From what I understand, the scientific consensus [1] is not that climate change is completely caused by human activity, for the very reason you mention: it’s complicated. :)
But like you also mention, the consensus is that we are we are at least partially causing it, even if it’s not “completely.” If we’re not causing 100% of the change, but perhaps 50%, I’m not sure if that’s much of a distinction in terms of what policy to change. Do you agree?
[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus - “Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.” It does not say or imply 100% due to those human activities. The ACS says, “The Earth’s climate is changing in response to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and particulate matter in the atmosphere, largely as the result of human activities.” Even there, it’s not saying completely, although it’s saying largely, which definitely has a distinction.
Absolutely!
I think we are very 'unlucky' (stupid) that we are accelerating a natural climate change that causes global warming.
If we had, instead, encouraged "Trust the Scientific Method" and taught people to think and replicate claims, we'd be in a much better place.
But, the lack of access to raw datasets (and the packaged code to transform them into claimed results) has led to a total "trust" environment, with no ability to "check scientist's work".
What other outcome could we have expected?
Just a few weeks back, Saudi Arabia (and some other countries I'm missing) insisted on weakening the claims made in a joint statement/study of the COP.
The lack of trust in science (imho) stems from the fact that pretty big news organisations (fox, Bild etc) are doing their best to ease the cognitive dissonance of their audience by claiming them unreliable. The ivory tower is just a propaganda trope at this point
Said to say that I think parent thread has it right - people need to have faith in the method - not the experts - and realize that the method does not yield infallible results. It’s simply the best mechanism for getting the truth with the data we currently have. And people need to be able to parse out when they are seeing data-driven conclusions over when experts are just saying dumb/political things. That can’t be a referendum on “science”.
Further, they believe that their holy literature is perfect and because science changes, science must be wrong[1]. Therefore, we should just follow what the book says, which is that there will be a rapture.
0: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2010/07/14/jesus-chris... where christ's return means the end times. 1: unfortunately I don't have a citation for this, but it's something I've seen a lot.
I think we'd be pretty amazed at what people can discover, when the raw data and the analytical procedures used to draw conclusions from that data are exposed to scrutiny.
I know how to run climate simulations, given a huge dump of climate data I would _not_ be able to draw any new conclusions out of it, I can guarantee that to you.
My point is that this idea that distrust in science stems from a lack of open data is wrong, and instead product of concerted and ongoing effort of propaganda and defunding of academia. Climate change is at this stage more a political problem than it is a scientific one.
I think that's certainly true, but it doesn't account of the scores of unforced errors that our institutions and academy's are making on an almost daily basis that has eroded any credibility. Here are just a few examples...
CDC tweets that masks are 80% effective at "reducing your chance of getting COVID" - which is highly selective and word smithed information AT BEST. The real number is more like 11% and only when it's surgical. CDC fails to mention at all the cloth masks are pretty inadequate - which would be actual helpful information for people... https://twitter.com/cdcdirector/status/1456645731691925518 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02457-y
American Academy of Pediatrics pushes FDA to approve vaccines and decries FDA's request for 1K more subjects to add to the 1500 in the trial. Then goes on to say Delta is "very dangerous to children" even though there is still no evidence to suggest that Delta is any more dangerous for children and rate of hospitalized chidren with serious disease hasn't changed from 2 in 100,000. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/american-academy-of-pediat... https://apnews.com/article/delta-variant-coronavirus-kids-40...
We could go on and on. People are not stupid. They see this stuff, know that they are being misled and that erodes trust. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter if the misleading is in good faith or not.
When you push wildly experimental things by calling them "Vaccinations", when they do not confer immunity (!) but primarily reduce symptoms, and hence are not a "public good" (protect the at-risk unvaccinated population), but are a "personal good" (reduce your individual risks) -- it is, in fact, you that are destroying the credibility of public vaccination programs! People aren't stupid. Avoiding a potentially risky genetic treatment that doesn't confer community protection, when I believe effective treatments are available, is sound logic.
