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As an aside, I still think chess fits. I don't even think we know how many games of chess are possible. Humans recently approximated a Go engine - something people long claimed was too complex to ever be done, much like chess. Models + compute can beat humans at games of unimaginable complexity.
Regardless, even if chess is a bad analogy, admitting that doesn't gets me out special pleading that climate science is not only special in its complexity, but also special in that thousands of people with PhD's, from Montana to Mongolia, overwhelmingly agree that its possible to model climate usefully.
What reason do I have to disbelieve climate science that doesn't also apply to designing bleeding edge microchips, or medicine, or applied physics, or the improvements seen in weather forecasting? I'm trying to argue myself into climate science skepticism inductively and/or by way of inferences. A strong quantitative scientific consensus about cause and effect is usually a good bet. What makes climate science different?
The only thing I can come up with is that climate science is more akin to a year-long weather forecast (ie cannot be computed in P time because well understood chaotic conditions). But then why do such a large amount knowledgeable keep spending money on the practical applicability of climate models? I'm back at special pleading that science is a liar in this case in particular.
Well, they have a vested interest in it, no?
that they at least produce the predicted results, be it a bleeding edge chip or a failed attempt at one, weather forecasting as I see it isn't much better than an old man and bad knees.
That is trying to understand a really complex system, that a myriad of special interest have their hands in all kinds of places, and that the system as such began a long long time ago and we don't know much about that period.
not this case in particular, you can add Psychology with its replication crisis to the pile and whatever the COVID clusterfuck was.
This was a common sentiment back when I was growing up in the 90s. Even back then, it was a silly sentiment and wrong, though it wasn't completely wrong, but it's certainly completely wrong today. Even since the 90s to today, weather forecasting has improved substantially. This makes sense, because there's a ton of money to be made by forecasting weather slightly better than the competition. Weather drives energy usage patterns to a significant extent - think air conditioning and heating - and being able to predict those patterns more accurately than someone else allows one to make bets on the energy markets (things like electricity, nat gas, coal, oil) to make more money. An old man with bad knees and a team of professional meteorologists both get things wrong from time to time, but how often they get things wrong and how severely they get things wrong are very very different these days.
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Actually, we do! Antarctic ice-cores let us get a surprising amount of information about the climate of the earth in the past. Similarly, other fields can tell us really interesting things as well - if you encounter lots of fossils of creatures that only lived in tropical rainforests in a place that is now a desert, that is useful information. Similarly, noticing lots of aquatic/fish fossils on ground that's above the waterlevel can tell you things as well. There's a vast wealth of information about the past available to modern scientific inquiry.
I personally believe in global warming - I can't see any other reasonable conclusion when you look over the data we have available to us. Historical changes in temperature and the association with atmospheric carbon dioxide seem fairly undeniable at this point. I don't think that climate change is going to cause Venus Earth or the end of the world, it is going to have a significant impact on human society due to how dependent we are upon the climate as it stands. There will be winners and losers, but at the same time I highly doubt anything is going to actually fix it - there are too many economic, political and military incentives to burn fossil fuels, and most of the current proposals from the left to deal with the problem essentially boil down to letting Goldman Sachs make more money while limousine liberals pay large sums of money to try and avoid facing up to their own massive contributions to the issue.
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This is practically a definition for 'science'.
This is largely true for most fields of science.
Similarly, this is also true for most of science.
I can't find anything that makes these arguments apply to climate science, but not biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, etc.
Eg. Do we really know bacteria cause disease? Researches have a vested interest in continued research, but the proposed mechanisms are beyond complex, based on biology that began over a billion years ago.
Apparently climate models have been, on average, predictive. But this is not the kind of inductive claim I'm searching for.
Apparently, these are accurate 75% of the time inside of 5 days. This would be easy to disprove. Again, not an inductive claim. As an aside, if interested I'd be willing to bet money that weather forecasts are about as accurate as 30 sec. of googling led me to believe they are.
I'm extremely mindful of this regarding climate policy.
The observable defining line between Science and "science" is that the former confines itself to areas that can be thoroughly and rigorously mapped, and the latter does not. Climate is plausibly across the line to intractably complex.
If you're of the view that physics is the only science worth of the name, perhaps. It's absolutely not the case for biology. If you could see from the inside what a mess taxonomy is, to mention one subfield...
Retinas and neurons and rattlesnake venom are real things, and they have been mapped thoroughly and rigorously enough that we can engineer off them. Oedipal complexes and Systemic Racism and restorative justice are not real things, but rather figments of the imagination.
I wish I'd saved a copy of the article I read once, where a scientist talked about how he'd pioneered his particular field for two decades, had testified before congress about his research, and now was confronted with solid evidence that nothing he'd been studying in all that time had actually existed. His candor made me presume that he himself was honest, that the error had not been intentional... but at that scale, it hardly matters. If you fuck up that badly, if your entire field fucks up that badly, if multiple independent fields can fuck up that badly for that long, then the project is beyond salvage. Especially when the fuckups are not random, but correlate strongly with social and political trends of the moment.
So no, we should not treat science or scientists with respect. We should not believe that fucking studies show. We should demand rock-hard evidence that is ready to engineer off of. If they cannot provide this, the null hypothesis should be that they are lying to us. If they can, we should be skeptical that they are lying to us very well. When the engineering hits mass production, we can maybe relax our skepticism.
I've had a similar idea bouncing around my head for a while, though I never expressed it. Is this your formulation, or did you get it from somewhere? It feels so obvious it would a bit shocking if no one else talked about it.
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This could be said in response to innumerable scientific claims. Climate science is plausibly knowable enough to model well. But I'm not making any claims what climate science says. I'm asking what, at a general level, is unique to climate science that garners a special amount of skepticism?
Its association with sweeping claims of the impending end of the world, something many people have come around to view with suspicion, and its use as justification for policies that cause visible economic harm in exchange for invisible climate benefits.
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