The audacious PR plot that seeded doubt about climate change

The IPCC scenarios don't really rely on feedback loops, because we don't know enough about them. They are rarely taken into account, while even the mildest plausible scenarios based on projected human activity project at least a 2°C change, which can't be stable. We underestimate feedback loops, and we might also get human activity wrong, but even if we don't you still get a planet that's just barely habitable.

The warming trend is not created by IPCC fudging past temperature data. This is a climate change denier talking point, but it's a lie. Land and ocean temperatures have been adjusted separately to account for the changes in the measurement methods. Localized sources were compared to their neighbours in order to be able to account for changes in the instruments, urbanization and so on. High-accuracy sensors are used to create a reference network of perfectly sited stations. Roughly half of the stations reduced the warming, half increased it. Deniers like to cherry-pick the stations to make a point. The biggest adjustment by far was because of earlier ships. They used to throw a bucket overboard, pull it up slowly and measure the temperature of the water with a thermometer, without accounting for the air temperature. Ships later switched to measuring temperatures through engine room intakes. These days we have a global network of automatic buoys. None of this increased the warming trend, the adjustments actually reduced it. Mostly only data from before 1940 had to be adjusted. Studies continue to use raw data along it's interpretations, but the necessity of an adjusted interpretation is constantly shown.

If you're not already climate scientist, or willing to seriously read up on the literature, then you have no chance of understanding and judging for yourself arguments about the field - this is true for most fields requiring advanced mathematics and statistics. You are deluding yourself if you think you can listen to two climate scientists debate a point and accurately assess who has the better argument; not that this may even be true if you are a climate scientist, as you often need to run your own experiments or at least verify equations and statistical models before making up your mind.

The purpose of journalism is exactly to process facts to the public at a level where they can be understood by most people reading/watching them. The proper way to do science journalism is two steps removed from the raw scientific discussion: you ask scientists in the field about the mainstream opinion, about how strong the consensus is, about plausible non-mainstream opinions; maybe you check with a few people close to the field but outside of it to see what are opinions about the field itself in the larger academic context. If you can, you also get information about consequences of these theories in terms that can be understood by a non-expert audience (such as time dilation and the way it is used in GPS satellites for special relativity).

Then, you present to the public a condensed version of this information.

What you don't do is ignore all of this burden of journalistic research and just bring some scientists that are for or against a theory and let them make some random simplified meaningless arguments to the public to see who has the slicker tongue and nothing else.

And even then, we've witnessed a long history of 'credentialed' people being corporate puppets for certain agendas, peddlers of their own self-importance and fraud or just plain wrong.

We should pick experts, but we should pick from a range, not just the experts we like or decide are on the right side. And sometimes also pay attention to the non-experts, they can ask very interesting questions and provide good thought experiments, even if naive.

Nuclear weapons were inevitable, they are trivial inventions.

Nobody would have fought over climate policy a 100 years ago. Climate change barely received any publicity before James Hansen's testimony in 1988.