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Scott Adams
(I think he is wrong about what most climate skeptics are thinking. It seems to me more of a selective reading thing; if the media you see tells you that it's fiercely debated, you're going to think it's fiercely debated by default, rather than know enough to look up the actual state of the field.)
My personal experience is that I've mostly seen two main camps of climate skepticism, both of which seem to map to contrarian sophistication levels. I don't see many people who are operating at level 2 and climate skeptics.
The first is the 'uneducated' critique, that nature is simply too big and variable for man to impact the climate, be sure he's impacting the climate, or have a desired climate reference level. This seems to mostly be out of touch with the data / scientific reasoning in general, but does fit into Adams's claim; one of the reasons why someone might disbelieve claims that we're sure about the causality and predictions is an overall poor track record of science. In this particular field, for example, some predictions of global cooling were made before, and people who value consistency more than correctness are upset by that. (It's worth pointing out that many people do give the argument "you're able to predict what the climate will look like in 80 years but you aren't able to predict what the weather will look like in 8 days?" despite the inherent difference between climate and weather, but that's mostly unrelated to Adams's point.)
The second is the 'meta-contrarian' critique, that pokes at the incentives of climate science, the difficulties of modeling, and the desirability of change. As an exercise in scientific number-crunching, climate predictions are very difficult and in a class of models where many tunable parameters can be adjusted to get highly variable results. Most of our understanding of how the climate will behave depends on the underlying feedback loops, and it seems that positive feedback loops (i.e. the temperature increases, which changes things so that temperatures continue to increase) are more publicized than negative feedback loops (i.e. the temperature increases, which changes things so that temperatures stop increasing). There's also evidence that the net effect of climate change will be positive until it's negative, suggesting that stopping change down the road would actually be better than stopping change now (if it were equally costly to stop change now and then).
(Note that both of those camps basically disagree with climatology as a field, for different reasons, and neither of them buy into the central premises of climatology but interpret the data differently.)
/waves
Hello from the second camp :-)
There the xkcd comic asking regarding the moon landing: "If NASA were willing to fake great accomplishments, they'd have a second one by now."
It's mean, but given the fake NASA discovery that "expands the definition of life" it's funny. At a time where jokes like that can be made, there's really question where the trust is supposed to come from.
Do you mean the reports of life able to survive in high arsenic environments? In that context it may be important to note that that was poorly done science not deliberate fakery. It is pretty difficult to fake landing on the Moon out of sheer incompetence.
Yes, but incompetence still doesn't encourage general trust in science and NASA should have known better than to announce the bacteria that supposedly live in high arsenic enviroments as a discovery that "expands the definition of life" at a big press conference.
I can easily understand how someone could consider everything NASA (or technologists generally) claims to do as being faked. Everything they claim to do is really hard to verify for almost anyone. And, a lot of it might actually be easier to pull off by faking it – CGI is pretty impressive nowadays and it's not that hard to believe that a lot of images and even video are manipulated or even generated from whole cloth.
If you had to verify, personally, that the ESA actually controlled a spacecraft that orbited a comet, etc., how would you do it? Myself, I accept that I'm really trusting a network of people and that I can't practically verify almost anything I'm told.
Good question. Intercepting the data stream sent back from the spacecraft would probably be possible (direct imaging at that range isn't in the cards), but it would take some rather sensitive equipment. It might be possible to find amateur astronomers who tracked it during its launch or during its flybys of Earth in 2005, 2007, and 2009, though, and derive a trajectory from that; it's not "personal", but if you don't trust that kind of data, you'd be getting far into conspiracy-theory territory.
That'd only get you so far, though. Rosetta's flight plan was pretty complicated and included both several gravity-assist flybys and maneuvers under its own power, so if you doubt ESA's ability to do anything other than get mass near the comet, that'd be tricky to verify.
ETA: Googled "amateur spacecraft tracking" and found a response to almost precisely this question. Turns out there are a few amateur groups with the resources to find the carrier signals from deep-space probes. They even have a Yahoo group.
Great response. You're not fully resolving the potential skepticism I identified, but that's impossible anyways. What should be ultimately convincing is that good theories generate good predictions, and you should expect good theories to be connected to other good theories.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of people are firmly in "conspiracy-theory territory" already and aren't consistently testing their beliefs. I can sympathize because I know I spend a lot of time generating and trusting weak theories about, e.g. other people's motivations, my likely performance on a particular project.
In 2010 NASA hold a press conference that they made a discovery that supposedly expands the definition of life. Today the consensus among scientists seems to be that the finding is bullshit.
While incompetence is likely the better explanation than malice, it's still a fake.
The point is that the network you are trusting was likely wrong about a big discovery that NASA claimed to have made in this decade. Maybe even the biggest claimed discovery of NASA in this decade.
I have no idea exactly what network Kenny trusts how much, but just about everything I read about NASA's alleged discovery was really skeptical about it and said "yeah, this would be amazingly cool if it were true, but don't hold your breath until it's been confirmed by more careful investigation". And, lo, it was not confirmed by more careful investigation, and now everyone thinks it was probably bullshit.
Much the same story for superluminal neutrinos (more so than the arsenic-using life) and CMB polarization due to inflation (less so than the arsenic-using life).
In the case of the neutrinos the announcement there was much more skepticism on the part of the people who made the discovery.
Yup, but I don't think that's relevant to how reliable the people Kenny trusts to tell him about scientific research are.
In the case of superluminal neutrinos, pretty much nobody including the people who made the announcement believed it; and the real announcement was more along the lines of "we've got some problematic data here; and we can't find our mistake. Does anyone see what we've done wrong?"
Good point. But my trusting a network of people, or really many (overlapping) networks of people, doesn't mean that I trust every specific claim or theory or piece of information. It just means that I've learned that they're overall trustworthy, or trustworthy to a specific (perhaps even quantifiable) extent, or maybe only trustworthy for certain kinds of claims or theories or information.