> Somebody here on HN just very recently claimed the exact opposite. Could it be a regional dialect thing?
FWIW, I have never liked the "back=later, up=sooner" thing. Thinking of a calendar, and time going left-to-right, back seems to me to mean "leftward," which would mean "sooner." This tended to confuse me for a long time, but finally I figured out how to think of it in a way that could stick with me, i.e. the "back=further, up=closer" thing.
> This is how science and engineering works, you keep revising and improving your models taking new evidence into account.
That's one way to look at it. But eventually you have to say that enough is enough. We aren't revising and improving models of the Aether. And just like the Aether, the models and predictions of the IPCC have proven to be inaccurate.
So you seem to be applying science backwards here: you're trusting the models first, and trying to make them accurate as you go. That's not science at all. Indeed, it's much like ancient philosophers who imagined a way that the "invisible" (i.e. microscopic) world worked and then devised a model to explain it.
The scientific thing to do is to remain skeptical until a model is proven to be accurate.
> This is the exact opposite of religion, which never changes its opinion regardless of any new evidence.
That's not true at all. Actual religions change over time. Actual religions study ancient texts and invent new theories about how to interpret them, which often spawn new sects. Actual religions even discover new texts (e.g. the Dead Sea Scrolls) and update their interpretations based on them.
Or to put it another way: religion does not have an opinion--people do. Some people are stubborn--and that includes some who claim to be scientific.
And the way science is currently organized is not so different than many religions: schools which educate experts who study and discuss and write peer-reviewed journal articles and offer simplified versions to laypeople through the media. That's literally true for both science and religion today. Perhaps we should be less concerned about "science vs. religion" and more concerned about searching for the truth.