| Appreciate the opportunity to dive in and read this myself! The story doesn't "change", that's the abstract where they're presenting the different pieces of research covered in the paper. It's like they're giving a tour of the house, here's the bedroom, here's the living room, here's the kitchen. There's 3 main chunks across 8 pages, including 2 pages of tables of different studies: - A survey of scientific publications - A survey of expert scientists who published about climate science - Other similar studies that attempted to estimate "consensus" I appreciated their closing statement:
"From a broader perspective, it doesn’t matter if the
consensus number is 90% or 100%. The level of scientific agreement on AGW is overwhelmingly high
because the supporting evidence is overwhelmingly
strong." Overall, I'm glad for the opportunity to read further, and agree with the conclusions of the 8 page paper. Thanks scientists, you've done a great job. The climate is changing, let's move on and build solutions. |
Yes, it does change. Individual forums discussions like this are typically a popularity contest, and you will surely win that, but I suggest your concern should be winning the war, not meaningless battles like this.
> I appreciated their closing statement: "From a broader perspective, it doesn’t matter if the consensus number is 90% or 100%.
A typically bold and confident statement. But what if it isn't actually true that it "doesn't matter"?
Whether the fact I point out above (and this is just one, there are many others) is is a meaningful change in the broader perspective is an interesting question. From the purely scientific perspective, it is indeed meaningless, of course. But from the perspective of persuading the entire population of an entire planet of people to change their behavior, is it (and other things like this) still meaningless? I have no way of knowing that, but I very strongly suspect it's not meaningless, at all. If it was me, with the stakes this high, I'd probably want to at least do a little bit of investigation rather than take my chances, but then I seem to have a far more conservative personality than others with passion for this topic.
My intuition tells me that to ultimately crack this nut, we are going to have to beat the Big Boss: the human ego. But first, we have to realize this entity even exists. Based on our demonstrated intelligence, awareness, and progress thus far in this journey, I am not optimistic.
> Thanks scientists, you've done a great job. The climate is changing, let's move on and build solutions.
Yes, let's. The scientists have indeed done a fine job within their specialized discipline, the rest is out of their hands. Are we up to doing as good of a job as they've done within their discipline? Are we willing to acknowledge and address that which is standing in the way to applying the same level of disciplined intellectual rigor that exists in the hard sciences? Personally, I don't think we are, at least those of us in Western cultures. My best hope at this point is that China progresses fast enough to solve this problem for all of humanity.