William Briggs, a statistician, has written a provocatively titled post “Is climatology a pseudoscience.” Is answer is no, but his essay should not comfort many climatologists:

Now put yourself in the place of a climatologist, one of the many hundreds, in fact, who was involved with the IPCC and so shared in that great validator, the Nobel Peace Prize*. You have spent a career devoted to showing that mankind, through various forms of naughtiness, has significantly influenced the climate, and has caused temperatures to grow out of control. Your team, at a major university, has built and contributed to various global climate models. Graduate students have worked on these models. Team members have traveled the world and lectured on their results. Many, many papers were written about their output, and so forth.

But something has gone wrong. The actual temperature, predicted to go up and up, has not cooperated and has instead stayed the same and even has gone down. What do to? Let’s take a “What would a scientist do” quiz and find out.

Your model has predicted that temperatures will go up because CO2 has, but unfortunately temperatures have gone down. Do you:

1. Abandon the model and seek a new career
2. Discover where the model went wrong; publish results admitting why and how you were wrong
3. Sit and wait: after all, the temperature is bound to increase sooner or later, hence validating your model
4. Believe that the model cannot be wrong, else so many people wouldn’t believe it, and so posit some new source that is “holding back” warming, and only if that new source weren’t there, your model would be perfect.

The problem is that too many climatologists choose #4.

Has anybody gone for answer (4)? Yes. Already we are seeing papers—peer-reviewed, to be sure—that posit sources that are “masking” the true warming. So far, these papers are concentrate on aerosols, which are particles, caused by mankind naturally, that can, through various mechanisms, block incoming solar radiation and lead to cooling. Aerosol cooling only gets you so far, however, because aerosols are heavy, short-lived particles whose effects are actually easy to measure. So if models continue to over-predict, even after accounting for aerosols, some other source that “masks true warming” will have to be found.

It’s too bad that many climatologist don’t work more on #2.