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RobinZ comments on Undiscriminating Skepticism - Less Wrong
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It's not like a normal person can observe such changes - we're talking fraction of a degree over lifetime so far (Wikipedia says 0.74 ± 0.18 °C over entire 20th century).
It's a matter of your level of trust in "mainstream" scientists, and there's nothing particularly irrational about not having terribly much trust here.
And even global warming is real, it's still instrumentally rational to be wrong - let other people limit their carbon emissions, the world in which you drive SUV and everyone else overpays for Priuses is the optimal world for you to live in. (it would be even better to believe correctly in global warming, but be cynical enough to not give a shit about it, but many people have some sort of cynicism limit...)
That's not necessarily true - first, the temperature change is not uniform everywhere, and second, the effects of such changes on weather may be noticeable in ways other than simple warming (e.g. more extreme weather events). Certainly day-to-day observations cannot support the kind of confidence that many scientists have in their conclusions about global warming, but they can lend slight credence to such statements.
But it's non-uniform enough that some people are observing warming and some are observing cooling. So it seems clear from a perspective that accepts the terms of the claim that all purely local observations are uninformative.
Tracking extreme weather events from a local perspective seems likely to give even less reliable results than looking for trends in your local climate.
If you accept the terms of the debate, you have to hope for non-biased global observations that are properly normed against a long baseline in order to make any decisions about what weather evidence counts for or against the positions. At this point, I'm having a hard time finding any non-biased observations.
Fair enough - I was quibbling, to a large part because:
The weather in my home region has gotten weird compared to my childhood - many mild winters and summer droughts, for example.
An Alaskan on DeviantArt a while ago wrote a prose piece about how she was always freezing, never warming enough in the summer to withstand the following winter ... and prefaced it with a matter-of-fact note about how that wasn't the case in recent years.
Hence, when you commented that "[i]t's not like a normal person, can observe such changes", that seemed to contradict my own experiences. But given the prior attitude effect, my experiences should probably be discounted a fair bit.