“Global warming doesn’t matter except to the extent that it will affect life — ours and that of all living things on Earth. And contrary to the latest news, the evidence that global warming will have serious effects on life is thin. Most evidence suggests the contrary.”

The quote is from Dr. Daniel Botkin, professor emeritus in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I guess we can add him to the list of scientists who disagree with the ironclad, unshakable “consensus” that we’re on the road to catastrophe. More from Botkin, from today’s Wall Street Journal:

I’m not a naysayer. I’m a scientist who believes in the scientific method and in what facts tell us. I have worked for 40 years to try to improve our environment and improve human life as well. I believe we can do this only from a basis in reality, and that is not what I see happening now. Instead, like fashions that took hold in the past and are eloquently analyzed in the classic 19th century book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” the popular imagination today appears to have been captured by beliefs that have little scientific basis.

Some colleagues who share some of my doubts argue that the only way to get our society to change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe, and that therefore it is all right and even necessary for scientists to exaggerate. They tell me that my belief in open and honest assessment is naïve. “Wolves deceive their prey, don’t they?” one said to me recently. Therefore, biologically, he said, we are justified in exaggerating to get society to change.

The climate modelers who developed puter programs that are being used to forecast climate change used to readily admit that the models were crude and not very realistic, but were the best that could be done with puters and programming methods. They said our options were to either believe those crude models or believe the opinions of experienced, data-focused scientists. Having done a great deal puter modeling myself, I appreciated their acknowledgment of the limits of their methods. But I hear no such statements today. Oddly, the forecasts puter models have e our new reality, while facts such as the few extinctions of the past 2.5 million years are pushed aside, as if they were not our reality.