I spent years doubting the science of climate change and spending time with people who didn’t believe in the science either.
When I realised I was wrong, I felt really embarrassed.
To move away from those people meant leaving behind an entire community at a time when I didn’t have many friends.
I went through a really difficult time. But the truth matters.
I’m the granddaughter of coal miners in Pennsylvania and my family moved to Florida when I was young.
We have a Polish Catholic background and we attended church regularly, but at the same time we were very connected to science because my mum was a nurse and my dad sold microscopes and other scientific equipment.
TBF there are a lot of unintuitive things going on with the science of climate change, such as the precise role of greenhouse gas absorption/emission spectra in trapping heat, that even with a strong general science background it’s not immediately obvious what the driving factors are.
Add to that the (deliberate) but plausible sounding misinformation and you have a deadly cocktail of not quite correct pseudoscience to drown in.
I understand being a climate skeptic, up until a certain point in time. There were still a lot of things that were unlocked and the reporting was muddled and there was lots of conflicting information floating and even in supposedly well informed publications. But there really is no excuse after 2004 or so.
There really isn’t even as far back as the 70s. The models weren’t as good back then but the conclusions remain essentially unchanged.
I agree with you. In fact we had important data about this going back to the early 1900s.
But convincing people of it back then was tough going. Even scientists. It only really started being obviously undeniable (which is a higher bar than merely very likely) in the early 1990s. And we didn’t always do a very good job selling it to be honest.
But science isn’t intuition-based. It often comes to conclusions that are far from intuitive.