I've struggled with this as well when it comes to issues that are under heavier debate [1]. I like to think that I am capable of reading most technical things and evaluating them with a healthy skepticism, but at a certain point, I know that I just have to trust people who are smarter than me.
One thing I try to pay attention to is consensus. It's probably very easy to get duped by a single voice that's smarter than you (or just knows more about a specific subject), but it's less probable that a bunch of those people are all in on it together. The larger the consensus, the easier it is to trust.
I think I have read (source?) that the consensus level on the broad category of climate change and whether it's likely to end badly for us is pretty near the high 90% if not close to the 99-100% mark. But then when it comes to the more detailed bits like how bad, and how soon, that's where I don't know who to listen to. Any suggestions?
[1] - I don't like the word debate here because it feels loaded, but I can't think of a better one.
Update: I feel silly even amending this, but upon re-reading my post, I see there may be some doubt as to whether I believe in climate change. I do, and only after a healthy amount of research and some level of blind trust in consensus of people more knowledgeable than myself. The uncertainty I have is around what the effects will be, how severe, and how soon. The answers to those help to inform my choices on how to go about helping fix it.
The oft-cited statistic is "97% of climate scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change" and the wikipedia article [1] is actually quite thorough. I personally do not know any scientist who doesn't believe in global warming, although I did know some skeptics a decade ago. Skepticism is healthy, but so is respecting statistical tests.
No one really knows the specifics of what's going to happen, but the latest IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has started focusing on 'adaptation' as some degree of climate change is inevitable (and, indeed, has already happened). The IPCC would be my choice as the closest guess as to what the next century will look like [2]
> it's less probable that a bunch of those people are
> all in on it together. The larger the consensus, the
> easier it is to trust.
No. It's in consensus that big lies get their best cover. History is awash with big lies hiding in consensus. Slavery is ok. Aristotlean theory of elements. Female inferiority. Divine right of kings. White man's burden. Inevitability of the technocrats. House prices always go up. Object oriented programming will solve all our problems. Anything to do with eating habits - salt, cholesterol, etc.
My favourite is bloodletting. Everyone thought it was true, for thousands of years. If you'd argued against it people would have thought you were crazy. And we now know that it's rubbish. All those well-educated men of all those centuries were todies who didn't have a clue what they were doing. (Or - who knew exactly what they were doing - getting the good patronage and the good women)
Climage change is fun. It's easy to follow the money on - it's just the latest mysticism of 'educated people'. The rebranding thing from "global warming" is pure weasel.
There's a lot of sense in looking at the consensus opinion as a starting point. And you should be wary of going against consensus - it's easy to get burnt by its momentum, people will treat you as a crank, your counter theories may be wrong also. And - it's easy to excuse your actions if you go with consensus and it turns out to be wrong later. But its status as consensus should give it no actual credibility in your mind.
Yes. The key thing I was (attempting to) respond to was the idea that consensus is a good indication of truth. My final sentence overstated things: we all all forced to piece together a worldview with slabs taken from consensus, but it's something to be concerned about, not celebrated. It's much easier to get duped by consensus than a single voice that's smarter than you.
I'll quote straight from Steven Pinker's 'The Better Angels of Our Nature':
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Once again it seems to me that the appropriate response is “maybe, but maybe not.” Though climate change can cause plenty of misery and deserves to be mitigated for that reason alone, it will not necessarily lead to armed conflict. The political scientists who track war and peace, such as Halvard Buhaug, Idean Salehyan, Ole Theisen, and Nils Gleditsch, are skeptical of the popular idea that people fight wars over scarce resources.290 Hunger and resource shortages are tragically common in sub-Saharan countries such as Malawi, Zambia, and Tanzania, but wars involving them are not. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, and tsunamis (such as the disastrous one in the Indian Ocean in 2004) do not generally lead to armed conflict. The American dust bowl in the 1930s, to take another example, caused plenty of deprivation but no civil war. And while temperatures have been rising steadily in Africa during the past fifteen years, civil wars and war deaths have been falling. Pressures on access to land and water can certainly cause local skirmishes, but a genuine war requires that hostile forces be organized and armed, and that depends more on the influence of bad governments, closed economies, and militant ideologies than on the sheer availability of land and water. Certainly any connection to terrorism is in the imagination of the terror warriors: terrorists tend to be underemployed lower-middle-class men, not subsistence farmers.291 As for genocide, the Sudanese government finds it convenient to blame violence in Darfur on desertification, distracting the world from its own role in tolerating or encouraging the ethnic cleansing.
In a regression analysis on armed conflicts from 1980 to 1992, Theisen found that conflict was more likely if a country was poor, populous, politically unstable, and abundant in oil, but not if it had suffered from droughts, water shortages, or mild land degradation. (Severe land degradation did have a small effect.) Reviewing analyses that examined a large number (N) of countries rather than cherry-picking one or two, he concluded, “Those who foresee doom, because of the relationship between resource scarcity and violent internal conflict, have very little support in the large-N literature." Salehyan adds that relatively inexpensive advances in water use and agricultural practices in the developing world can yield massive increases in productivity with a constant or even shrinking amount of land, and that better governance can mitigate the human costs of environmental damage, as it does in developed democracies. Since the state of the environment is at most one ingredient in a mixture that depends far more on political and social organization, resource wars are far from inevitable, even in a climate-changed world.
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Should we do nothing about climate change? Probably not. Panicking is not likely to help either. Given that the Cold War didn't end in a scorched earth I do believe we are capable of pulling together and dealing with what's in front of us.
One thing I try to pay attention to is consensus. It's probably very easy to get duped by a single voice that's smarter than you (or just knows more about a specific subject), but it's less probable that a bunch of those people are all in on it together. The larger the consensus, the easier it is to trust.
I think I have read (source?) that the consensus level on the broad category of climate change and whether it's likely to end badly for us is pretty near the high 90% if not close to the 99-100% mark. But then when it comes to the more detailed bits like how bad, and how soon, that's where I don't know who to listen to. Any suggestions?
[1] - I don't like the word debate here because it feels loaded, but I can't think of a better one.
Update: I feel silly even amending this, but upon re-reading my post, I see there may be some doubt as to whether I believe in climate change. I do, and only after a healthy amount of research and some level of blind trust in consensus of people more knowledgeable than myself. The uncertainty I have is around what the effects will be, how severe, and how soon. The answers to those help to inform my choices on how to go about helping fix it.