There isn't even a single point of authority here. The determination is made by climate scientists, biologists, ecologists, etc... across multiple independent governments, allies and enemies alike.
Argument from authority is meant to avoid groupthink, but there are many many disparate groups coming to the same conclusion here while relying on entirely different sets of evidence.
If you can use argument from authority to dispute this, then you can use it to dispute any consensus ever made.
It sounds like no one responding to me actually understands how climate models work. How do they work? What are their assumptions, their dynamical models, their uncertainties? I don't think you or anyone else in this thread can tell me that. You can tell me "the data is there", or vague assertions like "there are papers everywhere" - that's it, no specifics. If you were writing a scientific paper with such vague assertions it would be thrown in the trash.
Only specialists are qualified to even enter the debate. That is the essence of the fallacious appeals to authority that undermine all climate arguments. And the specialists are terrible communicators.
Yes you can get a brief summary of what it is about. But you are not at all in a position to evaluate how sound it is without spending months or years.
Short explanations between laypeople is essentially propaganda, no matter which side of the issue they are on. What I mean is: How believable the explanation is is only correlated to the rhetorical skill of the presenter. It is not related to how true the proposition is.
I think this is a general problem. Climate isn't an exception in any way, it just happens to be the one area that really matters for our future (consequences of people not believing evolution is far far less).
Darwin did just fine in the Origin of Species ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species ).
> Short explanations between laypeople is essentially propaganda, no matter which side of the issue they are on.
While this is correct, would you like to point out a long explanation that will overcome this? A book, perhaps?
One that doesn't rely on computer models, all of which, in every field, are absolute trash because they can be twisted to say whatever you want them to say as demonstrated in the very article we're discussing.
How is it that Darwin didn't need computer models to make his point, but climate science is empty without them?
The basic thesis of climate change is even simpler than evolution (greenhouse gases causes warming in lab + nature compensates within a window, ocean acidification etc => there is a tolerance level where nature can no longer compensate and you get the effect on earth that you observe in lab).
Yet in the same way as with evolution there are opponents/deniers.
It sounds like you insist that something must be "simple" in order to be "true". That because climate isn't "simple", climate science is wrong. But: You have lots of stuff like General Relativity which is complex yet (normally considered) true. Nature doesn't have to be simple just because you say so.
The article we are discussing is illustrating statistical incompetence and says nothing about computer models at all.
If you want to insist that computer modelling is garbage, say goodbye to most of the science you have previously accepted. My PhD is in astrophysics and we certainly did a lot of computer modelling and equation solving (since the 70s...take computers away and there is nothing left of cosmology as a field, the same holds for many other fields). If you don't trust computer modelling say goodbye to anything you think you know about the age of the universe, etc. etc.
There is good science and bad science with the aid of computers just as there is good and bad science without the aid of computers.
I don't have any book recommendation for you. I just know how to do science (from an astrophysics perspective) and from what I know, the climate "sceptics" seems to be making a lot of rookie mistakes when they crop out, and the climate scientists seem to make sound claims. But that is definitely just looking at the surface and applying my preconceptions. I don't have time to spend a year or two to go in depth; so I see no choice but to trust the climate scientists the way I would trust an oncologist if I got cancer and so on. Reading some "propaganda" about the subject (as defined in my previous post, i.e. popular science) from either camp won't make me much wiser anyway.
You're going to lengths to make a weak argument here.
You're just dicking around for seemingly no reason. It seems as though you're trying to win a debate that no one else is interested in by being exhaustingly pedantic. You didn't even really use the appeal to authority correctly, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt there. Good luck.
I'm guessing that these deniers don't question other complex things like how their hardware and software works, how gravity works or how papers is made.
The greenhouse gas hypothesis is readily explainable to elementary school children. Explaining the actual mechanisms is, obviously, far more complicated.
But the same is true for evolution. Origin of the Species pre-dated the discovery of DNA by nearly 100 years. Even a not particularly bright Biology undergraduate has a better understanding of evolution than a hypothetical re-animated Darwin.
