You can choose to do what I usually do: "I am not knowledgeable enough to evaluate this conclusively, therefore I will simply accept that I don't know."

I don't know is a very liberating state of mind, far better than "believing."

Alternately, you could do what I sometimes do: "it appears to me that the climate science does indicate that humans are screwing up this planet's climate, but I don't know for certain if there is some serious error that won't come out for another 20-30 years. I estimate that it's much more likely than not that the scientists are right. (But the political solutions proposed are much more likely than not to have seriously adverse unintended consequences)"

This is still not believing. I still accept that I do not know, and have merely assigned educated guesses as to probability of correctness to various positions.

It is never necessary to believe anything.

So if you are laying on the floor dying of not enough carbonate in your blood stream, and there's a hypodermic syringe nearby, a gallon of distilled water, and a box of baking soda, are you saying you won't shoot it up?

Also, I doubt that it is so complex to determine how to sterilize material with gamma rays. If you are an expert on this subject, please explain more and I'll be happy to listen and hopefully learn something. AFAIK if you want to kill some proportion, say 99.9% of pathogens, all you need to do is ensure that the material receives dose X, and you can base the dose determination on the most resistant known/common pathogens.

It should not matter how the pathogens are distributed in the sample. The dose is uniformly distributed over each incremental unit of volume.

If the staff microbiologists think that they have too many unanswered questions about the nearby gamma ray facility and it's applicability to their problem, fine they can simply boil a large pot of the solution. Or take a $30 CFL shortwave UV lamp and dip that into the solution and stir until its sterilized. These techniques are quite well characterized and extremely simple to perform.

You are missing, however, my main point which is that having to get government approval for every possible step stifles any chance of being able to adapt to changing circumstances in a timely manner.

"Everyone that matters..."

That you would say such a thing says more than anything else you said.

"a lesbian is likely to have different ideas on some things"

Why? What evidence supports this?

" Occupy movement was a good example, no one really knew what it was about or how to articulate it. "

Before the crash it was only hard-core capitalists sounding the alarm and we were without exception laughed off of every stage.

"all science is still belief, just well supported beliefs."

No. Belief has no place in science.

Science has hypothesis, theory, and natural law which translate roughly into "it might be this way, let's see if we're wrong...", "it's looking very likely that it's this way, currently with >95% chance of being so", and "it is almost certainly this way, since every prediction has not been falsified for several hundred years of determined attack." There is no proof, ever, of "truth" in science. There is only proof of falsehood. Everything else is varying degrees of probability of being correct.

Understanding this creates a frame of mind in which belief has no place.

"Climate science didn't "align itself with a particular political leaning". It's exactly the reverse: a particular political leaning aligned itself with climate science."

Why didn't scientists disassociate with this particular political leaning then? Couldn't the scientists imagine where things would wind up?

Scientists where I work are mostly left-leaning, and almost without exception the newest 1-2 generations are predominantly "progressive".

"Don't forget that part. Science shouldn't dictate policy, as that undermines democracy, but if a shitty policy get proposed, science can (at least try to) tell you how it's going to blow up in your face."

We have predictive, scientific, socioeconomic/sociopolitical models now?

This is exactly the problem with Climate Change. Nobody has any idea if the political solutions will work or blow up in our faces, or create yet another massive self-enriching bureaucracy and corporatism.

Scientists should have stayed out of the political aspect of this.

"barbarians have been at a distinct disadvantage."

A perfectly plausible scenario right now is that the mostly non-Muslim civilization nukes itself into oblivion, and Islam completely takes over the surviving human societies.

I'm not saying this to bash Islam. It's just something that cannot be ruled out. One might even think we are trying our best to bring this outcome about. Bin Laden lost the battle for his life, but his plan is still in play because we are playing his game and are too stupid to stop it. Ie.,

"The only way to win The War On Terror is not to play."

"societies that cling to truth always win out over post-truth societies"

Uhh, have you run your ancestor simulation for an infinite amount of time?

"trying to make the world more just is likely to make most of us better off."

Not even wrong. A misguided implementation can make things wind up turning out much less "just" than where we started. Simply enforcing "ideals" by using political force is almost certain to result in disaster. We are toying around with systems which we do not yet understand well enough scientifically to be able to predict the outcome. Systems that when tweaked the wrong way can spiral into civil wars, Dark Ages, etc.

Does anyone even "precautionary principle" anymore?

"When you say to yourself I am above this..."

Anyone who groks where neuroscience is heading should know that this is exactly the frame of mind about which we need to be constantly on guard. Humans are inherently biased and prone to many cognitive limitations. It's remarkable that we ever managed to arrive at the current scientific method at all.

I consider the scientific method to be the greatest intellectual achievement of humanity.

It won't simply fade away. It is enabled by certain laws/policies. Until those are removed, it will get worse.

"If you are a white cis man you almost certainly should resign from your position of power."

These people simply need to be locked up. They have engaged in an active conspiracy to undermine civilization itself, and are now using positions of power themselves to engage in overt racial, gender, and political discrimination.

There are already laws against this, and those laws need to be turned on these people relentlessly until their "movement" is utterly destroyed.

This is a humane thing to do as well, because if this continues, instead of being locked up temporarily, I fear that they as well as all the "disadvantaged" groups that they agitate "on behalf of" will wind up being the ones piled up in ditches when this movement ultimately precipitates a civil war.

Nobody should want to see this happen, because the people that are likely to come out on top in such a scenario are just as horrifying as SJWs are when combined with the ever increasing backing of the state.

I'm on board. I advocate attacking the sources of funding: Abolish all college financial aid and .gov backed student loans. Then watch "Gender Studies" departments implode. Abolish all public employee unions. There are many laws that enable this mess. It will only get worse unless the bad policies are rescinded.