At Jo Nova’s unthreaded Carbon500 asks

How can the opposing points of view be effectively communicated without using too much temperature data?

There are no easy answers. Start quoting one set of figures and an “expert scientist” will counter with some other figures, call you a denier and say you know nothing.

An alternative approach is to compare climate “experts” with experts in other fields. Hundreds of expert scientists, over nearly three decades, should have gained a track record in predictions through their understanding of the climate system, and learnt from their mistakes. The public relations aspect should now be in emphasising their scientific achievements in predictions and the increasing quality of their work. The PR should not be in banal statements, saying how much they all agree, and denigrating the opposition.

Let me give an analogy. Suppose someone claims, after years of study, to have a developed a scientific system for predicting the winners of horse races. How would you distinguish between that person being a true expert or just a gambling addict, whose system is just a sophisticated way of denying their problem?

Using the climate consensus approach, the true expert would be somebody who has published on the subject in the peer-reviewed literature, and has a lot of similar experts reaching similar conclusions. The gambling addict would be marked out by the one who goes it alone, rejecting the opinion of other “experts”.

My approach would be to evaluate on whether the betting system actually works.

1. As the purpose of placing a bet is to win, one would expect a minimum requirement is to make money. That is not that you get a winner ever time, but over a series of bets to more than break even.
2. From a human point of view, a way to identify the expert to see observe they cope with losses. The true expert would learn from the mistakes and use this to improve the predictive ability of the system. Over time, the profit margin would get greater. The gambling addict would come up with a plethora of excuses why their system did not work, then proclaim that a winning streak is just around the corner.
3. A true expert would know the limits if their system, whilst the addicted gambler would make totally exaggerated claims about the precision and accuracy of their unimpeachable system.

The analogy does break down after this. Catastrophic global warming is a belief system, mainly deriving from extreme left-environmentalist political perspectives. CAGW is a collective belief system, not an isolated individual. The consequences of the climate alarmists to recognize their failure in understanding go far beyond that of someone with a gambling problem.