A thorough explanation of our best knowledge about evolution requires a graduate-level course in genetics (and a few other things). A thorough explanation of our best knowledge about climate science requires a graduate-level course in mathematical modeling (and a few other things).
> It sounds like no one responding to me actually understands how climate models work. How do they work?
I've actually implemented toy versions of some of these models so that I could have a better understanding of the relationship between computer models and raw data. I have a graduate-level understanding of ODEs, PDEs, and numerical analysis, but was still in pretty far over my head.
My take-away form that experience: unless you have the time to devote to getting (the equivalent of) a PhD in climate science, you likely don't understand these models well enough to comment on them.
So I actually do think it's just objectively true that:
> Only specialists are qualified to even enter the debate.
Which, as you note, is a serious problem. But the way I see it, each citizen has three options:
1. Get a Ph.D. in climate science.
2. Superficially engage with climate science.
3a. Trust that people who spend a lot of time studying these probably have well-informed opinions (an appeal to an appropriate authority).
3b. Trust some other authority (e.g., the PR experts working for conservative senators and fossil fuel companies, who are admittedly better communicators).
Obviously, option 1 is ideal.
Option 2 isn't necessarily better than Option 3a. How do you know what you don't know? How do you know when you come to a terrible conclusion based upon a misinterpretation of data?
Let's take me as an example. When experimenting with these models, I'd often find surprising results. But then I'd ask a climate science friend only to find that I had made some subtle but in fact ridiculous mistake. And they'd be able to explain to me what that mistake was, because I have lots of experience with ODEs/PDEs and enough experience reading scientific literature that I could read the papers/datasets that used to justify their assertion that I had chosen an unrealistic value for some parameter or another. And enough experience with statistical modeling that I could apply some common "validation" tricks and notice that I could reproduce some of the critiques of my mistakes.
How do you do that if you don't have a Ph.D.-level understanding of dynamical systems, plenty of programming experience, AND a climate science Ph.D. friend? Not to mention no family and plenty of free time...
That leaves Options 3 -- both appeals to authority. However, not all appeals to authority are equally fallacious. Listening to a quack pot cult leader and listening to a trained nurse are both appeals to authority; however, only a fool would believe these are equally inadvisable.
If you don't have the time to seriously engage with modern science, is trusting your own judgment really more advisable than listening to experts? I don't think the answer is quite as clear cut as you make it out to be. When I see arguments like yours, that Emerson quote always comes to mind: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
I.e., just because you avoided a "logical fallacy" doesn't mean that your mode of reasoning is more likely to result in Truth. See also: the millions of "proofs" that Sqrt[2] is rational. On this question, the person who listens to the blind authority of the mathematician has a strictly better route to truth than the person who believes their own mistaken reasoning despite (or, more typically, to spite) expert testimony.
I submit the same is even more likely to be true for more complicated issues, such as climate science or evolution.
It's worth saying that no one really expects you to live life or strictly act like this. Avoiding fallacies is really just about putting forth a concrete logical agument.
Retoric (and life) can be plenty productive without logical rigor and appeals to authority have meaning and value outside of 'logic'. Ethos, logos, pathos anyone?
The data are publicly available and the papers relatively accessible. The dismissal isn’t because climate deniers reject the mainstream. It’s because they reject the mainstream without trying to understand it.
This is not how it works the real world. Saying "research is out there" is absolutely meaningless in convincing people, especially if you don't even post actual links/citations (which most people never do).
They listened to their doctors. Modern life is too complex for everyone to understand everything fully. So we delegate decisions to reliable authorities.
If one wishes to disagree with said authorities, i.e. with the status quo, the burden of proof is on the person bringing the disagreement. The problem with anti-vaxers and climate deniers is their rejection of the status quo without any proper evidence. (Also making decisions that negatively impact other people.)
Exactly. This directly contradicts the notion that "the research out there" is by itself sufficient to convince anyone of anything.
People rely on authorities, and different groups of people have different entities they consider authoritative.
>So we delegate decisions to reliable authorities.
