Question: Do you ever run into customers who know nothing about software, and are demanding a capability that doesn't exist? Sometimes these customers will argue, and tell you that you are wrong, despite the fact that you have orders of magnitude more knowledge on the subject than they do. I call these people arrogant fools.

I call them students.

So he doesn't need to show you the science behind what he was saying, he can just show you the math behind the bookkeeping.

And you too will come away a believer ;).

What I have read of the writings of the people that the Catholic church venerates, especially from pre-modern times, I find they strongly smack of sincerity when they talk about metaphysics (like resolving theodicy, or the "limbo of the infants", etc). They argue so passionately, and in such convolutions. And people have chosen to be burned at the stake, just to avoid saying "Yeah, you're right, I was wrong about God, I take it back." Those people, at least, must really believe, at a profound level.

Mind you, I find that they strongly smack of insincerity and self-service when they talk about worldly matters, like excommunicating kings for applying new taxes, or taking sides in WWII, or the whole condom thing, or dealing with accusations of pedophilia, or....

Such a surprising juxtaposition. Other churches seem to me to exhibit similar patterns, although few western religions have had a chance to build up such a legacy as the Catholic.

What would happen if a pope (no capital, and it's not a typo) would abdicate saying they no longer believed? Or if a pope would attempt to dismantle the church and spread their belongings amongst the poor?

As someone without the knowledge, time or intellect to critique climate science in depth, I don't 'support' the scientific consensus & IPPC reports vs the WUTW blog because I personally support the scientists involved. I do it because I have a certain level of trust in the ability of scientific processes (and the institutions that enforce/practice them) to provide us with better understanding of the world. It's the same reason I'm prepared to fly in a plane even though I don't have the physics or engineering qualifications or knowledge to asses whether it will stay in the air.

Also, what I think you are trying to say without really saying it is that people without scientific degrees should be able to critique science. I'm sure nearly everybody involved in climate science is fine with that, so long as you are prepared to publish your data and methods and face the scrutiny of peer review (finding a journal that will publish doctored graphs, fabricated citations and grossly misused statistical methods is probably the real challenge: even Medical Hypotheses is peer reviewed now…).

The problem with this is that the scientific processes in the two cases (climate science vs. physics and engineering of airplanes) are not actually comparable. That's part of the problem: climate scientists have used the "it's Science, therefore it's right" argument to keep from having to actually prove that their processes are as reliable as the ones in physics and engineering that have given the public its confidence in Science.

When you look at the processes in climate science, they aren't even close. To take just one example, in physics or engineering, the sorts of admissions climate scientists have made about losing raw data, not archiving it properly, not properly recording the manipulations they've made to the data, etc., would be grounds for dismissal of the people involved and repudiation of all of their conclusions. The work would have to be re-done from scratch using proper procedures.

You act as if there has ever been a targeted attack on the entire scientific community of physics and engineering, like there has been on the climate science community. There has not been, so therefore there isn't some single record of all of the errors and bad data in these scientific communities. When you talk of mistakes made by "climate scientist" with ther data, what percentage of climate scientists do you think have committed these errors? You are using mistakes made by individuals and organizations to smear an entire science. This is both erroneous, dishonest, and false, and is the scientific equivalent of "Asians are bad drivers because I got rear ended by this guy." Proving climate science right, compared to proving physics/engineering is comparing apples and oranges. Unless you know of a duplicate earth-like planet to use as a control group while we proceed with binding formerly buried carbon molecules with atmospheric oxygen in our current planet to see what happens. Instead, they are left with computer simulations, which have, so far, been too consevative to be accurate. They have failed to take into account all of the positive feedback loops, and the result is that the planet is warmer than predicted. These simulations are then challenged and attacked, other variables such as solar output variation, etc are mentioned, and the science is dismissed as being phoney, biased, cherry picking.

I don't even beleive carbon reduction is viable. I want geo-engineering solutions to handle the problem. But the people who would otherwise be on my side in the debate are too busy wringing their hands about a small percentage of studies which are, ironically, themselves cherry picked by the opponents and used to dismiss the science.

There hasn't had to be. Those fields have properly policed themselves, so they haven't needed to be policed by outsiders.

When you talk of mistakes made by "climate scientist" with ther data, what percentage of climate scientists do you think have committed these errors?

That's the wrong question. The right question is, what percentage of the data that all these models and theories are based on is corrupted? The answer is, we don't know. That, all by itself, is unacceptable.

You are using mistakes made by individuals and organizations to smear an entire science.

No, I am using the fact that the data that the science is based on can't be trusted. Who did what to make it that way is useful to know, but it's not the central point.

Proving climate science right, compared to proving physics/engineering is comparing apples and oranges.

It's true that we can't run controlled experiments on the climate the way we can in physics or engineering. That doesn't change the fact that you can't do science at all if you can't trust the data. There's no reason for climate data to be treated any differently than, say, particle physics data, and there's no reason to excuse failure to properly control data in climate science any more than there is in physics.

the planet is warmer than predicted.

Reference, please? Last I checked the planet was cooler than the IPCC had projected it to be based on the current CO2 level. Remember that there is not one single projection; there are a bunch of them, each making different assumptions about how much CO2 will rise. The actual CO2 rise has been close to the "business as usual" model scenarios, but the temperature rise has been, at most, what the "minimum" model scenario predicted, the one that assumed sharp cuts in CO2 emissions.

I want geo-engineering solutions to handle the problem.

I have no problem with this, if we can have reasonable confidence in what the effects will be. For example, we have reasonable confidence in how much aerosols high in the atmosphere can affect the climate (based on data from volcanic eruptions), so we can make reasonable predictions about that kind of geoengineering.

