Your last statement here is, I suggest, both false and dangerous, at least in the sense I think you mean.
'..at least in the sense I think you mean'
If you don't know what sense I mean it in, the smart idea would be to ask first. Which will become relevant in a moment...
To suggest that one can sit at home on the internet and learn to be a climate expert, while caring for a family and holding down a job, is a naive fantasy. The training in physics, chemistry, statistics, and on and on is simply too much for a general member of the public to pick up online. Not to mention the time that is required to be adequately trained.
I never once claimed one could become a climate expert by sitting at home on the internet. Is it impossible to be a self-taught scientist? Probably not. Will most people actually put in the proper effort to do so? No. The majority of information you'd find in a specialized educational space can likely be found elsewhere; the only thing it lacks is someone explaining it and keeping people 'on track'.
The statement is dangerous for reasons we are seeing played out right now. Completely unqualified laymen are translating their ill-informed climate-denial into votes. And those votes result in real actions - like the US withdrawing from the Paris climate deal. When these things start to happen the welfare of humanity is put at risk. All because people refuse to trust the experts.
Such as yourself? I haven't seen any credentials, so I assume you aren't a climate scientist and cannot make any educated comments on anything regarding the field because you aren't part of it, apparently.
As I said before, just because someone is an 'expert' doesn't mean that they are trustworthy or even good at what they do. Unless you try to learn
something in the field to better your understanding and identify people who don't know what they're talking about, you're always going to be trusting them almost entirely based on 'I trust that they're right about their assessment'.
Now about "blind trust" - this is a deeply misleading turn of phrase. Science works - is it "blind trust" to accept that smoking causes cancer? Or that airplanes fly for the reasons we are told? Or that it is 150,000,000 kilometres from the Sun to the Earth? Or that excessive radiation causes cancer?
There is a very big difference between being able to recreate or observe something many times over to understand it, and having one big thing that you can't recreate and observe properly that you're trying to understand on a scientific basis. I also never said that science was about blind trust--I said that trusting the SCIENTISTS conducting the experiment is 'blind trust', because we have to hope they're doing their job correctly.
No. Science has proven itself to be a reliable means of gaining useful knowledge of the world. In the absence of strong reasons to the contrary, the findings of mainstream science should be trusted.
I mean...science never made any claims to absolute truths, and science is only as good so long as nothing later down the line contradicts it. Then the previous 'knowledge' has to be changed/updated.
I agree, this is why, as I have repeated many many times - trust the scientists, not the politicians, or even the media.
I was insinuating that it's not impossible in any way for a scientist to be bribed into lying. Christian scientists lie all the time, don't they? Because they have an agenda to push; it doesn't matter if it's religion or any other agenda. Not saying all scientists are being paid off, but that it's always something that should be kept in the back of our minds as a possibility when something like this crops up.
I never suggested that scientists, as individuals, are any more honest or less biased than anyone else. It is the scientific system that should be trusted - the requirement for rigour, peer-review, and repeatability.
It's not 'scientific system', it's called the
scientific method. The formal definition is;
"a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses."
Peer-reviewing is for quality control, it's not part of the scientific method. It's basically getting the 'OK' confirmation from other scientists that review your work to make sure it is accurate before it becomes a widely-accepted fact. And even then, none of that changes the fact that the scientific method can still be abused.
Is this a serious request?
Did I stutter? I already said I'm not arguing for or against climate change; I'm making the case that if you're going to tell me something of this magnitude is factually true, you're going to need to give me credible sources to look at and proper reasoning other than 'The [nameless] scientists say so'.
Simply stating that a bunch of scientists agree with your position does not make it true--in fact, that's just as bad as the anti-evolution groups.
I do not claim to know anything about climate change specifically, but I am skeptical about the subject because of the contradictory statements I've heard from both sides of the coin and the heavy political value of the topic.
