Comment Re:Scientists Vote Sceptic (Score 1) 695
I voted sceptic. Which frankly I feel every self respecting scientist should do. [...] Saying you "believe it" is bad science. It is a belief. It isn't evidence or data based. Saying you're sceptical but the evidence up to this point shows X, Y, and Z keeps you a neutral observer which is an important position within the field.
I'm a scientist, specialising in empirical inference.
The word "belief" is a well-defined term in probability theory, and hence in data analysis. When I say "I belief in climate change", I mean that I have access to noisy data providing strong evidence in favor of the hypothesis that humans are changing the planet's climate. Saying "every scientist should be a sceptic" is bad science. Yours is the nihilistic logic of orthodox statistics, by which it is impossible to discover anything, only possible to disprove hypotheses. While there is no way to ultimately _prove_ the existence of any physical effect, given sufficent amounts of data, it is possible to collect evidence in favor of one hypothesis over others.
But there is a second point in here, already made implicitly by others above: Our belief in favor or against the hypothesis of climate change is only the inference step of a decision problem: What matters is what we do, not what we believe. The problem here is that the loss from doing nothing if climate change is real is far worse than the loss from acting if climate change should turn out to be false. So, even if you assign equal evidence to the hypotheses of "false" and "true", the rational decision is to almost act as if climate change were known to be true. Sadly, we humans are very bad at rational decision making. Our brains are just not build that way.