Consensus science attitude

Well, Ethon knows that we have tried to curb our Boulder chip habit as per New Years Resolution, but Eli saw a comment from the Dean himself down at the bottom of a thread, the best expression of high Broderism that one could imagine in climate science

2. I am not a sea level rise expert. The most recent consensus perspective is the IPCC report. If the science has advanced since that report was done then we need to "interpolate" the IPCC. This sort of "interpolation" made good sense in the case of hurricanes and I have no objections to sea level experts doing the same thing.

We will not point out that the guy he is attacking, Jim Hansen, is a sea level rise expert (but not a glaciologist), however what is important is the assumption that any advance in the science will be an interpolation of the IPCC report, when all the evidence and even the IPCC report itself says that the outcome will be an EXTRAPOLATION from the current SPM.

• Contraction of the Greenland ice sheet is projected to continue to contribute to sea level rise after 2100. Current models suggest ice mass losses increase with temperature more rapidly than gains due to precipitation and that the surface mass balance becomes negative at a global average warming (relative to pre-industrial values) in excess of 1.9 to 4.6°C. If a negative surface mass balance were sustained for millennia, that would lead to virtually complete elimination of the Greenland ice sheet and a resulting contribution to sea level rise of about 7 m. The corresponding future temperatures in Greenland are comparable to those inferred for the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago, when paleoclimatic information suggests reductions of polar land ice extent and 4 to 6 m of sea level rise. {6.4, 10.7}
• Dynamical processes related to ice flow not included in current models but suggested by recent observations could increase the vulnerability of the ice sheets to warming, increasing future sea level rise. Understanding of these processes is limited and there is no consensus on their magnitude. {4.6, 10.7}
• Current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet will remain too cold for widespread surface melting and is expected to gain in mass due to increased snowfall. However, net loss of ice mass could occur if dynamical ice discharge dominates the ice sheet mass balance. {10.7}

There has been a great deal of discussion about why the Republicans in the US reject climate science (ear tip to Chris Mooney's Republican War on Science) and a lot of other science. If one thinks of their tactics as a struggle for the Overton Window it makes sense

It describes a "window" in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on an issue. Overton described a method for moving that window, thereby including previously excluded ideas, while excluding previously acceptable ideas. The technique relies on people promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous "outer fringe" ideas. That makes those old fringe ideas look less extreme, and thereby acceptable.....

The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it, and adding new ideas that can push the old ideas towards acceptance merely by making the limits more extreme.

Eli sees those like Roger Peilke and Richard Tol, pushing the other side, trying to make reasonable things said by those like Al Gore, Nicholas Stern, Jim Hansen, the Real Climate gang, etc. appear unreasonable and beyond the pale.

Some silly bunnies and anonymice will say that the two efforts are independent, that maybe Gore, Stern and Hansen are saying unreasonable things. Eli might be willing to pull his fine furry ears over his eyes if he saw the Rs rejecting the pull of Inhofe, Barton and their passel of denialist emeriti, but he has searched in vain for such. Indeed, when asked to say something about the loony Republican view of climate change, Roger and others practice a convenient truthiness claiming that they really are not expert in that area and don't know what those folk are saying.

To deal with this pull-push tactic if you have the facts on your side and want to get something done is not trivial. Pulling back by saying loony things about the end of the earth turns the whole policy debate into a food fight made for TV gottcha ads (Michael Tobis points this out constantly). On the other hand one does have to pull the debate back to reality on the one hand by ridiculing the Inhofians and by calling the Pielke's to account