But for whatever reason, right now there's a giant gap of approach in how "amateurs" on both sides approach science. I guess what I'd like is amateurs who are actually interested in the science engaging with and contributing to expert discussion.

Not merely for the sake of amateurs, but for the sake of the expert scientific discourse itself. Science has no sides except reality; but if you have a situation where one political side vociferously attacks you while another political side defends you, it's psychologically very easy to forget that and your role as a scientist.

Manipulative tricks only work when the vast majority of the people have no clue about the inner workings of the pale blue dot that we are stewards of. But I cringe at the way the polarization is worked on both sides of the divide, support by ignoramuses is just as sought after by both sides and just as meaningless. But since we all live in democracies support by the numbers is important even if those supporting you have no clue about the facts or the underlying mechanisms.

In the end that support should not matter. What should matter is facts and the way (big) money is distorting the picture is very worrisome. Plenty of scientists (in absolute numbers, not in percentages, the far larger number are as ethical as can be and even some of those critical of the evidence are critical for pure motives, not because of some paycheck) have zero compunction about supporting whatever side pays for their mortgage. A preponderance of evidence (unfortunately) no longer offsets a preponderance of marketing dollars. And that is to me - for the moment, I may revise that statement, living 45' below sea level - far more worrying than climate change in and of itself.

Considering the possibilities of a runaway effect and the reality of China/India starting to use far more power and hence emitting far more CO2 this may be a thing that is already too far gone to stop, even if we did act today (Nobody seems to be sure about that one, though the consensus seems to be there will be a mitigating effect, magnitude unknown). But then imagine some real disaster triggered by our carelessness does befall us, what are we going to do to deal with the aftermath if we can't even agree on what to do when it is not yet rearranging our lives with careless abandon?

Nature doesn't care, one way or the other whether we're going to agree with each other or not. It'll just let physics run its course, and physics tends to be a pretty good if harsh teacher. Humans are pretty fragile. Maybe we will learn from this, maybe we won't, time will tell. But for now I'm not too hopeful about how this is playing out and both sides are guilty of trying to politicize this instead of letting the facts simply speak for themselves.

An inconvenient truth indeed.

There is plenty of effort being put into preventing that [1]. More to the point, evidence suggests that education doesn't make much difference:

https://secure.huffingtonpost.com/bill-chameides/climate-sci...

For Republicans, in contrast, increasing education makes virtually no difference in their acceptance of anthropogenic climate change. Roughly 70 percent of Republicans with a high school education (or less) reject climate science, and about the same percentage holds for Republicans with a post-graduate education.

[1] https://ssl1.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/texa...

1) I don't have a single college degree

2) What does it matter if you have a college degree in some soft science versus a someone without a degree that has tried very hard to keep current with a number of scientific fields?

3) What does support from uninformed / soft sciences people mean when it comes to stuff like this? To me it counts for next to nothing.

Plenty of scientists are religious and you could easily find a way to argue that apparently being excellent in one field does not at all qualify you as even moderately informed in another. (and some would go a lot further than that).

Scientists apparently have enough trouble dealing with the facts in their own fields, let alone those in other fields or in metaphysics or about something mystical. That doesn't mean that they are bad, but in that sense they may not be much more useful than your average, uninformed layperson when you're looking for support, depending on the area of interest.

The only people that should have a say in the debate at all are the climate scientists (the religious ones too), and those versed in analysing large volumes of data with questionable pedigree and discontinuities. We pay those guys to do their jobs, policy should be informed by that and commercial interests should have 0 say in it.

And those suckers that massaged their data to make it look more dramatic have done more damage than all the naysayers put together.

Put it this way: your point 3) implies that 'hard science' people have valid inputs. Why does a materials engineer specialising in ceramics have a greater validity than someone from the 'soft sciences'? What about a mathematician working on better algorithms for wifi comms, why do they have more validity? An astronomer working a radio telescope? The guys in the laser lab in the basement? So on and so forth.

Ironically, the 'soft sciences' have more do to with the climate change debate than any of these 'hard sciences' - not because of the scientific findings related to climate, but in order to understand the psychology of the debate itself - there's lots in interesting things going on in terms of how people communicate.

Neurophysiology and psychology are science as much as physics and math. We just don't have the right formulations yet (we never may, but given the progress over the last 200 years I'd say it would be a bad bet to place limits on what we will ultimately find out).

To me soft sciences are cultural anthropology (cue cultural anthropologist disagreeing), political sciences and a whole pile of other interesting subjects that are not sciences per se but studies of interesting but ultimately non quantifiable subjects without falsifiable hypothesis.

If you want to crack the psychology of the way the debate shapes around subjects that are ultimately important to lots of people and where those people make decisions against their own interest you should study how marketing really works.

It is applied psychology with a twist, it's on how to use knowledge about people against themselves (cue marketing guru that is offended, I hope they won't be watching Bill Hicks). Marketing is exactly that, a way to sell people on something that doesn't benefit them and that they do not need.

When people without scientific training attack scientists--without having gone through similar training and evaluation--then it's not surprising they would be met with suspicion.

Of course they would be. But their support counts for just as much. Nothing.

If you want to settle things this way you're looking for something we do not have, a meritocracy. And even in science sometimes the lone guy was right after all (in fact, you could argue that every radical departure from the norm in science was exactly such a situation).

Science needs to work really hard to be above politicization of the work they are doing. If scientists can't do that then how are we going to hold the ignorant masses (you know, those without even a single college degree, because they're all ignorant) to a different standard?

To them either side looks equally good, in fact the side that throws the most money at it will probably be able to look better than the other, even when they're not right.

So the trick is to decide the issues in such a way that such support is no longer needed.