How Americans got so weird about science

I think your approach to science is wrong – scientists don’t so much “believe” in something as tentatively accept a theory based on observation and experiment. It’s not so much “believing in science” as accepting the scientific method as the best way to understand the universe, at least until better data and models come along. And it’s also not so much “believing in climate change” as looking at the data (or, if you’re not a climate researcher, looking at their conclusions) and accepting it as the best theory of where the climate is headed, until better data comes along. However, since data has been coming along for decades (and has been gathered from previous millennia via verified measurement techniques), the theory is accepted as pretty darn good (since they have predicted things that have come true). And the theory predicts some dire consequences in the coming decades. Just because you don’t “believe” in anthropogenic global warming doesn’t mean it isn’t the best way of describing what’s going on.

Note that “accepted as true” is not the same as “belief,” because latter indicates a kind of acceptance without proof, which is NOT the case with AGW.

BTW, one of the elements supporting AGW is thermodynamics, which has been verified over and over for over a hundred years, and is considered one of the most important scientific principles in existence. If AGW is untrue, then there’s something wrong with thermodynamics. That’s like saying gravity doesn’t exist.

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