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> by a lot of conspiracy theorists, And climate denialists, who generally fall back on their weak intuitions. It'd be overgenerous to compare them to Newtonian

by titzer 6y ago

> by a lot of conspiracy theorists, And climate denialists, who generally fall back on their weak intuitions. It'd be overgenerous to compare them to Newtonian physicists failing to grasp Relativity--the former was at least a respectable, experimentally verifiable theory that one could get to with basic calculus and the straight lines our minds draw for us, and not an inaccessible mathematical theory requiring graduate study to grasp that warps your mind just like it warps space time. A lot of people are like Flat Earthers who won't look through a pair of binoculars to watch a ship disappear over the horizon. It's both right in front of their face and yet beyond their reach; it needs just a smidgen of education, and they'd see it for themselves. It is this way with climate change denialists. But things are looking up! Monarchs are basically extinct now, the Arctic will be ice-free in summer sooner than expected, and floods in Florida are picking up! Some people are gonna get an education soon!

tryonenow 6y ago
>the former was at least a respectable, experimentally verifiable theory One of the major problems with climate science is that it is fundamentally not experimentally verifiable. That almost places it in the category of soft science. Laymen tend to underestimate the uncertainty of the so called consensus. It is a fundamental property of the field of Climate Science. It will not be comfortable in certainty to something like Newtonian Physics until we have non-sparse, direct measurements on a the scale of climate change - including periods on the order of thousands to millions of years. If you decomposed temperature variations sampled with a suitable rate and period (in space and time) you would find very noisy frequency and period spectra. It's like measuring the waveform of a song. With out current methods we are sampling the last second of a 3 minute song, sparkly estimating points from the rest of the song, and trying to make predictions for future sounds - in 3D. There is nothing which doesn't suggest that we aren't in a warming period which happens to line up with out estimates of anthropogenic CO2 production, and historic estimates are simply not precise enough to definitively determine that past changes did not regularly occur with the same rate. All I'm saying is that people need to recognize that doomsday scenarios are absolute worst case black swan predictions, and there is a lot less certainty to this pseudo-settled science than the zeitgeist would allow one to admit. Look at the reception received by anyone who raises critical points - the same pressures bias most literature on the subject.

by titzer 6y ago

tryonenow 6y ago

>the former was at least a respectable, experimentally verifiable theory One of the major problems with climate science is that it is fundamentally not experimentally verifiable. That almost places it in the category of soft science. Laymen tend to underestimate the uncertainty of the so called consensus. It is a fundamental property of the field of Climate Science. It will not be comfortable in certainty to something like Newtonian Physics until we have non-sparse, direct measurements on a the scale of climate change - including periods on the order of thousands to millions of years. If you decomposed temperature variations sampled with a suitable rate and period (in space and time) you would find very noisy frequency and period spectra. It's like measuring the waveform of a song. With out current methods we are sampling the last second of a 3 minute song, sparkly estimating points from the rest of the song, and trying to make predictions for future sounds - in 3D. There is nothing which doesn't suggest that we aren't in a warming period which happens to line up with out estimates of anthropogenic CO2 production, and historic estimates are simply not precise enough to definitively determine that past changes did not regularly occur with the same rate. All I'm saying is that people need to recognize that doomsday scenarios are absolute worst case black swan predictions, and there is a lot less certainty to this pseudo-settled science than the zeitgeist would allow one to admit. Look at the reception received by anyone who raises critical points - the same pressures bias most literature on the subject.