There are credible scientists who disagree with the climate change narrative. Just because you don't agree with them doesn't make them "nut jobs" or "deniers" or any other label you care to attach. Equating folks who don't agree with a lot of climate change assertions with flat earthers is not productive in any way.
And I agree with you're analysis; legacy media typically trot out straw men only to signal how superior their view is.
I wasn't specifically saying all climate change deniers are nut jobs, just that the ones the media trots out often are. I'm not familiar enough with the denial side to evaluate their position - but that's the modern problem isn't it? We have to delegate to a third party to assess ideas for us because we don't have the time or expertise to fully understand every political position. But if that third party becomes biased, it all collapses.
> I'm not familiar enough with the denial side to evaluate their position
This is sort of third or fourth-hand, so don't just trust it blindly, but what I generally hear is that most of the real "other side" does actually believe climate change is real. They just oppose action because they believe humans aren't the cause, and almost any action we take will be a lot of wasted time and money that could be used better for other things.
The problem is that upon hearing that they oppose action, the "climate change is real" people totally ignore their reasons and lump them in with the crazy "climate change isn't real" people.
Why don't you go investigate the denial side? It will probably only take thirty minutes and might be interesting.
I did this once. I had fully accepted the media's narrative that these people were all kooks and idiots, so I was curious what could possibly cause them to think these things. I went and read some of their websites for the same reason I went and read some flat earther websites the other day, for amusement.
Unfortunately it turned out that (surprise) journalists had been wildly misleading me about what these people really believe, probably because journalists as a class of people accept intellectual authority without question, especially in the scientific realm. The problem of fraudulent psychology results is one well known example of this.
Here's what a lot of "climate change denial" really boils down to:
- CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas. We are indeed releasing lots of it.
I've yet to see anyone deny this, although I'm sure there are people out there who do. However this is not mainstream "denial".
- But we don't really know what effect this is having, or if it's really changing the climate
This is where climate change "deniers" separate from journalistic mainstream. They aren't so much in denial as much, much less certain about climate science and its conclusions, to the extent that they often conclude nothing should be done.
- This is partly because the climate is too complex to model, and partly because of scientific bias, fraud and malpractice.
A lot of climate change denial turns out to be a specific case of more general criticisms of the scientific establishment. Their style of argument can easily be ported to criticisms of social science or economics, with hardly any tweaks.
Basically: proclaiming certain doom and that your field of study is the only way to avoid it is a surefire way to get massive amounts of grant money, media coverage and political power. In addition, the "deniers" tend to have lots of evidence of actual serious problems with the science. One recent article I saw pointed out that the thermometer dataset that has been used for over 20 years to measure climate change is full of obvious errors, like temperatures that would be physically impossible or which are clearly the result of bad celsius/Farenheit conversions, or which are taken from thermometers that are literally at the start of airport runways i.e. routinely blasted with jet exhaust.
When errors that are obvious to laymen are discovered in critical datasets that have been used for years to make very precise predictions about very complex things, it is reasonable for some people to conclude the science is less certain than journalists present it, and as a consequence that maybe the costs of inaction are lower than has been presented.
It almost doesn't matter what a few credible scientists think about climate change--it maters what the overall consensus agree is and what most climate scientists believe. A huge part of science as a field is consensus.
I think this debate goes round in circles because we rely on news organisations to do several things at once, and they should probably be unbundled.
We rely on them to report immediate, factual events, like a fire in a hotel or an impending storm.
We rely on them to do longer form reporting on social trends, new scientific findings, business and governmental activities, etc.
We rely on them to locate and expose corruption and malpractice amongst the powerful.
We rely on them for book and film reviews.
And sometimes we rely on them to engage in analysis and generally telling us what to think, because figuring out our own opinions on complex topics is hard work. We'd like them to do it for us and then boil things down to an executive summary that we can then adopt wholesale as if it were our own opinions.
It's not clear to me that it makes sense to bundle so many things together, or if this is a useful combination or just an artifact of an earlier era when distributing the written word required lots of equipment and big agent networks. Now the internet exists should we be defending these agglomerations or breaking them apart?
Einstein finalized his theory of relativity in 1916 and it was widely accepted in the physics community by the 20s. Additionally, Einstein was primarily a theorist (vs an empiricist) so while there was room for initial disagreement, the solar eclipse in 1919 offered evidence and majority opinion accepted the theory.
Climate change has both consensus and evidence. It seems irresponsible to keep spreading doubt in the face of both.
He published his first important papers in 1905 and received the Nobel in 1921. His work was controversial for decades, but I would argue that there was no consensus in physics at that time.
I have encountered this before and am curious about the alternative take. My understanding of it is that they agree with the popular narrative to the extent that the climate is changing but that they disagree about how conclusive the evidence is that it is caused by humanity, is that correct?
Can anyone point me to hard, unbiased (in your opinion, of course) data that supports the assertion that climate change is caused by humans or otherwise depicts an accurate representation of our current understanding on the subject?
Is it possible that climate change is due to natural and not human forces?
That’s very reasonable. I doubt humans caused the last ice age. Maybe Mother Earth is up to some stuff herself. I rarely hear that discussed and instead hear news people pushing for aggressive measures.
I have yet to meet a climatologist who says this. Usually it is the other way around, they are exasperated that people don't take climate change as seriously as they should.
They need to stop being exasperated, because that implies that they keep hoping people will come around and that disaster can be averted. It can't. We might as well just prepare for complete ecological disaster, or resign ourselves to our fate which is going to be complete civilization collapse due to a climate that we simply can't live in at our current population levels.
Basically, instead of trying to convince people who still refuse to believe the evidence, they should be switching to something more productive, like building dome cities or building colonies on the Moon or something.
Your opinion on the predicted effects of climate change, are so far off from reality, that you are actually more incorrect than the climate change deniers.
No scientist believes that civilization is going to collapse because of climate change.
The predicted effects, according to the scientific consensus, is that sea levels will rise by a meter or 2 over the next hundred years. That is not an extinction level event. Not even close.
The scale of how bad things are, are more on the scale of trillions of dollars worth of damages. Thats bad, but it is bad on the same scale as another Iraq war, and not bad on the scale of billions dieing.
And I agree with you're analysis; legacy media typically trot out straw men only to signal how superior their view is.