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Sometimes an urban legend can become a “global legend.” The scare rhetoric of the global warming controversy is a case in point. John and Jane Doe can sometimes get lost in an ideological fog and accept a “truth” simply because it is being presented to the public in the loudest voice with the most glitz. After all if “most studies show” such-and-such, then who is John Doe to contradict the experts? Who has the time and the training to cross-examine ideas about glacier meltdown, El Nino, threatened species, ecological systems, and CO2 production? (“Heck, man, all I know is what I hear on the 6 o’clock news! Maybe my old Chevy really did help cause Hurricane Katrina.”) How can the general public choose sides about global warming? Is the majority always right? People in the sciences have a system of checks and balances called “peer review.” Researchers who wish to publish something must first submit a hypothesis and a record of experiments, observations, and conclusions to one or more of their colleagues in the same field. The submission may be successful, or it may be rejected, or it may be returned with the suggestion that results were inconclusive and that more data and more study is needed. Peer review would seem to be a good, objective method of pushing back the envelope of human ignorance, and it usually is; but it has failed at times in the past. It seems that even people in the sciences often get lost in what I call an “ideological fog,” when an idea can take on a life of its own, so that it becomes politically incorrect to speak against it, no matter how many of its flaws are exposed. Al Gore has produced a book which prompted a film of the same name: An Inconvenient Truth, which I consider to be an excellent example of this sort of thing. There are some very vocal, insistent, and scholarly voices speaking against Gore’s film, in very uncompromising language. Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia calls Gore’s circumstantial arguments “so weak that they are pathetic.” He says that Gore is an “embarrassment to U.S. science” and that Gore’s crusade is based on “junk science.” In substantial agreement with Carter are others, such as the Carleton University paleoclimatologist professor Dr. Tim Patterson; University of Winnipeg’s climatology professor Dr. Tim Ball; Dr. Boris Winterhalter, former marine researcher at the Geological Survey of Finland and professor in marine geology at the University of Helsinki; and Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, emeritus professor, Dept. of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology, Stockholm University, Sweden. Such men (and hundreds more), because they oppose a scare mentality, are being compared to Holocaust deniers, renegades who won’t submit. Let’s look at the credentials of the hundreds of experts like the stubborn scholars listed above, who oppose the alarmist thrust of AIT. They are qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby, climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing significant global climate change. “Climate experts” is the important term here. In stark contrast, only a very small fraction of the “majority of scientists” Gore cites in his film actually work as “climate experts.” Granted, the names Gore cites include skilled researchers, but “…they do not have special knowledge about the causes of global climate changes,” says Tim Ball. “They usually can tell us only about the effects of changes in the local environment where they conduct their studies.” That is, they are climate impact experts, not climate change cause experts. Studying the impact of a change, and studying the cause of the change, are two different disciplines. There are a few climate researchers cited by Gore, however, which we could indeed call climate change experts. However, these concentrate their research on designing and enhancing computer models of hypothetical futures. Says Ball, “These models have been consistently wrong in all their scenarios.” That is, they are merely “what if” constructions, and they have a poor predictive record. Ball goes on to explain that these researchers admit that their computer outputs are not “predictions.” These so-called “predictions” have fostered a neat disaster movie (The Day After Tomorrow), along with heart-tugging TV documentaries that warn about the melting of ice flows from under polar bears and penguins; but they are “merely scenarios….,” says Ball. The problem is, such researchers go on to allow the public to think they are actually making meaningful forecasts! Simply put, the consensus of true climatologists is that, yes, the earth is warming; and that, yes, human civilization seem to have at least something to do with it. Where they disagree with Gore and his alarmist scholars is whether the warming is any different from the warming/cooling cycles that have been observed in the past. That is, they strongly oppose the current frenzy, and the junk science being used to support much of it. Marlo Lewis, a Senior Fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (), has written an overview of AIT which enumerates over 100 distortions in the film, distortions he categorizes as one-sided statements, misleading statements, demonstrably wrong statements, exaggerations, and speculations, all woven into a scare-matrix. Steven Hayward, a Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute, is busy working on a film as a rebuttal to AIT. His work, and those of other sober organizations, can perhaps rescue the man on the street from this sort of thing. There is no reason that citizens cannot make sure they have heard both sides, so as to distinguish sober science from Chicken Little scenarios.

If the alarmists were as candid about uncertainties, I might give their views some credence.
Nah, they'd still be wearing tin foil hats.

Of course such usage as indicated in that uncertainty guidence paper just begs the question of how do they go about assessing the uncertainty to assign such phraseology.

Mix UN/IPCC concensus politics with science the animal you get is anything but science.

By the way the genesis of the uncertainty guidence paper you have linked to comes from the concepts expressed in this paper authored by Steven Schneider, (one of the historical heavy lifters in the anthropogenic global warming crew):

http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/UncertaintiesGuidanceFinal2.pdf

"A final note before turning to the specific recommendations themselves-the paper assumes that for most instances in the TAR, a "Bayesian" or "subjective" characterization of probability will be the most appropriate (see, e.g., Edwards, 1992, for a philosophical basis for Baysian methods; for applications of Bayesian methods, see e.g., Anderson, 1998; Howard et al., 1972). The Bayesian paradigm is a formal and rigorous language to communicate uncertainty. In it, a "prior" belief about a probability distribution (typically based on existing evidence) can be updated by new evidence, which causes a revision of the prior, producing a so-called "posterior" probability. Applying the paradigm in the assessment process involves combining individual authors' (and reviewers') Bayesian assessments of probability distributions and would lead to the following interpretation of probability statements: the probability of an event is the degree of belief that exists among lead authors and reviewers that the event will occur, given the observations, modeling results, and theory currently available. When complex systems are the topic, both prior and updated probability distributions usually contain a high degree of (informed) subjectivity. Thus in the TAR, we expect Bayesian approaches to be what is most often meant when probabilities are attached to outcomes with an inherent component of subjectivity or to an assessment of the state of the science from which confidence characterisations are offered."

And the intent of the use of such terms:

"It is certainly true that "science" itself strives for objective empirical information to test theory and models. But at the same time "science for policy" must be recognized as a different enterprise than "science" itself, since science for policy (e.g., Ravetz, 1986) involves being responsive to policymakers' needs for expert judgment at a particular time, given the information currently available, even if those judgments involve a considerable degree of subjectivity. "

The same Steven Schneider responsible for this quote:

"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but - which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both."
(Steven Schneider, Quoted in Discover, pp. 45-48, Oct. 1989; and (American Physical Society, APS News August/September 1996).