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Message: <blockquote data-quote="freyar" data-source="post: 6684550" data-attributes="member: 40227">Something I see a bit in this thread and a lot in political discussion is people talking about what's going on in nature as if it's their opinion.  It's just not.  Nature is doing what it's doing.  There can be discussions about what data mean, but the data are what they are.  The point is that, in proportion to the general public, only a very few people are educated about the data or how to make sense of the data. And essentially all the people who know what the data mean are in agreement that they mean human behavior is changing the climate.  Seriously -- in politics, a 60%-40% split in an election is a landslide.  Climate scientists are nearly unanimous on this.Frankly, we tend to say that everyone gets an opinion about everything, so the public lets politicians get away with bluster about the climate.  But that's not really how it works in science.  The only people who have an opinion worth listening to on a scientific topic are the people who do science in that field.  As a theoretical particle physicist and string theorist, I would not be asked to referee a journal article on climate science --- I don't get a scientific opinion on that because I'm not an expert.  I've seen a few talks and read a few general-level articles, and I can follow those, but, really, I defer to the experts.  And, you know, if a climatologist wants to know about the Higgs boson, they ask me.  They wouldn't then say, "in my opinion, the Higgs doesn't exist."  Sounds silly, right?One other event worth pointing out, though I don't remember the links to the news articles on it.  A few years ago, a scientist who was a skeptic about anthropogenic climate change (please note: this was not a climate scientist) got a big group of other non-expert scientists together to reanalyze the data that the climate science community had already gone through. So they spent a couple of years, and then, lo and behold, they came to the same conclusion that climate scientists had all along -- the climate is changing, and the main cause is human civilization.</blockquote>

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