re: #3 CuriousLurker

I think that for a lot of people, like myself, scientific data is intimidating. My last contact with anything even remotely scientific was probably in biology class in high school 30 years ago, so unless something is explained to me in very clear & simple terms, I have a hard time wrapping my head around it.

Many people are in that position. No one can know everything. No one person can even know everything that human beings have figured out. Because of that, something that everyone needs to work on developing are skills that check to see if some scientific claim “rings true.” It isn’t that you need to be able to calculate the orbit of a satellite for example. It is sufficient to understand that a satellite has to be moving very fast in order to maintain its orbit, so if someone told you something that would mean that satellites are moving slowly, you would instantly know they were full of crap. For example, in the case of AGW, I recently posted a video that had two people do a table top experiment that showed that having more CO2 in your air means it must get warmer when you hit it with IR light - and in fact, both jars, in both experiments got substantially warmer. Again, you do not need to be able to calculate exactly by how much, to know that doubling or quadrupling the amount we have in the atmosphere must heat up the Earth.

I know this will probably horrify those of you who understand & have an ongoing interest in science (or who are actual scientists), but for the rest of us, accepting things like AGW is sort of like religion—i.e. we believe it as a matter of faith in the messenger (or disbelieve it due to lack of faith, as the case may be).

This is the greatest challenge that scientists face in trying to deal with anything scientific that has become politicized. People want to believe things they like and don’t want to believe things they do not like. Science is most assuredly not religion however. All of the evidence is there for anyone who wants to look. Everything always comes back to the very real nuts and bolts of what the actual physical world is doing in ways that can be verified.

Are people willing to look, and on a deeper level, have they exercised the mental muscles lately to know how to look? Science is not about hearing lists of facts. It is an active engaging process where the implications of facts are put together to make consistent pictures. It is not a history book, but rather more of a murder mystery. Clues come in and the culprit is identified. It is something active that you engage in and reason through. However, science is taught as yet another story to memorize - something passive. As such, it becomes yet another thing to be cynical about when someone lies to you, like ghost stories, or tooth faeries.

The problem of course, is that charlatans claim the mantle of science for their own ends. The trust that people might place in experts is eroded by the latest “scientifically proven” fad diet.

This is even further complicated by shoddy reporting where controversies are generated to create drama that does not really exist in the scientific community. As far as the legitimate scientific community is concerned, everyone gets what the notion of a GHG is for example and that CO2 is one.

The thing for you to do is to look for the basics and see if what is being said rings true with the basics. If someone says something doesn’t make sense, ask.

For example, AGW deniers like to make up all sorts of stuff about CO2. Just ask them, since you know and have seen that it absorbs IR and gets hotter when it does, how it is possible that all the teratons of extra CO2 we put in the atmosphere are doing nothing.