What is happening in the Arctic is now beyond words, so here are the pictures

What if scientists regularly engage in falsifying and otherwise manipulating their results to fit their agenda? What if the very statistical methodology they follow is open to abuse? If we are to give wholesale acceptance to anyone who is an 'official scientist,' yet they could well be corrupt, how is that epistemically responsible?

Furthermore, why must we blindly accept the status quo when there are legitimate dissenters? The very nature of scientific advance is that it overturns the status quo. Your methodology would seem to undermine scientific progress.

Finally, it is said that the mark of a true expert is the ability to boil a complex subject down to the lay level. If the layman must study fulltime for 5+ years to understand climate science results, is the field perhaps not at the necessary level of expertise?

Define screwed.

I’m not sure what I think about the “climate change” issue, but I maintain a reserve of skepticism towards proclamations of apocalyptic doom.

A) Humans, and all living things, are screwed from the get go. A guaranteed calamity awaits us all.

I think contributes to a lack of perspective that is not helpful, and possibley harmful. On a number of levels, personal and political.

B) The fact that climate change gets far more discussion and attention than the ongoing calamity of US military conduct is telling. It tells me that climate change, which is complex, and only ameliorated by levels of global cooperation never seen before, serves as a “boogie man” for the “politically aware.”

Organizing against the conduct of corporate war, as it operates globally, presents far more “low hanging fruit” for positive outcomes, at doable price levels.

Yet, there are no serious (meaning electable) politicians in the US who have an opposition to the crazy influence of corporate money. The military spending (and its corruption) is protected from scrutiny by seemingly insurmountable social structures.

Yet, achieving meaningful reductions in military activities, if not spending, is within the realm of imaginable. It is far more doable than the level of global cooperation that is required to reduce carbon emissions. But people who might be inclined to support collective efforts to clean up the corporate-military-political complex are demoralized.

The Republicans apparently pride themselves on taken the worst possible courses of action on challenging problems. They are working to undercut the science of climate change!

Frankly, I see global action on significant greenhouse gas reductions as impossible.

So, somehow, liberal minded folks have found a perfect subject to project their sense of hopeless futility in “global warming”, an almost intractable problem.

In the meantime, there are unexplored opportunities to improve our communities, and world, all around us.

If we, the US, could somehow turn the corner on the lunatic resistance to gun control, and then make some active progress on military misadventures, maybe Americans might think about giving up on meat.

Uh, all of these things are happening already, and will continue to happen. The biggest causes of unnecessary misery in this world are political (which of course encompasses the physical environment.)

The questions are what the best course of action would be: for individuals, neighborhoods, states, continents.

We cannot escape the physical environment we live in, and to fantasize that somehow compiling a list of risks could lead to some dramatic action is not illuminating. Taking such talking points out of context is confusing.

I agree with your point that we should consider the evidence, and conclusions, presented to us as the work product of scientists. Especially as much of the information is shaped by innumerable cognitive biases.

However, I’m fascinated that someone could realistically doubt the “theory of evolution.” For one thing, it is very much an active area of research, with new discoveries all the time. (Reading about the epigenetic aspects of hereditary traits kind of blew my mind. It turns out that animals adaptions to specific environments can influence later generations.)

So how do consign a relatively young area of research, that is making concrete contributions to science as being akin to religious belief?

The specifics, and controversies, of evolutionary theory, and it’s scientific cousins, are quite complex, and it seems rather capricious to wave it all away as if it was some cartoon theory of reality.

My own, very limited, view of the weakness of evolution as a theory, is that it can seem like a “just so theory,” almost true by tautology.

But the mechanisms of natural selection, and hereditary transfer of traits are so well established that to dismiss the lot of it strikes me as irrational.

>>Other than displacing a large number of people who live on coastlines, what's the big deal?

Those people won't peacefully move somewhere else. Especially in Europe as the middle east becomes literally unliveable and millions of people will start walking north to just survive another day - I can't imagine even the most tolerant european countries willingly accepting this, especially since it won't happen overnight, but over many decades, with more and more people flowing in. That is bound to cause huge amounts of unrest, possibly civil war/ or just war.