A recent study placing climate change scientists in two camps – believers and deniers —took some knocks for failing to identify the differences among the believers.

Some of those variations were on display last week at an MIT for a symposium called “”https://globalchange.mit.edu/news/event-item.php?id=275">Perspectives on Energy and Climate Policy Research." The event was to honor Henry D. “Jake” Jacoby, Sloan School of Management professor who help kick off climate change research at MIT.

One speaker, Brian P. Flannery of Exxon Mobil Corp, spoke on the modeling approach to climate change known as integrated assessment. Flannery cast it as a way to embrace uncertainty while using quantitative analysis.

Click here for some of his thoughts.

Flannery questioned the science use by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He knocked early IPPC reports as “verbal assertions without quantitative work.” He also said that the panel balked at including a chapter on integrated assessment in its second report “because they didn’t like the answers that were emerging because they were quantitative…”

Down the road, Tufts environmental economist Frank Ackerman sees it differently.

Writing that "The integrated assessment models (IAMs) that economists use to analyze the expected costs and benefits of climate policies frequently suggest that the “optimal” policy is to go slowly and to do relatively little in the near term to reduce greenhouse gas emissions… the results of such analyses are no better than the information drawn from the underlying economic, atmospheric and biological sciences. Integrated assessment models are limited both by the underlying knowledge base upon which they draw and by the relatively limited experiential base.

The event was recorded and will be posted, we’re told.