Right, and you can do all that with the climate data if you like - it will just take you a little longer to do because it's not a simple as an ACL tear.

No one is hiding that data, they're just telling you that understanding it is non-trivial. This does not make it incorrect, however.

No, you believe them because they're an expert in their field and they agree with 97% of the other experts in their field.

It's a complex system that is not possible to understand without a lot of background in the field - like open heart surgery, or programming the SSL library. At some point down the line in day to day life you're going to have to trust that the person who is an expert knows what they are talking about.

Of course, the expert could explain to you how they reached their conclusion, but you'd quickly get lost because they would assume that you knew various other important building blocks necessary to understand it - like a background in science, for example. Just because he can't explain it to a layperson in a few short sentences doesn't mean that they're lying. It *might*, but at that point you seek assurances from other people who are experts in the field.

This is not about religion - and that fact that you are trying to paint it as so is a huge non-sequitur. Religious beliefs cannot be proved. Scientific evidence can be - but often it is not as trivial as opening a box and saying "here it is". That does not make it wrong, just complicated.

Do you say the same thing to your doctor before they perform major surgery on you, or do you trust that they are a professional in their field and that 97% of other doctors would agree with them on how to perform your operation?

If you want to prove them wrong, the data is available.

Put it this way, do you think that if the data supported those special interests who have paid a lot of money to discredit climate scientists that they wouldn't use it to actually do so?

The beautiful thing about science is that it doesn't care if you don't believe it, it simply is. The data is all there.

I still find it fascinating that people believe that one particular discipline of scientists - not all scientists, specifically one narrow discipline - is involved in a "pseudoreligious political" conspiracy.

What here is more likely? That they're right, or that 97% of all climate scientists on earth in every country, every university, every company, every government, every society are all in lockstep under some grand master plan to... what? Funnel small amounts of money to them?

Even if we take the ludicrous position that every government has decided to work together in perfect unison to run a grand conspiracy to generate tax money/green policy/some other right wing bogeyman de-la-jeure, how on earth are they going to keep all the scientists to go along with it? It sure isn't money - have you seen the salary of a scientist? The easy money is working for ExxonMobil or the Koch brothers. The money on the anti-climate-change side is vastly higher than it is on the "regular science" side. There's no way that 97% of scientists in the field would go along with it - all it would take is for one to be tempted by the dump truck full of cash to blow the conspiracy open, and that hasn't happened - despite all the attempts to discredit climate scientists.

It's not even as if the data they are using is somehow hidden. This is data collected globally from thousands of sources and hundreds and hundreds of people available to anyone who wants to study it.

The fact that you are classifying an entire discipline of science as "pseudoreligious" says it all really. You disagree with 97% of scientists on this issue, but you're not sure why (or you lack the arguments as to why) except that you've been told they are all involved in some conspiracy, so you make it into some political ideology battle.

I guess I should trust the 3% of programmers who say that there are NSA backdoors in the Linux kernel. I mean, some guy on 4chan said it and I believe him. Those pseudoreligious zealots on slashdot are just trying to get me to use Linux so the government can spy on me.

Anecdotes are not data.

What does the thermometer (that is placed in the same place for it's life) say over the course of 50 years?

One data point is not enough. Nor is starting your measurement conveniently in 1998 and then saying "look the trend is level!" without showing that the overall global trend is very definitely upwards with cyclical dips.

Ah, that old chestnut. When you pick 1998 as your starting point, you do exactly what you accuse climate scientists of doing - cherry picking your data to suit your argument.

Take a look at the global trend over the entire lifetime of the data.

What the propaganda has convinced you of is that there's no warming trend because it started with a record high year as the origin. Zoom out on the graph (the entire data set that the cherry picked section comes from looks... somewhat different)

Then your confirmation bias is showing. There's a huge amount of material out there for the leyman on climate change, but it relies on you accepting that the vast majority of climate scientists are not lying to you.

I have to take programmers at their word when 97% of them say that there are no NSA backdoors in the Linux kernel, and that's a relatively uncontroversial position to take because they're experts.

How am I a zealot? Because I disagree with you, or because I pointed out that by your own admission you can't find a layman's guide to climate change on the internet via google?

Note that I'm not personally attacking you here. My initial comment was meant to convey that without being an expert in the field it's hard to assess all of the evidence yourself. In the same way that I have to take it on the say of programmers that Linux is not full of NSA backdoors because I don't have the training or the skills necessary to determine it for myself.

I'm not being a snob here, I'm merely pointing out that being an expert scientist is not what most people are. I'm not saying "you're not worthy", I'm saying that you're unlikely to fully understand what's going out without some extensive background (i.e., multiple years of study in the field).

Would you feel like a doctor had gone "the snob route" if he told you that you weren't in a position to tell him how to perform a surgery because you heard on the TV that surgery is just a scam practiced by "zealots"?

Also, "what I believe to be the truth" - that's a very telling statement right there. While I suppose it is technically accurate, what you actually mean is that I'm some sort of blinded religious zealot who has been told what to believe when in reality I happen to be a scientist who trusts other types of scientists in their field.

But like I say, I believe the 97% of programmers who say that there are no NSA backdoors in the Linux kernel - but I'm taking them at their word because they're the experts.

