I will say up front that you clearly have more knowledge than I do. both of you do.
However, how do you call NASA 'half liars'? How do you discredit so much that NOAA says? You seem to think that all of these scientists are just lying throughout their teeth? You are both giving information, graphs, data. How does one determine which ones are fake and which ones aren't? And these are legitimate questions, not questioning what you are saying with the data you are showing. And on the flip side, Bio is doing the same thing. You are calling each other liars (essentially, or at least the scientists that are saying the information each of you is backing). So this goes to both of you. Both of you each seem to be very smart, and have data to back your theories. But each of you is absolutely right, and the other is wrong. So how do each of you know that you are correct and the other is wrong? Seems like it has to come to an opinion, and opinion is just that. It can be based on interpretation of fact, but it is still just an opinion, right?
I can only speak for myself, but the way I look at it is as follows:
I’m not a climate scientist or an expert by any means. I have had the privilege of being taught by many who are experts, though, so that’s the place I can draw my own conclusions from. The lessons I learned from them is that it’s possible to find individual studies that show nearly anything (coffee causes cancer! Coffee doesn’t doesn’t cause cancer! Cephalopods come from outer space! Etc, etc). As a result, it’s important to keep the skeptic muscles in our brains working, but often the pragmatic thing to do is go with the sort of emergent “truths” that come from decades of literature, meta-analysis studies, etc. because the alternative is to slip into some sort of bizarre postmodern world where there are no truths to be known about anything — in which case why do anything? Why study anything? Why care?
Because I’m not an expert, but have learned enough from people who are to know that the climate is an immensely complex system with many variables that work together in ways that make it possible for individual studies of specific variables to sometimes show things that contradict other processes, my gut instinct is to trust the people, agencies, and academies who have spent half a century or more studying this. Therefore the position of all 200
National Science academies, the curriculum taught at every major research university on the planet, NASA, NOAA, all of the world’s governments, and the greatest scientific minds of our century (Hawking, E.O. Wilson, etc, etc) is good enough for me.
I also look at it from the perspective that even if they’re all wrong and humans are not the cause of all of the recent warming, almost nobody is debating the fact that we’re responsible for at least some of it. And that alone is reason to do everything we can to limit emissions. Not to mention all of the other associated issues like ocean acidification, PM 2.5 particulate pollution which kills millions, energy poverty issues, wars fueled by desire to control extractive resources, etc.
I distrust positions that frame climate issues entirely around partisan policy. I don’t care about the policy of any particular party. I just want solutions. I didn’t come to care about the future of earth and her species because of some political agenda. I came to it because I’ve spent hundreds of days and thousands of miles traveling by foot through some of the most remote wilderness areas in the lower 48 over the last decade and have come away from that experience fairly heartbroken over the obvious strain I’ve witnessed firsthand that humans are putting on our fragile planet.
