A quick guide to climate change science. Includes explanations and refutations of the many myths I see being repeated in this thread. Literally every single, "oh yeah, Mr. Smarty-pants Scientist? Well what about THIS" you'll ever hear or read, discussed at this link.
And let me take up bandwidth once again to deplore the hideous state of science journalism today. It often does seem to the scientific community that the current mode of news publication (who, what, when, why, how, showing "the opposition's point of view," in less than seven column inches with a snappy headline, all in little words a TV news anchor can pronounce easily) is specifically designed to screw up the communication of any actual science. I can really see quite easily how non-scientists would get confused by the apparent weirdness of science reporting--believe me, many scientists have completely refused to talk to mainstream media journalists because the information they provided to the reporter was not recognizable in the resulting article.
I mean, imagine you're a reporter with no science education, tasked by your editor to fill a not-very-big column space with a story about a local college professor's discovery. If the local college professor's discovery, which was a Very Big Deal and published in Cell/Nature/Science, is on the molecular mechanism of, oh, let's say divergent initiation in promoter sequences. First you've got to get the professor to give you a short lecture in basic genetics, and then he's got to explain why a single promoter might produce differential transcription, and then he's got to explain how he proved that actually happens and why it's important to human biology. Since this is a
new discovery, there are still lots of points we don't know--how this affects models of systems biology, how the current generation of genomics analysis techniques are going to be affected, what diseases are affected by alternate regulatory mechanisms--lots of unknowns. And there will be several colleagues in the field saying, "Well, clearly much more work needs to be done, as we don't know whether these transcripts are even relevant; they may be quickly destroyed, as they are very unstable."
And then, as the reporter is walking back to the office, he runs into some dude wearing his underpants on his head and proclaiming that the eyebrow fairy told him that all of genetics is a lie made by the Killer Robots From Outer Space.
Your story can be:
a. "Local Professor Discovers New Gene Regulation"
b. "Extra Genes Found! Scientists Baffled!"
c. "Local Professor Controversy: Are Our Genes Under Fire?"
d. "Local Professor's Discovery Risks Killer Robot Wrath"
There is a 75% chance here of picking the headline that usually runs. And when someone questions the wisdom of taking seriously a guy who wears his underpants on his head and believes in Eyebrow Fairies and Killer Robots and whatnot, the response is, "Well, we have to tell both sides of the story and report on the controversy. That's Ethical Reporting!"
What scientists are starting to think, in the sort of consensus-building we do, is that many of the manufactroversy "debaters" are not intellectually honestly debating. We often run into "debate points" that are so absurd that we don't think ANYONE, even 12th-century mendicants living in mud huts, could possibly say such a thing for anything more than entertainment value. Put this in any other context: If you were debating the relative merits of, say, Wyandotte vs. Orpington, and someone pointed out that "Oh yeah, well, Orpingtons have those giant man-eating fangs!" and after you explained, very patiently that no, no chickens of any kind have fangs, no that's a picture of a crossbeak, sorry, not a fang, they replied, "OK, mister smarty-pants, what about all those people they've killed?" And then you're stuck explaining for an hour that Salmonella killed those people through improper hygiene, and that just because a rooster boxed them once does not mean they were in mortal danger. And then they dismiss the entire concept of Germ Theory as nonsense, because whoever heard of invisible animals, and anyway they got away from that vicious rooster just in time and surely had a near death experience... After a while, it's like a four-year-old who keeps asking, "Why" until you're ready to give 'em a smack. It's not honest inquiry or desire for knowledge.
