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In science, a majority means very little. There have been many cases throughout history where one person was right and everyone else was wrong. That is a plain

In science, a majority means very little. There have been many cases throughout history where one person was right and everyone else was wrong. That is a plain old crap argument. Yes, there have been such cases, but they are far and away the exception rather than the rule. For every Einstein that was right when all of his peers were wrong, there are a thousand morons with websites that claim that Einstein was wrong, and they make plenty of noise and harass the hell out of scientists all over the place. The fact that Einstein's theories are now accepted is no reason to lend any more credibility to the "Einstein is wrong" theories, in fact, the ultimate acceptance of Einstein's theories is evidence that truth eventually wins out over fancy in science. For the most part, if you want to know what's true in a scientific field, you do accept the consensus opinion. There are brief periods where the consensus is wrong, but if there's actually enough evidence to prove it, these periods end rather quickly and the truth wins out. Scientists are not random people in China, they have actually spent their lives studying their fields, and truly care about finding truth. The bulk of a scientist's training is about methods of separating truth from fiction, and I would not be so quick to assume that people brought up with that ideal are willing to disregard it because - what? - it doesn't match their politics?

gavanwoolery 15y ago
I agree with you - it is often the exception rather than the rule, but that does not mean we can discount skeptics because they are a minority. In this case, there are enough skeptics, and enough sound logic behind them, that there is reason to be skeptical (again, go through all the quotes in the wikipedia entry I linked and see if you can dismiss all of them). I would never propose that we should or should not believe in AGW. What I propose is that we should be skeptical to both sides until we have the hard, undeniable data. Again, I would emphasize there is a huge difference between a fact and a hypothesis. Many studies have already been proven wrong, temperatures have not risen as dramatically as expected. In the long run though it makes little difference either way as I have stated. Regardless of AGW, we should pursue green technology because we are running out of non-renewable energy, and advancing energy research is perhaps the most important scientific field at this point in time.
PakG1 15y ago
One key difference between Einstein's theories and the matter of climate change. Einstein's work has stood the test of several decades of analysis, time that allowed the skeptics to be turned. The same can't be said of the argument around climate change yet. People shouldn't draw conclusions so easily.
- hugh3 15y ago
  The main difference is that relativity has been tested experimentally, over and over, to extremely high precision. Climate change models have been tested once-ish, to low precision, without necessarily filtering out the other effects. I just want to re-emphasise, since this is an area in which people love to misinterpret, that nothing I say should be taken as an argument that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening. The preponderance of evidence, in my flawed estimation, indicates that it probably is. I'm merely here to argue against believing things with an excessive degree of confidence.
hugh3 15y ago
The mere fact that a majority of scientists think X rather than Y is a poor argument for why you should believe it too. You also need to know why they believe that and how strong their conviction is. For instance, if the available evidence suggests that X is probably true (with, say, 90% confidence), then a poll taken of scientists will find that 99.9% of scientists will say "Yes, X is probably true". But of course there's still a 10% chance that X is false -- information well known to those scientists, but completely lost in the opinion poll.

gavanwoolery 15y ago

I agree with you - it is often the exception rather than the rule, but that does not mean we can discount skeptics because they are a minority. In this case, there are enough skeptics, and enough sound logic behind them, that there is reason to be skeptical (again, go through all the quotes in the wikipedia entry I linked and see if you can dismiss all of them). I would never propose that we should or should not believe in AGW. What I propose is that we should be skeptical to both sides until we have the hard, undeniable data. Again, I would emphasize there is a huge difference between a fact and a hypothesis. Many studies have already been proven wrong, temperatures have not risen as dramatically as expected. In the long run though it makes little difference either way as I have stated. Regardless of AGW, we should pursue green technology because we are running out of non-renewable energy, and advancing energy research is perhaps the most important scientific field at this point in time.

PakG1 15y ago

One key difference between Einstein's theories and the matter of climate change. Einstein's work has stood the test of several decades of analysis, time that allowed the skeptics to be turned. The same can't be said of the argument around climate change yet. People shouldn't draw conclusions so easily.

hugh3 15y ago
The main difference is that relativity has been tested experimentally, over and over, to extremely high precision. Climate change models have been tested once-ish, to low precision, without necessarily filtering out the other effects. I just want to re-emphasise, since this is an area in which people love to misinterpret, that nothing I say should be taken as an argument that anthropogenic climate change isn't happening. The preponderance of evidence, in my flawed estimation, indicates that it probably is. I'm merely here to argue against believing things with an excessive degree of confidence.

hugh3 15y ago

The mere fact that a majority of scientists think X rather than Y is a poor argument for why you should believe it too. You also need to know why they believe that and how strong their conviction is. For instance, if the available evidence suggests that X is probably true (with, say, 90% confidence), then a poll taken of scientists will find that 99.9% of scientists will say "Yes, X is probably true". But of course there's still a 10% chance that X is false -- information well known to those scientists, but completely lost in the opinion poll.