Likewise, creating artificial markets that penalize highly efficient, clean and non-murderous producers of hydrocarbon products (ie. Canadian), while simultaneously giving a complete pass to murderous and polluting regimes (China, Middle-Eastern) is repugnant. A "solution" which is this terrible is not acceptable, and hence will be rejected (eg. by people, for example, that don't agree with tossing gays off roof-tops or harvesting organs from undesirable people groups)
So, until "those people" who conflate rejecting insane non-immunizing experimental treatments with denying "vaccine efficacy", or conflate rejecting ineffective transfers of wealth from law-abiding oil producers to murderous polluters as rejecting "climate change" -- we're not going to reach agreement on "trusting the science".
Even if raw datasets were available, I suspect 95%+ of people lack the ability to draw conclusions from them.
A majority would fail simply in the step of opening a browser and navigating the internet to get to the dataset.
And then a sizable portion would fail at figuring out which programs to use to analyze them.
And then a sizable portion of those would not understand the math to be able to understand the measurements they would be making.
The emergence of certain mostly trustworthy organizations filled with mostly trustworthy people is what has gotten us humans this far. People do not have the capacity to be able to comprehend and analyze all of nature, they will have to rely on trustworthy specialists.
It doesn't take a multitude of people to falsify an unsound claim.
It only takes one counterexample.
Could it be that "Trust the Science" is simply an attempt to prop up faulty science that can't survive scrutiny?
But at the of the day, for the most complicated topics, we will have to trust others.
There's a sizable portion of so-called scientists that neither know nor understand math either [1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1xfa8p/medical_paper_...
There was a time when you were meant to trust the church. You weren't allowed to read the bible or interpret it yourself, since that was the role of a priest.
It was not a good system, and the people who were in charge of interpreting the scripture for people used their station to enrich themselves and levy power over the people who had to come to them.
1) https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210907/masks-limit-covid-s...
But we know that this is not the case. To me, this exercise is along the lines of wondering what the universe would be like if the cosmological constant had a different value.
It's a discussion about a theoretical world which does not exist, isn't it? What is the point then?
be generous and call it 95%.
what would it take to prove to the scientific establishment that whoops, we're in that 5%!
Wrong after all.
Here's the proof, everyone can go home now.
Given the number of variables & the long timelines involved, and the depth of political entrenchment - that outcome of a widely accepted disproof seems basically impossible, doesn't it?
In which case, what are we arguing for?
if our Goldielocks zone is so precious, then one would expect any deviation in the orbit to deliver measurable differences in effects caused by earth’s proximity to the sun, no?
The orbit of Earth is also extremely stable, barely changing, and with time the earth is getting farther from the Sun, not closer, as the Sun is slowing losing mass since it's burning fuel to produce heat and light. The speed at which we are getting further away is however ridiculously tiny: a few centimeters a year.
To give you a sense of perspective, earth is closest to the sun in January and furthest in July. It is ~5 million kilometers nearer in January, and that only amount to about 6 or 7% more solar energy received.
So, any deviation of earth orbit's over the past 100 years that would explain climate change would need to be massive. Not the kind of things we wouldn't notice, and also not the kind of things that would allow us to be talking about it today. If earth's orbit was changing that much, that would mean our solar system is not stable, probably making life impossible.
So there's already a 3.5 million mile margin of error in our Goldilocks zone... we'd have to go way beyond a few miles of annual change to feel any impact.
It is also awfully very convenient to ignore the fact that Earth's climate has been ever changing since its beginning.
“the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of about 120 years on average.”
“no temperature variability is preserved in our reconstruction at cycles shorter than 300 years, 50% is preserved at 1,000-year time scales, and nearly all is preserved at 2,000-year periods and longer.”
Recent data came from yearly measurements, so preserves variability on a yearly basis.
In other words, the way past data was determined, sudden changes would be hidden, like the temperature spike that it shows in the 20th century.
If it had gone back 400,000 years, which is basically nothing in geological scales, it would bring up some really interesting questions.
“Climate simulations generally do not reproduce this kind of warming in the Arctic Ocean, meaning there’s an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms driving Atlantification,”
My takeaway: because we still know so little about the mechanisms we should be more careful about our environment. It's very naive to pump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere without knowing what will happen.