Has anybody here has changed their minds on the matter of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and what evidence or arguments made you reconsider your original positions on the matter?
I’ve bounced back and forth on the matter several times, and right now I’m starting to doubt global warming itself, nevermind catastrophic or anthropogenic; since those I read most frequently are biased against, and my sources which support it have a bad habit of deleting any comments that disagree or criticize the evidence, which has led to my taking them less seriously, the ideal for me would be arguments or evidence for it that changed somebody’s mind towards the end of supporting the theory.
I think you are overweighing the evidence from moderation policies.
If a large number of evangelicals constantly descended onto LessWrong, forcing the community to have a near hair trigger banning policy, would that be strong evidence that atheism was incorrect?
There are several different pieces of this for me.
I haven’t much changed my mind on the existence of global climate change since I first looked into the data, about a decade ago, except to become more confident about it.
I’ve made various attempts to wrap my brain around this data to arrive at some opinions about its causes, but I’m evidently neither smart nor well-informed enough to arrive at any confidence about whether the conclusions people are drawing on this question actually follow from the data they are drawing it from. Ultimately I just end up either taking their word for it, or not. I try to ignore the public discourse on the subject, which in the US has become to an absurd degree a Blue/Green issue entirely divorced from any notion of relying on observation-based reasoning to ground confidence levels in assertions.
The thing that most caused me to lower my estimate of the likelihood that the climate change is exclusively or near-exclusively anthropogenic was some conversations with a couple of astrophysicist friends of mine, who talked about the state of play in the field and their sense that research into correlations between terrestrial climate fluctuations and solar output fluctuations was seen as a career-ender… not quite on par with, say, parapsychology, but on the same side of the ledger.
The thing that most caused me to raise that estimate was some conversations with a friend of mine who was working in climate modeling for a while. I don’t have half a clue regarding the validity of his models, but I got the clear impression that climate models that take into account anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2 levels are noticeably more accurate than models that don’t.
On balance, the latter raised my confidence in the assertion that global climate change is significantly anthropogenic more than the former lowered my confidence.
I don’t really have an opinion yet about how catastrophic the climate change is likely to be, regardless of whether it’s anthropogenic or not. Incidentally, it regularly puzzles me that the public discourse is so resolutely about the latter rather than the former, as it seems to me that catastrophic non-anthropogenic climate change should be as much of a concern for us as catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.
Has anybody here has changed their minds on the matter of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, and what evidence or arguments made you reconsider your original positions on the matter?
I’ve bounced back and forth on the matter several times, and right now I’m starting to doubt global warming itself, nevermind catastrophic or anthropogenic; since those I read most frequently are biased against, and my sources which support it have a bad habit of deleting any comments that disagree or criticize the evidence, which has led to my taking them less seriously, the ideal for me would be arguments or evidence for it that changed somebody’s mind towards the end of supporting the theory.
I think you are overweighing the evidence from moderation policies.
If a large number of evangelicals constantly descended onto LessWrong, forcing the community to have a near hair trigger banning policy, would that be strong evidence that atheism was incorrect?
No. But it would result in me not taking theoretical weekly posts on why atheism is correct very seriously.
There are several different pieces of this for me.
I haven’t much changed my mind on the existence of global climate change since I first looked into the data, about a decade ago, except to become more confident about it.
I’ve made various attempts to wrap my brain around this data to arrive at some opinions about its causes, but I’m evidently neither smart nor well-informed enough to arrive at any confidence about whether the conclusions people are drawing on this question actually follow from the data they are drawing it from. Ultimately I just end up either taking their word for it, or not. I try to ignore the public discourse on the subject, which in the US has become to an absurd degree a Blue/Green issue entirely divorced from any notion of relying on observation-based reasoning to ground confidence levels in assertions.
The thing that most caused me to lower my estimate of the likelihood that the climate change is exclusively or near-exclusively anthropogenic was some conversations with a couple of astrophysicist friends of mine, who talked about the state of play in the field and their sense that research into correlations between terrestrial climate fluctuations and solar output fluctuations was seen as a career-ender… not quite on par with, say, parapsychology, but on the same side of the ledger.
The thing that most caused me to raise that estimate was some conversations with a friend of mine who was working in climate modeling for a while. I don’t have half a clue regarding the validity of his models, but I got the clear impression that climate models that take into account anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2 levels are noticeably more accurate than models that don’t.
On balance, the latter raised my confidence in the assertion that global climate change is significantly anthropogenic more than the former lowered my confidence.
I don’t really have an opinion yet about how catastrophic the climate change is likely to be, regardless of whether it’s anthropogenic or not. Incidentally, it regularly puzzles me that the public discourse is so resolutely about the latter rather than the former, as it seems to me that catastrophic non-anthropogenic climate change should be as much of a concern for us as catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.