[jayspell]

One thing you can do is realize that experts are often wrong. The prevailing knowledge of twenty / thirty years ago has been proven wrong. Experts never admit they were wrong, they just modify their certainty to whatever the new study says. The fact that their previous certainty was disproven never comes up (think the crisis of bee colony collapse or insect die off). Another thing you can do is accept that changes to the climate have occurred since the beginning, and they will continue to happen regardless of what we do. The last thing you can do is turn off the endless reporting on climate change. The media has a vested interest in working you up (this includes social media). They make money off your attention, don't give it to them.

[cogman10]

I downvoted and here's why.

For starters, experts do admit when they are wrong. That comes in the form of later studies and more refined models. Experts in the field of science and research let the data speak.

A lot of distrust in "experts" has come from the fact that as new data comes in experts have changed the models they used (for example, abandoning global cooling back in the 70s).

What we are seeing in climate change is the evidential weight equivalent to what we have for evolution. It's massive, it's conclusive, and it's undeniable. It's not something that's just one study or a few scientists pet theories, it's accepted by all serious climate scientists.

To overturn that amount of evidence, you'd need an equal amount of evidence and, frankly, nothing has been found that comes close to disproving it.

If there's been any evidence of the experts being "wrong" it is in fact pointing towards them having underestimated the impacts.

> The media has a vested interest in working you up (this includes social media). They make money off your attention, don't give it to them.

Or you could do like I've done and look up the research for yourself. It's bleak.

Rather than burying your head in the sand and rejecting news that makes you feel upset, it's important to make sure you aren't letting your own biases drive your opinions.

I say all this as someone that was formerly a climate change denier. Funnily, it was an "askscience" reddit question that ultimately moved me and changed my opinion here. The responders gave me a plethora of scientific evidence and data which all points to exactly the same conclusion. Man made greenhouse gases are heating up the earth which, in turn, is causing a higher rate of natural disasters.

Experts can be wrong, they usually aren't, and when they are they update and change their models to explain both why they are wrong and how the new data fits in. That's how science works. It's a constant process of "being wrong" or learning more and refining the models and predictions.

[jayspell]

I have to disagree with you "experts" are wrong ALL THE TIME. Experts in every field at every level are wrong constantly. Watch ESPN and get the predictions for the outcome of games. On CNBC, you have experts giving their predictions, and getting them wrong all the time. Experts change their opinions as new information becomes available. That sounds fantastic, until those expert opinions are used to set policy. I gave an example of bee colony collapse that has recently been disproven, how about something that actually drastically changed the US, the Food Pyramid. Expert opinions changed the way Americans ate and kicked off an epidemic of obesity, or at least helped it along. Expert opinions are only as good as the current study, they shift with the wind. You cannot base your life on expert opinions.

[cogman10]

Did I say they aren't wrong?

The problem is you are picking different instances where experts are wrong in different fields and saying "See, all experts everywhere are wrong about everything! So let's do nothing!".

The message and understanding on climate change and global warming is roughly 30 years old. Do you think there hasn't been ample opportunity for a different theory or evidence to produced to explain it? Do you think nobody is testing it? Do you think there's some grand conspiracy to prop it up?

Climate change isn't a nutritional or sociological situation where a lot of different impossible to control variables are coming into play. It's dead simple. We measure the amount of greenhouse gases, we measure global temperatures, we compare.

It's even trivially provable, even by an elementary student. Take 2 glass jars, fill one with CO2 and another with O2. Place in the sun. Observe as the jar filled with CO2 becomes hotter while to O2 jar matches outside temperatures.

> You cannot base your life on expert opinions.

My life, your life, our lives are based on expert opinions. How on earth do you think electronics and computers work? By amateurs banging clay together? Computers and electronics were built on exactly the same scientific principles of "experts" that climate change was founded on. Experts are why we have GPS, cell phones, automobiles, doctors, cancer treatments, antibiotics, vaccinations, pain killers, fertilizers, etc... The list goes on. Our entire modern society is built on experts.

Expert research, (and this is what climate change is, research, not just opinion) is what brought about the modern world.

You might as well point to Doctor Oz and say "See, he's full of garbage so all modern medicine is bunk!".

[jayspell]

I wouldn't pick this particular point in time to make a defense of "experts". This pandemic was likely caused by "experts" and if climate change is man-made then they caused that too. Wisdom and intelligence are two different things. Intelligence will ask if you can do something, wisdom will evaluate whether you should do something. I trust experts to build a better phone, I don't trust them to tell me when my kids should have access to one. I want them telling us how to build large carbon filters, I don't want them setting policy that everyone needs to lockdown to save the climate.