What original AC is saying is that our current medicine doesn't resemble Star Trek style ... We drop blanket bombs into our bodies with the expectation that the evil bits will die a whole lot faster than the good bits, and by the time the evil bits are dead, the good bits are still in a good enough shape to regenerate.

No that is NOT what we do for practically anything but chemotherapy for most cancers (where the difference from normal tissue is very small - a few mutations in signaling systems) and the main difference is that being stuck in reproduction mode makes them somewhat less robust.

Antibiotics are all about targeting one or another chemical mechanism that has one form in the target organism when its equivalen has another - or is absent - in human tissue. There are a LOT of drugs that have been discovered or designed, and the collection consists of enormous numbers of "magic bullets" that each target just one, or a small set, of systems found in particular pathogenic lifeforms, with either negligible, or far lower, side-effects on other systems.

Sure many antibiotics hit a wide range of NON-human life - pathogens and others - because THEY share susceptable versions of the target system or contain systems that are strongly side-effected. Sure the doctors sometimes have to pick drugs with bad side-effects because those are the best choices they have. But the characterization of antibiotic and antiviral drugs as "blanket bombing" has been out of date for more than half a century.

You don't understand. It's ok, though. We do have people working on it.

Also, no one says that "weather is not [a]ffected by climate" - you are either wilfully ignorant of what they're saying or you have misunderstood the phrase "weather is not the same as climate" which is a different thing entirely.

Which 17 out of which 19 models were wrong? [citation needed] there I think. I'm listening.

Well, you posted this:

And then you think I'm being elitist?

Well, it seems like you're not capable of using google if all you can find is NASA's site and things like it.

There are lots of pages that explain the nature of climate change to a greater or lesser level of detail. If you actually searched for them and couldn't find them, then my assumption about "what you are capable of" was accurate.

Right, but the crucial difference there is that seances are humbuggery, whereas if you actually want to learn and study the science behind climate science then you actually can do so because it actually exists.

Just because it's complex and you don;t understand it doesn't mean "it's all made up like magic". That's the religious doctrine argument.

A programmer told me not to use Linux because all the code is full of NSA backdoors. I mean, I'll have to take his word for it because he says he has looked at the source code and I don't know anything about programming. I mean, 97% of other programmers say that there's no NSA backdoors, but I trust this guy. He took out some TV advertising. He told me that those other programmers are being paid by the NSA to keep quiet.

It's hilarious to me that climate science is so heavily disbelieved due to the political storm that surrounds it.

If you were to listen to a team of programmers who have said "this complex SSL library is secure", then I have little choice but to either believe them or seek additional verification from other expert programmers. I know nothing about code. So, imagine now that 97% of those programmers have agreed that the code is secure, after testing it in various different ways and understanding what the source does. Would you consider that a pass?

It's only when the answers that scientists present are inconvenient to us that we suddenly decide that they can't be right and that this is all a big conspiracy, or it's driven by some some religious fervour.

I made the analogy too simple, what I should have said was something along the lines of forming a hypothesis about the relationship between mass and molecular weight. In order to even think about that sort of problem you need to define a few terms, like what molecular weight is, and what your unit of mass is. That is where consensus in science comes in.

Also deciding on the level of precision in order for a result to be considered meaningful. It's not always the same, but in a field of study those values tend to become standardised via consensus. For example, the degree of precision in the measurement to say "we found the Higgs Boson" was decided by consensus, whereas the actual science of looking for and detecting and analysing the data was done via the scientific method.

The problem is you're not in a position to be able to evaluate the evidence - climate science is difficult and specialised.

If you asked your doctor to show you your MRI scans so that you could evaluate the evidence of his/her diagnosis for yourself, where would you start?

This isn't a "you're too stupid to understand" argument, it's a "it's not your area and it's very tricky, beyond basic concepts" argument.

If you're consistently disbelieving the very large majority of climate scientists when they summarise their findings, then you're a denier (assuming you take other scientists in different fields that are no politically sensitive at their word). If you're simply looking for an easy to digest pile of evidence then you're going to be disappointed. The evidence is all there - it's just not easy to understand, beyond simple threads like "land ice melting > sea level rise" or "higher [CO2] > more retained IR" but how those things fit into the whole is not trivial.

It has become very easy to simply distrust what climate scientists are saying because of a large propaganda campaign to demonise them all. It's almost unique to that particular field - but it happens to a greater or lesser extent where money overlaps with science (pharmaceuticals, GM crops, climate science, renewable energy, nuclear science etc) from both sides of the political spectrum.

Recent research has shown that chickens are the closest living relative of T. Rex.

Do you have a reference for the research?

If it's true that T.rex is closer to chickens than to pheasants, peafowl, and other Phasianinae, it would mean that the Phasianinae family dates back to before the K-T disaster.

This was all over the mainstream press last April. I was echoing their over-simplified characterizatoin of the research.

It's actually "closest living relative among the set of genetic databases they tested", I.e. chickens, sheep, etc. Chickens happened to be a bird they tested, with aminno acid sequences far closer to those of the collagen recovered from T. Rex - nearly identical, in fact, than those of things like mammals. So don't expect this to re-write taxonomy - or to mean that chickens were any closer - or farter - from T. Rex than their close relatives such as phesants.

Of course there's other evidence that birds were around well before T. Rex. So it may turn out that chickens are closer relatives to T. Rex than, say, bluebirds. (Or maybe bluebirds will turn out to be closer, once they're compared.)