I once met an engineer who thought climate change isn’t man made because the earth just does that sometimes, like when the ice age ended.
I mean, it does, but the signal looks totally different. It’s crazy that people with a little bit of knowledge can look at something like that and think “the experts who spend their whole lives thinking about this have probably never considered this thing I just found on Google!”
Yeah, it wasn’t the fact that such a cycle exists that was ridiculous, it was that it never occurred to him that maybe all of the climate scientists know about that cycle and took it into account.
Physicists are the worst with this, in my experience–even worse than engineers. They think that because their work is “more fundamental” than that of the special sciences and their models are more wide-ranging, they’re qualified to evaluate all other scientific work. Lots of physisicsts–even very good ones–turn climate crank in their old age.
I once met an engineer who thought climate change isn’t man made because the earth just does that sometimes, like when the ice age ended.
I mean, it does, but the signal looks totally different. It’s crazy that people with a little bit of knowledge can look at something like that and think “the experts who spend their whole lives thinking about this have probably never considered this thing I just found on Google!”
Yeah, it wasn’t the fact that such a cycle exists that was ridiculous, it was that it never occurred to him that maybe all of the climate scientists know about that cycle and took it into account.
Physicists are the worst with this, in my experience–even worse than engineers. They think that because their work is “more fundamental” than that of the special sciences and their models are more wide-ranging, they’re qualified to evaluate all other scientific work. Lots of physisicsts–even very good ones–turn climate crank in their old age.
Reminds me of that youtuber Sabine Hofstadter or whatever her name is.
Yeah, she’s a big one. Freeman Dyson, Fred Singer, and Fred Seitz too. It’s weirdly common.