Classical Liberalism vs. "Climate Liberalism"

In an EconTalk discussion, MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel, author of What We Know About Climate Change, remarked: “If I’d written a book called What We Don’t Know about Climate Science, it would have been an encyclopedia.” Emanuel added in regard to climate models:

I actually share with [opponent] John [Christy] an inherent distrust of complicated models. I don’t like them particularly. It’s one of the necessary evils.

Welcome to the physical science debate. It has been 35 years since James Hansen’s historic testimony about anthropogenic global warming before Congress in 1988. The overriding uncertainty is climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide (CO2) and other man-made greenhouse gases, which together produce the enhanced greenhouse effect.