1. F=ma, Newton's second law, can be replicated easily. It's a fact.
2. If I kick this soccer ball right here, applying a force, it will accelerate away from me. It's a fact.
3. Look, it has accelerated away from me, it's a measurable fact!
...a short time later...
4. Oh, I was standing at the bottom of a hill, so the ball just rolled back to my feet.
Do you understand? We are discussing an insanely complex system, with feedback loops everywhere, and a scant (at best) 100 years of quality data on a planet 4 billion years old. There is nothing simple about this. The physics of the radiation balance isn't in question, but for all we know it may be dwarfed by negative feedbacks. They are forced to fallback on computer models for a reason.
Nobody talks about 99% of doctors and smoking, because we can empirically test this. Hundreds of millions of people have smoked, and we have observed the effects.
The smoking/cancer analogy always makes me smile, because it is actually a very good one. Let's turn it around. The physics of how smoking causes cancer is pretty solid. We know about toxins and carcinogens, etc. But let's say I hand you a single human being, and I ask you, "if he smokes for the next 40 years, will he get cancer?". We don't have a freaking clue. The human body - the feedback of the immune system defences, nutrition, genetics - are beyond our power to model. Science is hopelessly unable to answer that question. And ponder this for a moment - we have 6 billion potential test subjects to work with! We have one earth. This is the state of climate science. The biosphere/atmosphere/oceans/etc. are every bit as complex as a single human body, and we have only one patient to study, and data for maybe 0.0000025 of the patient's lifetime.
But, I hear you say, "shouldn't we be cautious then? Shouldn't we quit just in case?". And fair enough, we probably should be cautious. But the counterpoint to that is that fossil fuel usage isn't a nicotine hit. It doesn't deliver us a few moments of pleasure in return for the risk of cancer. It fuels our entire industrial civilization. So the risk/reward calculation looks quite a bit different, doesn't it?
In one case, we have the potential risk confirmed by the empirical evidence of a test set of hundreds of million of smokers, and the potential reward being a nicotine hit. In the other, we have no way of testing the theorized risk outside of models, and the reward is the energy to power our entire civilization.
So yeah, it is an analogy that always makes me laugh a little.
We actually do need to talk about those feedback loops. Really.
In science that is extremely important, we probably don't disagree. This is obvious.
For laymen who vote about this shit and need to be informed? Again important. If we just wave around this "99% of scientist" shit, the intelligent, but uninformed part of populace is not going to buy it. They feel like being called idiots. There is nothing like that to make a person to vehemently oppose you, if he has based part of his ego on being intelligent.
Now in my circle of friends, who am I going to believe on this subject. The guy who goes "420 blaze it! 99% of scientist agree cars are bad!" Or the guy who is bachelor of something and is really really skeptical about all this climate change stuff. I would go with the latter.
The message should be "We hear you and we aren't 100% certain. Let's start from the easy stuff to minimize the potential bad stuff."
If a laymen disagrees with the vast majority of scientists, he is not intelligent no matter what he likes to think of himself as. Intelligent people are aware of the complexity of the world and their own ignorance of a subject are aren't so hung up in their own egos that they think they're smarter than an entire field of specialists. So if you think the skeptic laymen is more believable just because he's a skeptic, well, you're not really taking the intelligent position because you're ignoring the context that he's in opposition to nearly all of the experts.
...a short time later...
4. Oh, I was standing at the bottom of a hill, so the ball just rolled back to my feet.
Do you understand? We are discussing an insanely complex system, with feedback loops everywhere, and a scant (at best) 100 years of quality data on a planet 4 billion years old. There is nothing simple about this. The physics of the radiation balance isn't in question, but for all we know it may be dwarfed by negative feedbacks. They are forced to fallback on computer models for a reason.
Nobody talks about 99% of doctors and smoking, because we can empirically test this. Hundreds of millions of people have smoked, and we have observed the effects.
The smoking/cancer analogy always makes me smile, because it is actually a very good one. Let's turn it around. The physics of how smoking causes cancer is pretty solid. We know about toxins and carcinogens, etc. But let's say I hand you a single human being, and I ask you, "if he smokes for the next 40 years, will he get cancer?". We don't have a freaking clue. The human body - the feedback of the immune system defences, nutrition, genetics - are beyond our power to model. Science is hopelessly unable to answer that question. And ponder this for a moment - we have 6 billion potential test subjects to work with! We have one earth. This is the state of climate science. The biosphere/atmosphere/oceans/etc. are every bit as complex as a single human body, and we have only one patient to study, and data for maybe 0.0000025 of the patient's lifetime.
But, I hear you say, "shouldn't we be cautious then? Shouldn't we quit just in case?". And fair enough, we probably should be cautious. But the counterpoint to that is that fossil fuel usage isn't a nicotine hit. It doesn't deliver us a few moments of pleasure in return for the risk of cancer. It fuels our entire industrial civilization. So the risk/reward calculation looks quite a bit different, doesn't it?
In one case, we have the potential risk confirmed by the empirical evidence of a test set of hundreds of million of smokers, and the potential reward being a nicotine hit. In the other, we have no way of testing the theorized risk outside of models, and the reward is the energy to power our entire civilization.
So yeah, it is an analogy that always makes me laugh a little.