Carl Sagan on Man made Climate Change - 1990
Carl Sagan on Man made Climate Change - 1990
An important part of a longer keynote speech, found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Xz3ZjOSMRU
This is from a time when there was trust in science, when it was revered. A time long ago.
Science should never be trusted. The whole point is that you can test it and verify it. Take nothing on trust or faith. Verify, verify, and verify with that scientific method.
Sure...but the tiny fraction of papers which claim that it's not a result of people dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are so riddled with errors that there's a survey paper describing the ways they go wrong. That's a situation you get after people are done testing and probing and looking for ways to prove the mainstream idea wrong. At which point, it's best to run with what's now known.
This is somewhat of a fallacy.
The body of knowledge, collectively referred to as science (not the scientific method itself), should indeed the testable. However, one cannot possibly have the time required in their lifetime to test the entire corpus. At some point you need to defer to experts in most fields.
I'm a geophysicist. I cannot even test the body of knowledge within my own field -- it is far too large. But from my own background and abilities, I can usually tell if something is legitimate or snake oil fairly quickly within the body of knowledge of my own field. I have to assume that fields outside of mine are going the same. If I don't, I become a crazy person.
“Every one of the things you would do to ameliorate [climate change] makes sense on completely separate grounds, they are worth doing apart from [climate change].”
[Sagan uses “greenhouse warming” in his keynote]