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What I mean is - are predictions of what will happen in the future accurate, based on data today? I'm not completely convinced they are, but I don't need complete assurance, just assurance that the research has been done in a methodical way. Those of us who want complete assurance before acting are behaving in a manner different from how most people would act with all other things regarding science. Diagnosed with a bad illness? Let's wait and see if the prediction turns out to be true before getting any treatment. Few of us would do this.
As a scientist, but not a climatologist, I always say that I have doubt regarding every theory (the word *theory* used in the sense of a model, a system of understanding something, not as a "guess", which is its popular use), because I have seen every theory in the past undergo continual evolution. Unfortunately, when non-scientists hear this sort of thing, they think it means the scientist thinks the whole thing is flawed and should be discarded. Instead, it is the healthy skepticism which continues to seek refinement of the model. So don't misunderstand scientists in the news when they have disagreements about the model. They may not be saying that the whole thing should be ignored but are often quibbling about just how we understand climactic change and the forces that drive it. Some of them don't accept future predictions, true, but there is not uniformity of opinion on just about every other scientific theory, especially the more recent ones. It's the nature of the beast.
What do you do with situations in which our understanding, our theoretical models, is in a constant state of refinement (all science is this way, BTW, including what goes into your car)? Current climactic models have reached a pretty high level of sophistication. We know how heat is circulated through the oceans and think we know the periodicity (that is, time between cycles) of this heat flow. Scientists don't dispute the existence of normal heat/cool cycles on earth. However, some detractors are assuming that they either don't know about these or are ignoring this when formulating the current model. Yeah right, and NASA scientists ignored the motion of the moon when plotting trajectory.
I would say that if you really want to decide everything for yourself (I gave up on this long ago), you have to learn everything about everything and delve into the data, something which has already consumed untold numbers of person-hours. You would need to be immortal and have a lot more than 24 hours in a day. Or, you could take the tact that you might already take with all other things which you don't have time to learn everything about and ask - what are the qualifications of the people who did this work, and how much consensus is there in the scientific community, and what do they agree on? Then, the political decisions occur, which are - ignore it, or do we act upon the most minimal of the predictions, or the most maximal, or do we do something in between, or something barely adequate to prevent the worst? To me, that's the harder part. The fact that our understanding is incomplete should not prevent us from acting now, however, since the consequences of inaction are probably bad.
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