AGW -- "And You Believe That Why?"

One of my FB friends was having a "debate" on his wall the other day. It was about global warming/climate change. My friend, whom I also work with, is skeptical, and the other guy was a true believer.

My own skepticism is the result of having examined the issue dispassionately from a scientific perspective, and finding that the claims of impending doom are grossly exaggerated. I am also less than impressed with the attempts at climate modeling done by folks who lack a sufficient appreciation of just how big the task is. For instance, it is still damn difficult to model on a computer the behavior of water turbulence in a pipe. So when I am told that some computer model of the Earth's atmosphere predicts doom, my reply is "that's interesting" and my thought is "So what?"

But the actual issue that bothers me is that few people ever examine the process by which they decide to believe one claim over another. Also, distance from a subject or an "expert" always conveys a sense of exceptional competence that probably isn't there. Those of us who write know how easy it is to have our tentative opinions taken as facts, and we know how easy it is to have our thoughts appear "in black and white." Speak or write like you know what you're talking about, and people will give you the benefit of the doubt, usually under the unexamined assumption that the author wouldn't write about it if he wasn't certain himself. All too often we wind up believing something because of how it was presented to us.

But in real life with the people we interact with every day, we all know that some of our friends believe all kinds of things passionately, even though we're also convinced they don't know what they are talking about. The only thing that separates those friends from people who appear in print is this--the other people are appearing in print. They are every bit as prone to believing in things they can't prove.

Scientists are no better. They are no more likely to be self-reflective than anyone else, and far more prone to be arrogant about the power of their own intellects. Also, most of them are in a position where they have to compete for funds and justify their research over and over again, or they lose funding. In the case of climate science, many of the practitioners have a huge stake in the validity of their claims, and they do not welcome ideas and other work that will challenge that. The pursuit of the truth does not rule science; the pursuit of funding does.

Personally, I do not think global warming scientists are perpetuating a deliberate scam (although there are scam artists out there taking advantage of people). I think they are perpetuating a set of myths in which they wholly believe.