How to (Not) Understand Climate Change

Looking through these two websites (Friends of Science & How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic) was incredibly frustrating. The more I read on either site, the angrier I became, until I finally had to set down the computer and come back to it later. Both websites were incredibly biased, neither seemed credible, and all their arguments were very weak.

It's no wonder there's so much confusion out there regarding climate change science. People can post anything on the web. There are no editors or publishers to filter what is being sent out to the public. Moreover, there is so much data out there about climate change that it is near impossible to understand it all, let alone include it all in analysis to figure out how it fits together.

So, websites such as these have the ability to choose the data that supports their views to include in their arguments. Moreover, they get to interpret much of the data they choose as they wish. So much of the data presented is so confusing that people are likely to believe what someone who seems "expert" tells them it means (not that I think either seems expert, but they sure have expert sounding titles). But even their expert explanations weren't very clear; in some of the articles I read I couldn't figure out what they were trying to say.

Both websites talk a lot about correlations between different changes in the earth and different factors that could be causing it. These correlations are probably convincing to a lot of the public who don't understand the idea that correlation is not causation. In the end, I didn't feel like there was a lot of conclusive evidence on either site.

Not that all this confusion is entirely the fault of the creators of these websites. The earth is currently changing in so many ways, was that we can't really understand. The causes of these changes are probably many, and may include sort of chain reactions. The causes certainly aren't simple enough to encompass in a single platform for a website. For example, in the About Us section of the Friends of Science website, they state their opinion as follows:

Our Opinion:

It is our opinion that the Sun is the main direct and indirect driver of climate change.

I'm not even sure what this means. The factors playing into climate change are much too complex to whittle down into a single sentence. The arguments on both sites seemed very simplified, and not in a way that made anything more clear to their audiences. Their arguments were just jumbled and juvenile.

Climate science is confusing. Although I'm not sure how we can reconcile the different ideas presented on these websites, they are certainly not the way to educate the public about climate change. Instead of having so many deep set opinions, I think that people who are analyzing climate data should have more open minds and be willing to admit that they don't understand everything. Instead of working against each other, the creators of websites like these would be better off to work together. Maybe then we'd figure something out.