XFool wrote: This is starting to confuse me. The original post and poll posed a question "Climate change - man made?" That is a question over a matter of material fact about the real, physical world. No amount of voting can answer that question.
Perhaps it was my fault for asking "What now?" but my whole argument here is that the subject (of the poll) itself is being answered by 'sceptics' in a political way - which is inherently nonsense. You can, quite legitimately 'question' or have an "opinion" on government policies to deal with climate change - despite some claiming I am trying to suppress democracy. But the argument here is about the poll, and the climate.
There's the philosophical distinction expressed perhaps as the noumenon and phenomenon. The real, physical, material universe 'out there' and our inner mental perceptions, ideas and knowledge about it. Science is, we think, the most accurate way to describe the noumenal world.
I'm speculating here, but maybe the reason why this poll has become entangled in the phenomenal world is because the question isn't worded in a strictly scientific way. (mtk62, that's not a criticism). That point has been made earlier in the thread, but the ambiguity has opened the way for all the personal opinions and points of view. For example, I can believe that climate change exists, and that human activity contributes to it, but it matters how much the human contribution is vs the natural non-human effect. At what point would we draw the line between saying True or False? And at what point does the human contribution make a big enough impact for us to need to do something about it?
You might say that scientists have already answered these questions. Ok, so we could do a poll of climate scientists.
This poll has a small number of us forum members with no doubt a wide variety of knowledge on the subject, most of us non-scientists I expect. It's an opinion poll intended for average people not a scientific study. It's no doubt given a very different answer than you would get from the hypothetical poll of scientists. And then it's meandered away from the opening post as forum threads often do. Did you expect something else?
You might not like the result of the poll, or that so many average people don't live their lives according to strictly scientific principles, but that's how it is.
XFool wrote: Science proceeds through "
consensus". A new consensus replaces an older consensus as more is learned. Yes, as in any subject, there are always hold-outs or Mavericks, scientists who cannot accept the new ideas and continue to adhere to the older, disproved ones. e.g. Believe in an old Earth, disbelieve in natural evolution, disbelieve in quantum mechanics, disbelieve in Einstein's Relativity etc. What usually happens is the inevitable, they eventually all die...
I hope we are not risking venturing into a similar area to that favourite nonsense of the US religious ideologues: "
It's only a theory".
Ok, but the scientific consensus which we've got at the moment is what it is, and we shouldn't second guess where it might go in the future. For the sake of argument, if the consensus right now is 90% we shouldn't extrapolate that to assume that the majority view is 100% true. The minority 10% of dissenters still deserve their place even if it's inconvenient and gets used unwisely. We always need a seed of doubt in the orthodoxy. Science is human knowledge, it's distinct from the actual reality it's describing.
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