lorenfb wrote:golfcart wrote:
When I get in an airplane I trust that the aerospace engineers know what they are doing and are definitely better than me building a plane in my garage.
That's a poor analogy, i.e. engineers and physicists when it comes to most all problem solving have closed-form solutions.
That's not the case when it comes to modeling climate change where research is very similar to social science research,
i.e. developing a hypothesis, designing a model, and then using some form of numerical methods, e.g. linear regression
to evaluate correlations based on probabilities and then
attempting to find causality. The result is a non-deterministic
mathematical model. It's always easy to
selectively find data to fit one's hypothesis!
I'm insulted that you would compare building a physical model of the earth and it's atmosphere to social sciences...
The physical sciences hardly have the replication problem that you see in things like sociology or psychology. And the last time I checked, climate scientists weren't putting out nonsense like this
Glaciers, Gender, and Science or falling for stuff like
Sokai's hoax.
Fair enough about your criticism that most engineering problems are a lot more cut and dry, but the atmosphere still follows the laws of physics. it is not like IR photons are declining to be absorbed by CO2 molecules because their daddy didn't love them or they don't like a particular group of people. It is not like photons lie at the exit polls because they don't want to look bad. And it is not like we can influence photons behavior by bombarding them with propaganda about how they should act. LOL. Social sciences are screwed up because people are screwed up and don't behave rationally all the time. Photons behave rationally, there are just a sh*t load of them to worry about and a lot of things for them to interact with.
And not just that, physicists and engineers use non-deterministic approaches in solving some problems too... one could argue the entirety of quantum mechanics is "non-deterministic" but we use it to create all kinds of cool stuff which we rely on.
If your argument is that the problem is too complex to trust the experts I don't have a good rebuttal to that as i stated before. If you think that the research is ideologically driven or that the biases of the researchers cause them to accept answers they are looking for while being skeptical of answers they are not looking for I can't really argue with that either. That is your belief and it is the job of climate scientists to make a strong enough case to convince you otherwise by being as transparent and rigorous as possible in their work.
At the end of the day though, I stand by my overall assessment, this comes down to a question of trust and faith in expertise. It comes down to a question of who people want to believe because most folks on both sides don't understand 2% of it. Do you think you could grab some random climate activist out of the protest line and get them to solve a radiative transfer problem? Or even a simple stephan-boltzman blackbody model of the earth? Do you think Clinton or Trump could solve those? I highly doubt it... but it doesn't stop them all from speaking about the issue like they understand it thoroughly. It is just like religion, or abortion, or any other hot button issue where people have already basically formed the opinion they want to have and then go seek evidence to support that opinion.
That is why hollywood liberals being condescending assholes about this stuff is going against their own self-interest. It makes them and their target audience feel better about themselves but it has absolutely zero positive impact on getting people who don't currently agree with them to agree with them. If anything, I would argue, it makes people who don't already agree with them far less likely to be open to changing their minds.
