Mysteries

Preach it, Roger

Smart, and a pretty handsome guy too.

This is important:

Another lesson is that debates over forecasts and uncertainty often overshadow knowledge that is far more certain. Paul Somerville and Katharine Haynes of Macquarie University note wryly that "no action has yet been taken against the engineers who designed the buildings that collapsed and caused fatalities, or the government officials who were responsible for enforcing building code compliance."6 The real tragedy of L’Aquila may not be that scientists led the public astray with their bumbled discussion of predictive science but, rather, that our broader obsession with predictions blinds us to the truths right before our eyes.

As the entertaining yet depressing spectacle ("skeptacle"?) of deniers relentlessly revising history in the face of the disappointing results from BEST, this is a key point to keep in mind. It's easy to get distracted by the horse race, and think our focus should be there, especially as real science wins that race over and over again. It shouldn't. That argument has been won. It should be on the very basic first step of instituting a carbon price and greatly improving our infrastructure for the challenges ahead.