Post #243650 by aquarj on Tue, Jul 18, 2006 1:31 PM

To me, there's absolutely nothing wrong with an individual making choices to live cleaner, or "greener". On the contrary, it's admirable for someone to walk the walk in their own life by consuming less energy and generating less emissions and waste, regardless of what the truth turns out to be w.r.t. human effects on climate.

However, there are a lot of fallacies in the reasoning provided above, especially for a discussion purportedly in praise of real science. Legitimate studies on global climate present assessments about likely trends and causes, not certainties. Unfortunately, popular reasoning is that when a large majority of studies reach similar probabilistic conclusions, then this essentially increases those probabilities to a level where dissenting minority opinions can be discounted at face value. This kind of reasoning is the stuff of junk science, which itself makes a bad name for real science and in fact is only a diversion from the actual investigation of observable facts and evidence. Dismissing anyone who would dare question such consensus, or even attacking them as luddites, is in fact the opposite of scientific method. True scientific inquiry should always welcome the opportunity to investigate contrary data or analysis, with the goal of either disproving it or modifying conclusions to accommodate it.

Some topics simply cannot be proven or disproven scientifically ("does God exist"). A stalemate is a stalemate, and people should be free to make choices based on their own faith without dogma from others attempting to characterize one particular belief as fact. I'm not trying to draw a direct analogy, however, any honest characterization of the scientific domain of global climate would acknowledge that it's more complicated than humans can correctly model (yet). The space between actual climate phenomena and the ability of scientific models to approximate them is still a space filled by extrapolation and belief, not by factual correlation.

None of this is to say that we can't get CLOSE with scientific approximation and extrapolation, and certainly we can get close enough that many people feel they have enough evidence to motivate changes in their own behavior. But I don't understand why this so frequently gets coupled with broad brush political venting, especially on this forum where that's a mutually agreed taboo. Instead of saying, "I don't want to get political but...", how about just sticking with the first instinct and not doing it?

-Randy