It's weird you are attacking someone who agrees with you in policy. Just because he does not think "correctly". Given that your argument is out of authority, it's bit alarming.
By other scientists when doing science sure, that's cool; by the ignorant public when working on policy, that's just ignorance.
> Most of our current scientific knowledge was originally someone disagreeing with the majority.
No, if you are not a scientist in the field, your disagreements are just ignorance. Science can and should be challenged by those actually doing the science, not arguments from ignorance from the general public.
If you really wish to know the shit, you find the facts science has provided. There are facts. This "99% of scientists" stuff is making the signal/noise ratio quite bad.
No it isn't, it's not possible to educate yourself to the depth required on a great many things without becoming a professional in the field and while that's cool for those that want to; it's utter arrogance and ignorance to ignore the entire scientific community as a laymen and pretend you know better. Quite simply, if you are not a climate scientist, you're talking out of your ass. The people educated enough in the evidence to have the rational debate, have already had it, the intelligent debate is over and the conclusions have been publicized. The only people still debating are the few scientists in the extreme minority (which is fine), and the utterly ignorant (i.e. the public).
Are you?
1. CO2 causes the greenhouse effect. This can be replicated in aquarium. It's a fact.
2. Burnind fossil fuels creates CO2 as material does not disappear. Carbon included.
3. CO2 is not absorbed by oceans. It goes to atmosphere. Measurable fact, documented by Mauna Loa observatory since 1956.
4. The change in radiation balance shows in significant ways. As is shown by change in glacier mass balance. Again measurable fact, easily understandable by layman.
It is not hard so far. We have human made climate change there. Now if we go into the "what will happen and how much?" territory, 99% of climate scientist agree that we don't really know. There are educated guesses with freakishly huge error bars.
If we compare this to "should smoking be banned", nobody speaks about 99% of doctors. "Is flyin safe?" and you don't hear about 99% of engineers. This "99% of climate scientists" stuff makes the whole business sound like it's matter of opinnion.
...a short time later...
4. Oh, I was standing at the bottom of a hill, so the ball just rolled back to my feet.
Do you understand? We are discussing an insanely complex system, with feedback loops everywhere, and a scant (at best) 100 years of quality data on a planet 4 billion years old. There is nothing simple about this. The physics of the radiation balance isn't in question, but for all we know it may be dwarfed by negative feedbacks. They are forced to fallback on computer models for a reason.
Nobody talks about 99% of doctors and smoking, because we can empirically test this. Hundreds of millions of people have smoked, and we have observed the effects.
The smoking/cancer analogy always makes me smile, because it is actually a very good one. Let's turn it around. The physics of how smoking causes cancer is pretty solid. We know about toxins and carcinogens, etc. But let's say I hand you a single human being, and I ask you, "if he smokes for the next 40 years, will he get cancer?". We don't have a freaking clue. The human body - the feedback of the immune system defences, nutrition, genetics - are beyond our power to model. Science is hopelessly unable to answer that question. And ponder this for a moment - we have 6 billion potential test subjects to work with! We have one earth. This is the state of climate science. The biosphere/atmosphere/oceans/etc. are every bit as complex as a single human body, and we have only one patient to study, and data for maybe 0.0000025 of the patient's lifetime.
But, I hear you say, "shouldn't we be cautious then? Shouldn't we quit just in case?". And fair enough, we probably should be cautious. But the counterpoint to that is that fossil fuel usage isn't a nicotine hit. It doesn't deliver us a few moments of pleasure in return for the risk of cancer. It fuels our entire industrial civilization. So the risk/reward calculation looks quite a bit different, doesn't it?
In one case, we have the potential risk confirmed by the empirical evidence of a test set of hundreds of million of smokers, and the potential reward being a nicotine hit. In the other, we have no way of testing the theorized risk outside of models, and the reward is the energy to power our entire civilization.
So yeah, it is an analogy that always makes me laugh a little.
In science that is extremely important, we probably don't disagree. This is obvious.
For laymen who vote about this shit and need to be informed? Again important. If we just wave around this "99% of scientist" shit, the intelligent, but uninformed part of populace is not going to buy it. They feel like being called idiots. There is nothing like that to make a person to vehemently oppose you, if he has based part of his ego on being intelligent.
Now in my circle of friends, who am I going to believe on this subject. The guy who goes "420 blaze it! 99% of scientist agree cars are bad!" Or the guy who is bachelor of something and is really really skeptical about all this climate change stuff. I would go with the latter.
The message should be "We hear you and we aren't 100% certain. Let's start from the easy stuff to minimize the potential bad stuff."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance#Argume...
"If P were true then I would know it; in fact I do not know it; therefore P cannot be true."
For example, it's not that Einstein in 1905 made Newton's formulas from around 1700 unusable, quite the opposite, for a lot of purposes they are still used: it's just that for the very high speeds they need adjustment factors and more complicated math to express what's going on. The expected improvement in the science certainly won't make "everything we know wrong." Such formulations are just spammy titles. There will be only refinements.
For the current state, see:
I'm not "climate skeptic", I'm true believer. I just try to combat these authority heretics.
> It's weird you are attacking someone who agrees with you in policy. Just because he does not think "correctly".
No, it isn't weird. It's perfectly rational to disagree with people because they reach the right conclusion for the wrong reasons because "thinking" wrong is often dangerous and leads to superstition.
It's often unnecessary, because you need the fact anyhow. In some cases it's justified to save time. Like in the military.
Your line of argumentation doesn't make sense here. We can look for backing up an authority with facts which come from...that same authority, who we then have to believe or not, short of replicating their study. Or we can get someone else to replicate the study, and someone else to replicate that study, and...suddenly we're talking about scientific consensus again.
You do not have time to replicate and verify the work of every scientist. At some point you are going to have to choose to take some authority's word for it.
The person I choose to believe is the one who talks about radiation balance and p-values and confidence intevals. Then I expect to see peer revieve publication and some peer revieved confirmation. It's also possible to establish somekind of authority to conduct meta-study. This works nicely in medical field.
Someone talking about "99%" of scientists is just distracting. Link the IPCC document and call it a day.