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 Monckton, only one of whom, Carter, has published a peer-reviewed article on climate science. All three have been repeatedly shown to have no credibility in climate science, frequently making wild and inaccurate claims.
The response by Australian climate scientists to Pell's speech was understandably scathing. Dr Karl Braganza, Manager of Climate Monitoring at the Bureau of Meteorology, told Crikey the Cardinal's argument 'that climate science lacks empirical evidence is specious. There is lots of observational evidence for the greenhouse effect, and the enhanced greenhouse effect.'
Lest you think this assessment of Pell harsh, bear in mind he has accused climate scientists of having 'fiddled with the evidence' in a reference to United Kingdom researchers whose conduct was confirmed to be entirely proper and scientific.
Regrettably Pell seems entirely uninterested in the mainstream science. Not even the BEST conclusions merited a mention in his lecture, allowing him to repeat the untruth that global warming has stopped. His lecture is a collage of climate denial talking points that one finds on the weirder conspiracy sites on the internet.
Reading between the lines, it is apparent from Pell's lecture that it is not an informed scientific view that is driving his understanding, but rather his politics. He clearly dislikes the Greens; I am with him on this for various reasons, including the fact that they support abortion and oppose nuclear energy.
But ideology is no guide to physical reality, and political views should not drive scientific ones. Whether one is left or right on the political spectrum the same laws of physics apply, and it is those laws of nature that determine what is happening to the world's climate.
Climate change science is like any other area of science, although it is one where there has been very considerable attention for a considerable period by a considerable number of scientists. The near unanimity of the conclusions reached on the rate and cause of recent warming is remarkable.
In a 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Professor William Anderegg et al., it was found that around 97 per cent of climate scientists actively publishing in the peer-reviewed literature supported the thesis that human activities are causing climate change.
It is no surprise then that every major science academy including the Vatican Academy of Sciences have warned that the world is warming and that we are causing it. Other Church leaders have accepted this reality; the Archbishop of San Salvador, Msgr Jose Luis Escobar Alas, declared last week that climate change is the most serious problem confronting humanity.
Climate science is complex and not explainable in sound-bites. Of necessity the layperson must defer to the experts. If Pell had offered views on neuroscience, quantum computing, immunology, the geology of Mars or any of the other topics covered in the latest issue of Nature we would rightly be scratching our heads at his intervention, unless he truly were a polymath of Galilean standing.
But the discourse of climate change has become so debased and post-modern that any views, however bizarre, can be given an airing. Like homeopathy and astrology, Pell's pseudo-science should be ignored, and the scientific method allowed to continue, however unpalatable the conclusions may be.
Dr Tim Stephens is Director of the Sydney Centre for International Law, at the Faculty of Law, University of Sydney and a parishioner at St Joan of Arc, Haberfield, NSW. He holds a masters degree in geography from the University of Cambridge, a doctorate in international environmental law from the University of Sydney, and writes on climate change science, policy and law. His latest book, co-authored with Donald R Rothwell, is The International Law of the Sea.