The Consensus is Sound. We Have Much to Do.

The conversion of UC Berkley climate skeptic, Professor Richard Muller, to global warming believer has rocked the denialist community.  Muller's project took three years to prove the IPCC wrong and, instead, proved that the UN panel actually understated both the degree of warming and the role man made emissions played in causing it.   Muller actually concluded that virtually the entire 2.5F warming since pre-industrial days was man made.

Muller's conversion has even impacted Britian's most denialist newspaper, The Telegraph.  There, science writer and comment editor, Tom Chivers, writes there's really no justification for denying the powerful consensus of the science community.

As a non-climate scientist, I have to accept certain things on authority, as I do with all expert knowledge. This is an argument from authority, but we all do it, and it's vital: if I had cancer, I'd accept the authority of the oncologist and the body of knowledge of the oncology community, rather than try to guide my own treatment with information I'd found on the internet. As Ben Goldacre said long ago in a different context, you have only two options: "you can either learn to interpret data yourself and come to your own informed conclusions; or you decide who to trust".

I've decided who to trust, and it's mainstream scientific opinion: the Royal Society, the Royal Institution, Nasa, the US National Academy of Sciences, the US Geological Survey, the IPCC, the national science bodies of 30 or so other countries. And that gives me a possible route out of the confirmation-bias trap: I have, in advance, outsourced my judgment to expert bodies. If several of them changed their position, I would change mine. It's far from perfect, but short of becoming a climate scientist myself, it's the only option I have; otherwise my reasonable belief that the climate is changing due to human behaviour becomes an article of faith. As it is, although it is mediated through authority, it's still, I hope, based on empirical data, on the scientific method.

What I want to ask those sceptics who, like me, are not professional climate scientists is: what's your way out? You are as trapped by confirmation bias as I am. You will not be able to disinterestedly search through the torrents of information, false and true, on the internet and elsewhere: the more you look, the more you will confirm your own beliefs, because that's what we do. Since the design of the human mind makes you an unreliable judge, what evidence would it take to change your mind? Who, in short, do you trust?

Muller, as Chivers points out, still can't link his epiphany over the reality and extent of man-made global warming to specific climate change impacts sweeping the world but that's not his field.  Those findings are being researched and tested by others - biologists, botanists, hydrologists, epidemiologists, glaciologists, geologists, the list goes on and on and on.

I too accept the view of scientific authority, especially when the consensus is this widespread and powerful.   And, if you don't, you need to point to some other scientific authority that is somehow as significant or greater than that of the mainstream scientific opinion.    And you can't.   That doesn't exist.   Muller is the last straw.   This argument is over.  It is time to accept the consensus and benefit from it.   There is much, so much to do.