| > If the ebola infections started appearing in all the major cities with airports and seaports, would you want the experts to try their best to stop it, or would you shrug and say, eh, sometimes people live and sometimes they die That highly depends on what "the experts" recommend that we do. In any case, your bad analogy is bad. > I have two responses: one, as potholer likes to point out, we all know that press headlines are sensational. ...which is what makes me far less worried about climate change. > Don't deny the science because you don't like the way the press reports it. All this talk about "95% of scientists agree (that the charts point up)" and "science denial" is an argument from authority. Given that 50% of science is estimated to be wrong[1], I'm willing to take my chances on this one, especially since there's a strong ideological component to it. The actual simulations are drastic simplifications with wide margins of error, and even those margins have been crossed by observation even in the close term, where the margins are still narrow. All the interesting stuff happens way further down the line, however. Perhaps a bit more humility regarding the practical limits to the scientific method is in order, at least in this case - but then how would you make your argument from authority? [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ |