Phelps Nails the Climate Change Debate. Phelps is a commenter on Scott Adam’s blog post “The Illusion of Knowledge”.

My climate change scepticism comes from an entirely different direction — I work in litigation and deal a lot with expert witnesses.

Everything about the “support” for climate change looks like the things that an expert witness does when they want to support their client but have bupkis for facts. It’s not just any particular thing — it is the intuitive pattern of behavior. “It’s too complicated to explain, but me and my colleagues all agree.” “This is all commonly accepted in the scientific community.” “Sure, the raw data appears to disprove my theory, but it hasn’t been properly adjusted yet.” “The predictions I made before didn’t pan out, but that is because I didn’t have X data yet (usually the disproving data that now proves the new but identical-result theory.)

All in all, the climate change crowd acts like a biased expert witness with a bad set of facts.

The reason the warmists believe is because of their models. They are dead certain that the models and basic physics indicate that increasing carbon dioxide is causing global warming. The models are wrong, but because they believe so strongly they have a massive case of confirmation bias — choosing only datasets that support their beliefs and adjusting data as required, because, after all, they know they are right. Book coming soon.

hat-tip Lion of the Blogosphere