You know you’re in for a bit of grandiose lecturing on climate change when conservative commentators start making comparisons to religion and throwing around quotes from the 20th-century science philosopher Karl Popper.

Now I’ve got nothing against Popper, but you need to be on pretty solid ground to declare, as the Sky News contributor Chris Uhlmann did last weekend, that the idea global warming is causing more extreme weather is “an article of faith” rather than something we can just test and observe.

In an article in The Australian, Uhlmann, the former political editor at the ABC and Nine News, picked his way through Popper before cherry-picking his way through major climate reports to make his case.

“The zealots who invoke The Science as a gag order have never read the research or wilfully ignore its infuriating uncertainty,” wrote a confident Uhlmann.

“Take the deeply entrenched belief that global warming is causing more extreme weather. This is so ubiquitous as to be unquestioned.”

Uhlmann points to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) 2021 report The Physical Science Basis as evidence that there’s little sign of climate change having much to do with cyclones, droughts or bushfires.

This is a global warming “bible”, Uhlmann writes (actually, some scientists have complained for a long time that the IPCC has been too conservative in its reports).

When Uhlmann asks “what of bushfires?” he quotes the 2021 IPCC report, which says the “extreme........

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