Comment by jihadjihad
14 hours ago
Because they are practicing the reverse scientific method. They hold a conclusion in their hand, like, man-made climate change is a hoax, and seek to find any threads of "evidence" that support their foregone conclusion.
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Yes, of course there are bad actors, but this is false equivalence to equate science and the scientific method with basement randos.
Most importantly, most people don't understand scientific consensus vs. individual research papers or individual scientists. A major feature of the scientific method is that when an interesting result is published, it can be independently verified by lots of other researchers, and if they come to the same conclusion, that is excellent evidence that the result accurately describes the real world.
Scientists are people, and just like people everywhere they have biases and personal motivations. But again, the scientific method is much bigger than any individual or even group of scientists. If anything, being skeptical of unexpected results is a huge pillar of the scientific method. But skepticism alone is not enough - the next step is to look for validating research, not to say "hah, science is bullshit, let's trust this YouTube rando instead." As usual, I think Jessica Knurick does a great job explaining things: https://open.substack.com/pub/drjessicaknurick/p/trust-the-s...
True, and personally, I don't believe climate science is affected by bias to such a degree that the overall conclusion is wrong. But it absolutely does occur that a whole field can be biased, so the "independent verification by lots of other researchers" will cast unreasonable skepticism on results they dislike, while letting results they like pass with cursory examination. This is the case in e.g. social science:
The authors also submitted different test studies to different peer-review boards. The methodology was identical, and the variable was that the purported findings either went for, or against, the liberal worldview (for example, one found evidence of discrimination against minority groups, and another found evidence of "reverse discrimination" against straight white males). Despite equal methodological strengths, the studies that went against the liberal worldview were criticized and rejected, and those that went with it were not.
https://theweek.com/articles/441474/how-academias-liberal-bi...
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001 (the study referenced in the article)
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That sounds like a perfect match for a meta study do you have any? I am very dubious about your conclusion. I am basing this on work I did in high school on this so I really have no sources for my claim.
EDIT did some more searching and have not been able to finding anything supporting you claim. People have not been very alarmist about sea levels.. 7500m by the year 2500 in Waterworld does not count.
In fact I remember reading the opposite recently, that IPCC sea level rise predictions from the 90s were actually pretty accurate given the limitations of the models at the time. And that a good bit of the error was underestimations of rise, not overestimations.
> Here we show that the mid-range projection from the Second Assessment Report of the IPCC (1995/1996) was strikingly close to what transpired over the next 30 years, with the magnitude of sea-level rise underestimated by only ∼1 cm.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025ef00...
People wouldn't just lie on the internet!
Systems are complicated. Given there are numerous predicted outcomes (it's not just about the actual measured sea-level rise, after all) and many of those predictions are coming to pass far earlier than hoped, it might be worth having an open mind to the fact that sometimes people who devote their lives to studying something might be worth listening to.
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My phenomenal observations are that it's been getting warmer during my lifetime, but as soon as I mention this in an online conversation I get slapped down with 'the climate is always changing' and 'n=1'.
Most climate change denial arguments eventually boil down to social assertions about the change believers having perverse incentives, like being greedy for grants to go on sailing vacations to Antartica or feather their academic nests.
What are the cycles called? How do they function? A lot of people use the world cycle like other people use the word magic. A mystery pretending to be an explanation.
The number of critics of Anthropogenic global warming who actually have expertise on climate change and actively publish on the subject can be counted on one hand. If 99.9% of astrophysicists agreed that a meteor was going to hit your house next Tuesday you wouldn't wait around for the few crackpot holdouts before you to agree to leave.
>that’s cute
Unnecessary but moving past that: I understand where you’re coming from but a hallmark of people like that is they are not willing to learn or be swayed no matter how you try to educate them. They have decided what is real and it often dovetails with their social/political views in a way that is very hard to disentangle.
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Allegations of cherry-picking scant bits of evidence to support a claim are less effective when that claim is held up by vast quantities of distinct, high-quality evidence.
my wife is an actuary, and we always joke that you know climate change has real cause and effect because the actuaries are specifically monitoring and modeling for it lol
Can you apply that too to the "earth is round" argument?
The heliocentric model of our solar system "argument"?
I guess general relativity is only a "theory" in the end, geodude420 on twitter has an awesome thread debunking that Einstein schlub's whole career!