“A wise man makes more opportunities than he finds.”

This quote is attributed to Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), one time attorney general of the British crown, lord high chancellor to Queen Elizabeth I and father of the Scientific Method — the notion that scientific evidence should back up your logic, opinions and agenda.

Lately, a zeal for opportunism seems to have obliterated scientific method in a quest to overtake wisdom. After all, if everyone accepts the logic, why bother proving it?

Climate change is a handy example.

In early October, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report on rising ocean temperatures. The main finding was that human activity has caused 1.0 degrees Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial temperatures, and is likely to increase another 0.5 degrees by 2052 if it continues rising at the current rate.

Two weeks after the IPCC report, researchers in the journal Nature reported that ocean temperatures had warmed 60 percent more than the IPCC had reported.

Both reports carried the same somber warning. In the Butler Eagle, columnist Robert Samuelson wrote: “If there were any doubt before, there should be none now. ‘Solving’ the global climate change problem may be humankind’s mission impossible.” (“Mission impossible: Global Warming,” Oct. 15).

The overriding message, of course is: “change your ways right now, humankind, before you destroy the planet.” But there is a lesser message, spoken at a slightly reduced volume. The Hill picked up the secondary message in an op-ed column earlier this week: “The IPCC claims in its latest report that action must be taken to avert global warming ... its recommendation: a carbon tax of as much as $200 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 to an astonishing $27,000 per ton by 2100. For American families, this could mean the price of gasoline soaring to $240 per gallon.”

There’s only one problem, according to the Hill: “IPCC’s recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt because of seriously flawed economic models. But we must take a carbon tax seriously, as the idea gains traction.”

How flawed? Well ...

Researchers with UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Princeton University are walking back findings published in Nature after mathematicians posted critiques online, citing serious miscalculations. Co-author Ralph Keeling, climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, took full blame when alerted of the mistake.

“Our error margins are too big now to really weigh in on the precise amount of warming that’s going on in the ocean,” Keeling said. “We really muffed the error margins.”

Keeling said his team has submitted corrected calculations to Nature, showing that the ocean is still likely warmer than the estimate used by the IPCC. However, that increase in heat has a larger range of probability than initially thought — between 10 percent and 70 percent, as other studies have already found.

In other words, there is evidence, but no new evidence — no measurable proof — that the world’s oceans will continue to warm, and we will see further irreparable damage if we fail to reduce our fossil fuel emissions.

Indeed, there is evidence, and it should not be ignored or downplayed. In a great sense, the globe is our laboratory, and we’re immersed in a one-time experiment.

A the same time, we are steeped in the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, whose innovations and advances gave birth to the modern scientific method, which demands that experimental processes can be proven and reproduced.

In today’s sophisticated climate, it’s not enough to jump to conclusions, especially when a tax is involved. Show us the science.