Hi Tom,
Déjà vu - we've been here before, I think! ;-)
Your premise makes perfect sense and I'd happily sign up to 100% - but for one fatal flaw in its logic. Namely, that some aspects of the science relating to climate change is - as far as a layman like me is able to ascertain - empirical fact that no scientists anywhere disagree with. Namely, as the two learned gentlemen in the respective videos point out, Co2 and temperature have a logarithmic relationship so that an increase of X number parts per million of Co2 does not cause a corresponding increase in temperature. That assumes of course that Co2 causes temperature to rise in the first place (which some scientists dispute). The analogy of painting the barn red illustrates this point very vividly. So, what I want to know is this: where are the climate change scientists that say this isn't true and that the correlation between Co2 and temperature is in fact linear and not logarithmic? As far as I can tell there are none, and the only reason for that that I can see is that this is indeed 'settled' science and no one with a shred of credibility would question it any more than they would that night follows day or that the earth is round and not flat. Just ignoring this 'inconvenient truth' because it negates the whole climate change narrative is as ridiculous as it is bizarre. For this reason, in this specific context, I'm afraid I can't subscribe to your premise.
Tim.
Hey Tim -
Yes indeed, we've been here before.
But my question is on the justification in general for lay people to disagree with specialists. If there were 100 specialists in a room and 51 held the opinion that A=X and 49 said that A=Y, I'd go with the 51.
I'd still do that even when some lay people and some of the 49 in A=Y faction said that the 51 had used inappropriate methodology: because obviously the 51 don't believe they made such an error.
I can only promise that when (or do I mean if?) the majority of the world's scientists say this climate change theory is all a hoax, I will agree with them.