oh sure, and are you a betting person? 
Bet is won if whatever scientific community remains at this time, whether human, machine, or extraterrestrial, acknowledges the âdestructionâ of Earth most likely resulted from the Large Hadron Collider or a product thereof (e.g. strangelet, micro black hole, etc).*
* Teleporting Earth to another location or alternate universe where it is still able to support life is specifically excluded.
No particle physicist worth their salt actually believed it was likely the LHC would destroy the earth. After all, massively more energetic collisions happen on earth constantly from cosmic radiation. If the LHC could destroy the earth in the paltry few years it runs, then the earth should have been destroyed many billions of times over from a very fast proton colliding with the atmosphere.
My thinking is that we have both climate change deniers, and anthropogenic climate change skeptics.
The former are faux-conservative idiots who reflexively deny anything that seems âliberalâ to their bigoted sensibilities, even when it means abandoning historically conservative values like stewardship and alms. People like Rush Limbaugh and his ilk whoâd crucify Christ as a Marxist hippy.
The latter are people whoâre smart and humble enough to recognize that theyâre reliant on trained scientific specialists to analyze complex data correctly. And I sympathize; when something is so politically charged, itâs hard to place complete trust in any position, even scientific integrity, when you canât personally verify it. Iâve been fortunate in that my scientific training enabled me to understand the complexities of climate at least well enough to trust and understand the limits of modern climatology. Iâm now completely confident the Earthâs surface is warming, virtually positive itâs primarily an artifact of fossil fuel use, and consider it a very high likelihood the already mounting consequences of shorting out the Earthâs long-term carbon cycle will be the worst disaster in human history since Toba likely nearly made us extinct seventy millennia ago.
But before I researched it over the course of a year involving much reading on the topic (at first because I considered it important to be informed on and then because it fascinated me), I would have counted as an anthropogenic climate change skeptic. And I would never take a position, nor could I force myself to believe something on mere faith, simply because the Rush Limbaughs of the world deny itâs even possible on even less information. Unlike them, I donât regard reactionary politics as a substitute for scientific investigation.
As such, I have sympathy for the integrity of skeptics, and no respect for the childish tantrums of deniers. Climate doubters seems both unnecessary and a way to blur the important distinction between skeptics and deniers. Itâs bad journalism.
How about âintentionally ignorantâ?
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