Sure. Like, uh, elected politicians? Who benefit from politicization of science, no matter which side of each issues they end up on?
It it remarkable how oblivious most people are to the social dynamics of these issues.
The Discovery of Global Warming
https://history.aip.org/climate/index.htm
As the questions are political, you need rhetoric. As unfortunately as it may be, it should be obvious by now to everyone following politics that being "polite" is not a winning recipe in the game.
These people act as authorities as well. If the alternative is to appeal to another authority, then it seems like choosing not to change opinions is a reasonable course of action for somebody who is already convinced on the basis of authority. The public case for concern about climate change has been marred with incessant exaggeration (for example, lady liberty was supposed to be semi-submerged by now, and the north pole was supposed to be completely free of ice by 2013). The source of many Americans' (and Canadians') skepticism of climate predictions is a continuous outpouring of exaggeration and fabrication, especially on the part of Al Gore (whose film was shown to a significant proportion of Canadian school children [and I imagine, American school children as well] in the oughts).
Citation needed
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/
I trust Snopes here since they are desperately attempting to cast Gore's statements in a positive light. They choose to address whether Gore "predicted" this event, rather than whether he disseminated the prediction. If the question is whether he confidently disseminated this prediction, the answer is a resounding yes.
The IPCC publish estimates generally between 2035 (on the very low end) and 2100+ (generally "possibly before the end of the 21st century", i.e. possibly later) for the arctic ice cap to melt almost completely.
Where is they citation of Al Gore claiming the arctic will be ice free? Everything in that source is prefaced with terms like "could Be" and "as soon as", which you seem to be interpreting as a complete certainty. If I said I had cancer and could die as early 2018 then I wouldn't be wrong on New Years day 2019.
Where's the citation of the Statue of Liberty being underwater? Even with an ice free arctic this wouldn't happen.
> Where's the citation of the Statue of Liberty being underwater?
The Statue of Liberty thing I actually don't remember the source of. I remember it as a clip in a climate documentary where the statue of liberty is visualized as being about a quarter submerged (note I said "semi-submerged", not "underwater", funny how the broken telephone works even when you can presumably see everything on screen at once).
You can say this same thing about almost any scientific finding.
A less controversial example:
General Relativity is extremely odd and widely accepted.
If someone refuses to believe General Relativity, would you really say the problem is "failure of communication"?
Any kind of meaningful communication on the subject would take years, and also (if you insist in not trusting others) require a lot of expensive experiments to be carried out.
Any "communication" short of that is in a sense propaganda; in that how believable you make it seem to the layperson is not correlated with how true it is.
No, rather than a problem with communication, the problem is arrogance in believing that General Relativity (or Climate..) is something you can have an opinion about without years of physics training.
(There are physics professors that may dispute GR. That is fine; it did not seem that your topic was communication with sceptical academics in the climate sciences)
If I am going to reject my mechanic’s diagnosis I need to have strong evidence and reasoning to support my position. Climate deniers don’t have that, and their pigheadedness puts everyone at danger.
Efforts to summarize the scientific evidence for global warming for laymen are myriad. The arguments and evidence for global warming are extremely accessible.
I don’t see how the blame isn’t on the climate deniers.
Take the car mechanic. His incentives don't completely align with yours. Taking a benign example, his goals are to keep your car in good condition and to make money. Your goals are to keep your car in good condition and to save money. Thus, the car mechanic might err on the side of caution and suggest you replace your car brakes every 30 thousand miles, while you (assuming you knew all the relevant information) would only replace the brakes every 50 thousand miles.
In the absence of "strong evidence and reasoning", you may still reasonably decide that you don't trust the mechanic.
Multiple independent governments, thousands of peer reviewed studies across multiple disciplines, data collected from satellites, billions of dollars across decades of research... but still not enough.
It's stupid and dangerous. To be capable of thinking that it's a hoax requires a severe lack of understanding of the simple scale of humanity.
I find it more believable to think that you've been personally abducted by aliens than any segment of humanity having the ability to pull off a trick of such magnitude.