>There is great certainty in the knowledge that a train will derail given certain conditions. > > There is immense imprecision and a fundemental inability to pr

>There is great certainty in the knowledge that a train will derail given certain conditions. > > There is immense imprecision and a fundemental inability to predict where the cut glass vase in the dining car will come to rest. That's the root of the communications problem. What we know, to your analogy, is that a train wheel is incorrectly attached and will fall off at some point. What predictions are stating -- in media communicated to the general public from (and not just trash journalism; popular science journals, figures like Al Gore) -- is where the vase will land, when we don't even know where the train will derail. Climate change deniers cite failed prediction after failed prediction. They couldn't do that if the predictions had error bars. People can handle uncertainty just fine. However, if you tell someone a train is crashing in 100 meters over and over, they'll start to ignore you after a kilometer or two of failed predictions. If it derails 5 kilometers out, it's the boy who cried wolf. We are pretty close to complete certainty that Bad Stuff will happen, but we grossly overstate the certainty of which specific bad things will happen and when. > Those that demand certainty wrt small details fail to understand the physics of the big picture. All I'm demanding is that * we say "climate change" instead of "global warming;" * include error bars; * talk about impacts in terms of something other than degrees temperature rise; and * stop fixating on degrees C as the sole metric. Seriously. Watch Tucker Carlson at some point on the topic, or any similar commentator. 90% of what they say is correct, which is part of the reason it works so well. It's based on people on the left exaggerating for impact, simplifying, or using imprecise language. Al Gore sat us back 20 years with "An Inconvenient Truth."