Comment by late2part
8 years ago
Things that were described confidently for centuries (or less):
1. The earth is flat.
2. The sun revolves around the earth.
3. Fire is an element.
4. They have chemical/nuclear weapons.
5. No one can enter the search market; AltaVista owns the market.
6. Pets.com can't fail - look at who is invested and how big is the market.
7. Noone will ever need more than 640K of ram.
8. There is a world market for maybe 5 computers.
etc. Who cares how solid the consensus is - what matters is facts and truth.
Bill Gates denies making that 640K statement, and there's no clear evidence he ever said it:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/
There's also no clear evidence that Thomas Watson ever made the world market for five computers statement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_attrib...
Congrats. You poked a hole in the meta-consensus, proving the point.
You ignore the others, that dogma leads to shallow thinking.
All the world is the blend of chaos and order; acceptance and rejection, yin and yang. Your contribution helps drive the analytical consideration of acceptance or rejection.
I accept that dogma can allow wrong thoughts to persist, to drive criticism underground.
I accept that prevailing scientific/expert opinions can also be right.
I accept that the claim of climate change, if true, would have disastrous consequences on a huge number of human lives, and of course business.
I also accept that I'm not seeing people studying this field denying human caused climate change.
I am not seeing countries other that the U.S, where it has become political, denying climate change.
In fact, I see a larger number of nations in the world agree on something than ANYTHING in human history. These countries have their own scientists.
I can certainly entertain that a few countries might make false claims to push other countries to make bad investments. But you're claiming that a global conspiracy on a literally unprecedented scale is happening and that we should ignore a high consequence concept because a relatively small number of people that happen to come from the single country where it is a political issue and to a dizzying degree come from outside the field say everyone else is wrong?
I'm not a climate scientist. I've done a little digging and have my own guess as to what is likely correct, but frankly my opinion of this is low confidence because I'm so ignorant on the topic. When one side says volcanoes are orders of magnitude less greenhouse gas contributers than humanity, and the other side says the reverse, any decision I make is based other than evidence.
Using the same criteria I use to decide what OTHER scientific advice I follow, I conclude that there is a chance that counter positions to climate change are correct...but is more likely that they are wrong.
High chance of occurrence x high consequence if it happens = you need a lot more evidence than I've seen.
If the history books in 500 years talk about how humanity put forth a lot of effort to stop a calamity at a global scale that turned out to be snake oil, that is still a result preferable than about how people followed dogma that lead them to discount repeated evidence and the millions or billions of people suffered for generations. That might sound like a straw man - i could say that failing to rub my head daily would have disastrous consequences - but when paired with the likelihood that someone on the internet saw through this global hoax, it is part of my reasoning.
May I ask your profession and country of residence?
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