For calibration: do you think the question of whether green house gas emissions cause climate change is a political question?
I think discussions of it here would probably be, yes. I suspect it would be possible to have a discussion that wasn’t, but it would be much easier to do about some narrow subquestion, which would probably not be easy to identify.
The primary reason why I suspect that is I think most people don’t have the relevant backgrounds to comment on it, and the people who do have relevant backgrounds will have relevant backgrounds about different parts. The impression I get is that people who know a lot about simulations and dynamical systems (like myself) think that climate change modeling is mostly worthless on a technical level (i.e. by different choices of fudge factors they could get about any result they wanted from their models, and the current results are what seems reasonable to the culture of climate scientists), but I don’t know enough about climate science to know how significant a role the models play in their whole argument.
I’ll also point out that the primary discussion of a scientific subject (other than cognitive or decision science) here that comes to mind- the QM sequence- was, if I recall correctly, explicitly a question that is political in some parts of the world.
I think discussions of it here would probably be, yes. I suspect it would be possible to have a discussion that wasn’t, but it would be much easier to do about some narrow subquestion, which would probably not be easy to identify.
The primary reason why I suspect that is I think most people don’t have the relevant backgrounds to comment on it, and the people who do have relevant backgrounds will have relevant backgrounds about different parts. The impression I get is that people who know a lot about simulations and dynamical systems (like myself) think that climate change modeling is mostly worthless on a technical level (i.e. by different choices of fudge factors they could get about any result they wanted from their models, and the current results are what seems reasonable to the culture of climate scientists), but I don’t know enough about climate science to know how significant a role the models play in their whole argument.
I’ll also point out that the primary discussion of a scientific subject (other than cognitive or decision science) here that comes to mind- the QM sequence- was, if I recall correctly, explicitly a question that is political in some parts of the world.