[QUESTION]: What are your views on climate change, and how did you form them?

VipulNaik

Note: Please see this post of mine for more on the project, my sources, and potential sources for bias.

I have written a couple of blog posts on my understanding of climate forecasting, climate change, and the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis (here and here). I also laid down the sources I was using to inform myself here.

I think one question that a number of readers may have had is: given my lack of knowledge (and unwillingness to undertake extensive study) of the subject, why am I investigating it at all, rather than relying on the expert consensus, as documented by the IPCC that, even if we're not sure is correct, is still the best bet humanity has for getting things right? I intend to elaborate on the reasons for taking a closer look at the matter, while still refraining from making the study of atmospheric science a full-time goal, in a future post.

Right now, I'm curious to hear how you formed your views on climate change. In particular, I'm interested in answers to questions such as these (not necessarily answers to all of them, or even to only these questions).

What are your current beliefs on climate change? Specifically, would you defer to the view that greenhouse gas forcing is the main source of long-term climate change? How long-term? Would you defer to the IPCC range for climate sensitivity estimates?
What were your beliefs on climate change when you first came across the subject, and how did your views evolve (if at all) on further reading (if you did any)? (Obviously, your initial views wouldn't have included beliefs about terms like "greenhouse gas forcing" or "climate sensitivity").
What are some surprising things you learned when reading up about climate change that led you to question your beliefs (regardless of whether you changed them)? For instance, perhaps reading about Climategate caused you to critically examine your deference to expert consensus on the issue, but you eventually concluded that the expert consensus was still right.
If you read my recent posts linked above, did the posts contain information that was new to you? Did any of this information surprise you? Do you think it's valuable to carry out this sort of exercise in order to better understand the climate change debate?

Note: Please see this post of mine for more on the project, my sources, and potential sources for bias.

What are your current beliefs on climate change? Specifically, would you defer to the view that greenhouse gas forcing is the main source of long-term climate change? How long-term? Would you defer to the IPCC range for climate sensitivity estimates?
What were your beliefs on climate change when you first came across the subject, and how did your views evolve (if at all) on further reading (if you did any)? (Obviously, your initial views wouldn't have included beliefs about terms like "greenhouse gas forcing" or "climate sensitivity").
What are some surprising things you learned when reading up about climate change that led you to question your beliefs (regardless of whether you changed them)? For instance, perhaps reading about Climategate caused you to critically examine your deference to expert consensus on the issue, but you eventually concluded that the expert consensus was still right.
If you read my recent posts linked above, did the posts contain information that was new to you? Did any of this information surprise you? Do you think it's valuable to carry out this sort of exercise in order to better understand the climate change debate?

What's your opinion on the situation in Mali?

What I mean to imply by "I don't even have a slight preference to either direction" is not that I assume a 50% prior probability to each side; it's that I don't assume a prior probability. Assuming one would be uninformative noise, since I don't know enough about it to have an opinion -- and it would be both harmful and irresponsible. Harmful since it would commit me to a prior for something that I don't want to have any priors about -- once I write down a percentage, I've committed to that percentage, and I'll be more likely to update based on it, even though it has next to nothing behind it and I don't want to go anywhere near it -- and irresponsible because, if I do it in public, it'll give other people something to update on, even though it's little better than getting a percentage out of a random number generator.

I'm deliberately ignoring evidence that could be used to update because I don't think that I'm obligated to have an opinion on literally everything in the world. My time is better spent elsewhere. And I'm deliberately ignoring the non-trivial priors I would base a probability estimate on if I ended up in an absurd counterfactual world where I absolutely had to give one because they're a product of the environment in which I was raised, they're not old enough to be justified in the Burkean sense, and I don't think that the processes by which those environmental opinions are formed have anything more than the most tenuous connection to the actual truth, whatever it is.

Background reading: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes#mu

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[QUESTION]: What are your views on climate change, and how did you form them?

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[QUESTION]: What are your views on climate change, and how did you form them?

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