST results agreed with those published by other groups such as NASA and the Hadley Centre in the UK which have found that global land temperatures have increased by a remarkable 1 degree Celsius in just 60 years.
In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal Muller concluded that 'global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate.'
A week after the BEST team released its findings, Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, delivered a much-publicised lecture on climate change science to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think-tank in London that aggressively pushes climate change denialism.
Although titled 'One Christian Perspective on Climate Change' the lecture had precious little theological content. Instead the lecture was centrally concerned with climate science.
Pell criticised those who lazily defer to the consensus of scientists and set about himself to explain climate science, leaving the impression that he sees himself as a modern Galileo fighting against the scientific establishment. Yet what followed demonstrated a misunderstanding of the fundamentals not only of climate science but the scientific method and the history of modern science.
Pell's misuse of chaos theory and the invocation of the late Professor Edward Lorenz is particularly galling, given that Lorenz's insight that chaotic behaviour (such as the weather) may have predictable outcomes (climate) is at the heart of climate modelling.
Even if we take at face value Pell's claim that it is a matter for the layperson to decide himself what the science says, surely as part of that decision-making one ought to consider what the mainstream science has to say, even if only to dismiss it.
Pell does not refer to, for example, Professor David Archer's excellent book Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast (one of several used in science courses worldwide to teach climatology), or to any one of the many hundreds of articles on climate change published in the world's leading scientific journals such as Science or Nature.
Rather, he simply repeats the sceptical talking points of prominent climate change contrarians Professors Ian Plimer and Bob Carter, and Christopher