Steve Koonin is an incredibly smart guy with a huge amount of experience in climate and energy issues, and is saying things in this article that any competent computational physicist who has looked into climate modelling believes.

Compare for example my own short take on the same issues, written two years ago: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=886

You'll see basically similar concerns raised. If you're seriously wedded to the idea that consensus is important to the science, you should dig up the independent opinions of a few other computational physicists (not climate scientists, who are not computational physicists). Having done so, you might find that there is a consensus amongst computational physicists that climate models are problematic in ways that make them questionable guides to policy, although most of us will also say that we should be concerned about the amount of garbage we are dumping into the atmosphere (and there are reasons to want to get off fossil fuels that go beyond the climate change argument.)

Denialists have poisoned the public discourse on climate change, but Warmists have unfortunately responded by digging in their heels in a particularly anti-scientific way. I hope Koonin's piece will help bring the scientific discussion back to fundamentals, and perhaps decouple the policy discussion from models a bit.

For example: we know that carbon taxes work pretty well in reducing CO2 emissions (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-insidious-tr...) and we know that carbon taxes can be used to reduce corporate and income taxes. So anyone who is opposed to carbon taxes is necessarily in favour of higher corporate and income taxes.

This is a policy discussion that can and should be had independently of any detailed climate model results, and I invite everyone who is in favour of higher corporate and income taxes to chime in here in support of their position, and explain why those taxes are so much better than the carbon taxes that could partially replace them.