The BBC reports: “Scientists are calling on world leaders to sign up to an eight-point plan of action at landmark talks in Paris.”

Among those eight points we find:

Equity of approach — with richer countries helping poorer ones
Providing climate finance for developing countries.

Fair enough, though I’m not sure that anybody knows what “climate finance” is or how to provide it.

But whatever you think of these points, they are not scientific points; they are social, economic, and political points, and scientists have no special standing to speak to social, economic, and political ends, nor do they have any special insight into social, economic, or political questions.

The global-warming crusaders—who are fundamentally anti-capitalism anti-globalization, and sometimes anti-human rather than genuine environmentalists—have been very successful in shaping the rhetoric of the global-warming debate as a question of science vs. the anti-scientific, the ignorant, etc. But the most important questions in the debate are not scientific questions at all. It’s not as though Beijing or Delhi’s implementation of an unwanted global-warming protocol is going to proceed according to the laws of thermodynamics, or that Maxwell’s equations can tell us which economic tradeoffs undertaken to prevent global warming are likely to be effective or worth the price.

This is not about the usefulness of the scientific method; it is about the prestige enjoyed by science. That prestige is well-earned, but it is not transferable.

Presenting the economic and policy questions involved in global warming as though they were questions of scientific fact is intellectual dishonesty—including when scientists do it—and it should be scorned as such.