What if the world isn’t getting warmer? What if its getting warmer, but its a completely natural process over which we have no control? What if it is indeed a conspiracy of bureaucrats and climatologists working to advance their careers, either maliciously or perfectly innocently (but misled regardless)?

It wouldn’t be the first time science has been totally wrong about something. Sometimes the evidence for a phenomenon or its explanation is so reasonable, so compelling, that it dovetails so well with what we know or believe or want to believe, that we simply get it wrong.

There are a lot of reasons for this. Sometimes it just overwhelms us so we interpret every bit of contradictory information incorrectly, confirmation bias takes over, with its allies of cherry-picking, taking things out of context, misinterpreting the obvious, intimidation by the pronouncements of respected authorities, and so on.

And it isn’t just the non-scientist who is to blame. There are respected, otherwise perfectly orthodox investigators who don’t believe an asteroid took out the dinosaurs, who don’t believe in the expanding universe or the Big Bang, and who are convinced that the supposedly distant quasars are actually small objects ejected from our own galaxy’s nucleus. When I was in high school, the number of human chromosomes was not known accurately, and plate tectonics was dismissed as a fantasy, even though today the “truth” seems obvious. And in the past, there are endless examples of when the obvious scientific explanation just turned out to be dead wrong. A lot of scientific issues today are far from settled, and there are violent controversies, debates, competing schools of thought, even fashions among professionals. And of course, in the non-physical and social sciences, conflict and disagreement among practitioners is the rule, not the exception. Who takes anything psychologists, economists and political scientists say seriously? Its not that these people are fools, its just that what they study is so much more complex and there is no accepted investigative methodology. (Regardless of their claims there is!)

When you get right down to it, there is no way you can say anything is certain, or not biased by perception and preconception, even in consensus in peer-reviewed published results of legitimate experiments and observations. All you can really do is (arbitrarily) assign a probability to an outcome, and you must always retain an atom of skepticism, and an open mind. Remember, even the atomic theory may be undoubtedly correct, but what it has evolved into, Quantum Theory, is almost unrecognizable in comparison. The same can be said about Newton and Einstein, or Lamarck and Darwin. And sometimes (as I personally believe in the case of biological evolution) the current paradigm may not necessarily be wrong, but may be only a piece of the whole picture. Too many sacred cows (like conservation of matter and energy) have been gored for us to think there aren’t any others just waiting to be carved up. “The universe is not just stranger than we think, it’s stranger than we CAN think.”

No, I am convinced that global warming is real, and that its causes are human industrial and agricultural activity–indirectly the result of overpopulation. I can’t be certain, of course, just as this old atheist can’t be absolutely certain that there is no god. But I accept those truths with a high probability of certainty. I am also highly (but not totally) certain that the opponents to my beliefs about AGW are motivated primarily by ideological and economic prejudices, not by legitimate scientific skepticism. There is just too much of a correlation between what they want to believe and what they actually believe for me to accept their arguments, and when they apply that same logic to my convictions I simply am not convinced by their sincerity or their honesty.

That is not proof. They probably say the same about me. Perhaps there will never be proof, at least not in our lifetime. But the probabilities are all I have to go on. When you get right down to it, there is so little, if anything, we can say we truly know, or how, or why we know it.