> Please be more specific, which papers, which predictions are you talking about?

What gets cited most is Al Gore's summary of science in Inconvenient Truth. He quoted a bunch of predictions. He streamed those off. Within 15 years, there will be no more glaciers in Glacier National Park. Etc. Many of those didn't come to pass. Fox News is pretty honest when it quotes those. Selective, but honest.

He expressed complete confidence throughout: "There's not a single fact, or date, or number that's been used to make this up that's in any controversy"

Well, guess what? It's a chaotic system. We knew the predictions weren't great; we missed most of the effects of ocean acidification. Every number was in controversy. We missed a bunch of effects, underestimated some, and overestimated others. It's easy to point to place where people were untruthful. Fox News rarely lies, but it often quotes the places where things didn't come to pass. Liberal media quotes the places where things did, or where things were worse than predicted. Neither side is particularly truthful.

> You didn’t answer the question. How can we prioritize funding and actions?

Well, there are two hypotheses:

1) We're going to lie and convince everyone.

2) We'll be honest and count on people to be reasonable.

We tried #1. It didn't work. How about trying #2? It's painfully hard, calling people on lying when we agree with them, but it's critical, on both sides of the isle. Right now, we have a race to the bottom. Republicans lie. Democrats lie harder. Republicans lie harder. And so on.

> A lot of people already agree with you that we should prepare, and still we haven’t prepared. Why?

A lot of people disagree, and can point to good evidence that the side advocating for change was lying. The conclusion was correct, but when the logic along the way is dishonest, that's not how it's received.

> The reason everything went wrong is that scientists haven’t used confidence intervals?

I don't think that's quite what I said. I said the political left -- including and especially the scientific establishment -- expressed 100% certainty in predictions which (1) didn't come to pass (2) clearly had enough assumptions that a sane scientist could have predicted that (and many, in private conversations, did).

> Right-wing media...

Do you read right-wing media, or merely read about right-wing media? I haven't found media on either side of the isle to be more or less truthful. I read both.

> One big mistake you’re making here is suggesting that all science is making predictions, which is false.

No, I'm suggesting that this is the part of "science" which has the greatest problems with truthiness, and makes it hard to trust the best science.

> Most science, and much of the best science, doesn’t make any predictions at all, and doesn’t need confidence intervals, because it’s identifying and explaining past history, not the future. We don’t need science to predict that the temperature will go up, because we can see the trend over the last 10 or 50 years. Scientists aren’t telling us the climate is going to change, they’re telling us it already has changed.

And if this is all that was being presented, I think we'd have acted sooner.

> Adding a confidence interval won’t make that any more convincing to climate change deniers.

It's not about adding, it's about taking out.

> Watching Fox News will not help you identify the good stuff.

It actually will. Try it. Treat it (and all other media) as a primary source. You'd be surprised at how often an outsider perspective will do that. Mostly, it will help identify a blind spot around bad science you agree with. Chinese media too, actually. It's pretty easy to read critically past the propaganda. Does NY Times have better scientific coverage? Indubitably. But it comes with the same blindspot. In science, you're trying to make a good faith effort to disprove the hypothesis, and people who disagree with you do that much better than people who agree.