Dude, I promise you that the reality I want to be true is not one where we have fucked up the earth's climate.
I will only reiterate that if 1000 brain surgeons say X, you should probably believe X unless you have very particular reasons to believe you are way smarter than all of them and know things about brain surgery that they don't know.
And of course once in a great while that happens. There was a guy who first said that the earth was not flat, and all the other learned folks thought he was daft and then probably set him on fire or something. However, I have zero evidence to believe this accounts for any of the variance in the current moment in time, with climate, immunization, any of it. A far simpler explanation will do the trick, as mentioned in my original msg.
Yeah I hear you loud and clear. I get it. You believe this to be true, and/or that the confidence interval is very tight. I think the confidence interval is large enough that "warming is caused by CO2 and we gotta stop" is plausible but not proven yet. How on earth do I have the arrogance to say this?
1. I'm trained as an engineer and a scientist. I've read a lot of papers and I've got a good grasp of significance.
2. I've seen experts be wrong before and I understand a lot of psychology to where I understand how they can be both wrong and fervently believe they're not. It took me two days to convince a biology professor (PhD) that he was performing a simple calculation incorrectly and that it was skewing all his results. He was doing log(A)/log(B) instead of log(A/B). It's the first rule: https://www.biogazelle.com/seven-tips-bio-statistical-analys...
3. Big models of big complex systems can have lots of interlinkages that aren't always apparent. If I let you analyze a Honda engine and come up with a model for it, if the engine never revved above I think 3000rpm you'd make a great model and have really high confidence that it was highly predictive. Then when revved to 6k and the engine diverged from the model you'd flip out and not understand what's going on until I told you that the engine has two different camshaft profiles and it can change between them. To you, who has only ever known that an engine has one camshaft profile and that it's fixed, this is madness!
I hope this analogy makes it clear that I don't think there's a big conspiracy but rather than a lot of people who are very earnest and very well meaning can get the wrong result through systematic problems that aren't immediately apparent.
I also think that some of those people might in their head say "look even if this isn't true, the risk that it COULD be true is so great -- I mean it's the whole planet! -- that we need to solve this problem anyhow" and then go ahead with that. And then they'll get extra impassioned because now they're on a mission to save the world! Can you imagine how motivating that would be?
The problem is that it seems like there's no downside: we fix CO2 and everything's great even if we didn't strictly speaking need to. The problem is that there is in fact a downside, a huge burden on everyone on the planet because we don't yet have cheap, reliable alternative energy sources. The first world only developed because of energy and it seems pretty shitty to deny the 3rd world the chance to develop because we don't want Venice to sink.
Personally I think that if you gave me the choice, to sink Venice and a few other cities and to bring the whole developing world up to developed world standards, that's a very tough choice. Is our art and investment in buildings more important than their lives?
Further the idea that tipping points exist which will catastrophically damage the climate is fair, but nobody's looking at it the other way either. Maybe there's some other linkage which will actually start to make the Earth shed heat faster once the temperature goes up three degrees.
I get your objections to my objections. I appreciate your points and the general atmosphere around the discussion. So now it's pretty well-established that neither of us is gonna change the other one's mind, so it's fine if it ends here.
But I'm curious about something you said and would be interested in hearing you expand a bit on it if you're willing. You say (and I believe you) that you don't think there's a giant conspiracy; and you give an example of the Honda never revving past 3000, which, if one were to make the error you describe, is basically an illustration of a linear model with insufficient leverage to support the conclusions that are drawn from it. The Honda example is a good illustration of that problem, and I will steal it in the future.
For now, though, based on this example, and your point #2, I'm wondering how you think these kind of fundamental statistical and logical errors could be made on such a massive scale, by a huge group of scientists, distributed around the world?
The only way I can imagine such a thing being feasible is via some serious groupthink / path dependency; like if Einstein, Maxwell, and von Neumann were raised from the dead, transformed into climate scientists, and then, at the very start of the very first climate conference, one right after the other got up and loudly and confidently expressed certainty that climate change was caused by X. Such an event could theoretically lead subsequent scientists to parrot the new party line, and to have difficulty getting funded for research that diverted from these pre-conclusions about X.
That scenario obviously didn't happen. It seems exceedingly unlikely that anything comparable could happen on this scale. Of course, from time to time certain topics of inquiry go in or out of fashion, like the neural winter of the 90s and 2000s, which has ironically now reversed itself with the whole deep learning thing. But that happened because funding was coming principally from US funding agencies, the computational power and data was inadequate to demonstrate the value of the nascent techniques, and the body of research was overwhelmingly produced in US institutes, none of which apply here.
So I'm interested to know by what mechanism you think so many smart people who are also engineers and scientists, except also specialists in this very topic, are making fundamental logical and statistical errors?
I will only reiterate that if 1000 brain surgeons say X, you should probably believe X unless you have very particular reasons to believe you are way smarter than all of them and know things about brain surgery that they don't know.
And of course once in a great while that happens. There was a guy who first said that the earth was not flat, and all the other learned folks thought he was daft and then probably set him on fire or something. However, I have zero evidence to believe this accounts for any of the variance in the current moment in time, with climate, immunization, any of it. A far simpler explanation will do the trick, as mentioned in my original msg.