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1. Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Friday, 08-Dec-2017 10:59:55 EST Verius
   Mocking people who deny climate change by pointing to gravity: not a good idea. Gravity isn't accepted because a lot of scientists say so, like with climate change. It's accepted because everyone has immediate personal experience with it. Climate change on the other hand cannot be established with simple experiments, even pointing at higher temperatures is insufficient since what's meant with climate change is about humans being responsible for a changing climate rather than more high temperatures being a natural occurrence. That requires a lot of difficult data gathering and analysis and therefore in effect trust in scientists whereas gravity requires no such trust.
   1. Verius (verius@community.highlandarrow.com)'s status on Friday, 08-Dec-2017 11:05:40 EST Verius

      in reply to
      Furthermore even hard-to-test-yourself things like orbital dynamics are in contrast to climate change easily testable: you simply perform an experiment and see if the results match your hypothesis. There's very little wiggle room with physics at the non-quantum level. Climate change on the other hand is about such a complex system that it's effectively impossible to experimentally prove or disprove. It's really more about gaining insights, applying understanding of e.g. the effects of CO2 on heat radiation and then making complex models and in the end you hopefully can test those models against data that wasn't used directly or indirectly in the training of the model. On a "how clear are you going to get a result from your experiments" climate change research is actually worse than even things like high energy particle research (which costs a lot and has to deal with quantum probabilistic stuff but there's a good way of determining if a hypothesis is very likely to not be disproven).
   2. 6gain (6gain@loadaverage.org)'s status on Friday, 08-Dec-2017 12:28:26 EST 6gain

      in reply to
      @verius Also I'm not sure gravity was "accepted" - surely it just "is" , and people couldn't do a whole lot about it. Even flying is just a hack, not a gravity-changer. So it's a slightly weird comparison for me. The precursor to climate change is localised pollution, acid rain, etc - which I would say historically have been much more accepted as directly influenced by human activity.
   3. 6gain (6gain@loadaverage.org)'s status on Friday, 08-Dec-2017 12:24:42 EST 6gain

      in reply to
      @verius I think it's unproductive to lump the two together, sadly. Where you stand on what causes it (if you accept/assume that things are getting warmer) shouldn't affect various aspects of planning for the change.
      Also I do wonder if people will start to 'instinctually' link 'natural' disasters with climate change increasingly, or whether global scale is just something we (societally) can't get our head round from a local perspective. Even that has dangers, of course - it's very easy to overlook the man-made factors which do directly contribute to disasters having a worse effect, eg. destructive forest policies.