Science and Inquiry discussion

I am in agreement with the majority of the scientific community, that climate change is real. The other day, while talking with a guy at dinner, he announced that climate change is just a hoax.

My hackles went up when I heard this pronouncement. So, I countered, "then how do you explain the melting of the Arctic ice cap?" This didn't bother him at all. But it bothers me, as I've had personal connections with experiments that showed, unequivocally, that the temperature of the Arctic Ocean is rising. In fact, the rate of rising temperatures in the Arctic is much faster than other oceans..

So, how do you go about dealing with such people? Do you throw more arguments at them? Do you think of some way to seed some doubts into their consciousness? Or do you shrug it off, as they are not going to be convinced by any rational argument?

Hey, David. I know exactly this feeling and had this type of conversations with family members not only on climate change but on topics like COVID vaccines, health and medicine, politics, economics, and more. Those discussions frequently escalate and (especially with the COVID discussions, a lot of pro and antivaxers in my family) I felt like they started to affect my relationships.

it's weird that I can control myself from not getting involved in heated discussions with strangers, I'm able to actually hear them out and make an effort to understand their points and why they believe what they believe. But it's harder for me to do it with family members, I think the reason behind it is that there's a lot more things involved in a discussion than just seeking the truth. People build identities around their points of view, independently if they may be right or wrong, so it's hard to convince them of something because we're also attacking in a way their identity.

In my case, I try to do what I do with strangers: hear them out and ask them as many questions as I need to understand why they believe what they believe. It's important to be genuine here. Not everything that they say will be completely wrong, I've had great learning experiences in situations like these. When they see that you're interested in what they have to say they also open up more and they will hear your questions, and maybe even open up to also hear your points and consider them more seriously. When they start asking you questions about your point of view, that's when you know they have opened enough to be receptive.

You won't convince someone that doesn't want to get convinced. I've learned this in a lot of heated arguments, but maybe the questioning and the open conversations could start to sow seeds of doubt into their thoughts and only progressively will you make them change their minds. I'm not saying that you should make this your goal, but I guess this is a viable way into these sort of things happening. Happy to hear your thoughts!

As long as you are armed with data, at a high level, using their own "evidence" to ask them questions and framing your question so that they end up contradicting their own conclusions is great way. Kind of like judo: use their own energy against them. But that's easier said than done.

As with all debates, sticking only to data is easier with strangers than it is with family/friends (blame hormones, emotions), and one method is to be prepared to respond to their talking points, which, if they're not science-minded (they usually aren't), is usually a well-known list of items. If you can get them to buy into a premise or two (agree that the climate is warming, for example), then they'll be more receptive to your points.

Common refrain: "The earth has always had these cycles, it's natural."
--reply: sure, but human society with all our cities and infrastructure and environmental conditions weren't around 50K years ago. It matters what happens now .

"More CO2 is actually good for the planet. It makes plants grow."
--reply: in closed environments plant growth increases in the short term but in the real world other variables such as nitrogen content in the soil do not result in higher growth rates.

Etc

This is a case that benefits from looking backwards. There are at least a dozen, sizable, well documented change events during the 19th and 20th centuries that collectively help solve, or at least show the way to resolution. Cherry picking and algamation is allowed. Expanding your collection of change events to non western cultures and earlier-in-time, where archeological and anthropological-based narratives are available will greatly improve capability to persuade sceptics and help you better understand patterns of behavior.

Here are easy examples:

1) There was widespread opposition by heads-of-households to moving the toilet inside the house when indoor plumbing became available. How did lower status household members convince household leadership to change? Was local or state government agencies involved? Any help from the church? What was the role of peer pressure or neighborhood gossip?

2) How about the US's early WWII non-belligerency policy and widespread isolationist mentality? How was this overcome? What was the impact of recruiting strong regional and national leadership? Any help from churches? Journalism? Music and other popular culture?How much time did the change require?

3) How about the large-scale changes during the 1970s and 1980s regarding changing industrial / individual behavior waste disposal methods resulting in the assessment, and mitigation of land, groundwater, and surface water pollution? Was there opposition to change? How long did the change take? What factors produced the change?

Can you identify a couple of relevant historical change events to help map a favorable path forward and mitigate the sparking of civil, community, and family misunderstanding /trouble?

I is extremely frustrating and I think very dangerous that issues such as climate change and Covid are turned into left/right political issues. I mean, I’m definitely a libertarian fiscal conservative, but any dope can see that the world is getting warmer, icecaps are melting, and 9 billion people all using resources from cell phones to woodstoves to airplanes are not doing our environment any good (duh!)
Sadly we have found that we can’t “trust the science,” as often the science we are presented with is contaminated by little things like,say, patents on vaccines, research grants, bribes, um I mean “donations” from powerful special interests, etc. So if we bother to take any stance at all, we are forced to use our own judgement and form conclusions based on our own logic and the information we can scrape together. And let’s face it, most of us ain’t all that smart, nor do we necessarily have access to relevant information. I mean, who woulda thunk that the American taxpayer was finding research to CREATE (not just study) a virus made in a lab in of all places Red China? I mean, to me this just sounds like the plot of an outrageous movie….

Although, peoples' response to change can probably be plotted as a spectrum, I suspect it would mostly look like a dumbbell. What were the factors that smoothed out that dumbbell shape into more of a true spectrum for past change events. One place to look is how did the youth of the late 1960s and early 1970s successfully change American society (and government leadership) to agree on retreating from the Vietnam War? This action occurred despite opposition by many parents of injured and killed children who viewed retreat as a waste of their sacrifice. Not to mention opposition from business people who had vested interest in the military industrial complex.

Everything I have read shows that facts don't seem to change people's minds. I'm not sure what does. We need some new ideas and tactics because time is running out, if it hasn't already.

Nancy wrote: "...Sadly we have found that we can’t “trust the science,” as often the science we are presented with is contaminated by little things like,say, patents on vaccines, research grants, bribes, um I mean “donations” from powerful special interests, etc. ..."

I agree to some extent, but I think the biggest problem is we can't trust SCIENCE REPORTING. All too often I've looked up studies & found the conclusions reported weren't what they'd actually found but were outlying possibilities mentioned that were more dramatic or incorrectly simplified.

As a science writer (reporter) I found Jim's comment to be sad but somewhat true. I personally always read (as best I can) the research I'm reporting on, and I write my articles based on my interviews and my reading of the paper. I do not write from a press release. On at least a couple occasions I got some pressure from editors to frame the story in a way that I did not believe, and when that happened I said no. However, there are circumstances that give me more freedom to say no. I am a freelancer, I write mostly for less visible publications, and usually do not write on extremely tight deadlines. Staff writers, or writers with a larger audience, or writers who have to put together a story very quickly, may find it harder to write a thoughtful story, and such writers may succumb to "science by press release." (On the other hand, there are also lots of really outstanding science writers out there, and you should look for them.)

I don't necessarily blame "science writers" for poor reporting on scientific findings. Often (usually?) the fault lies in nonscientific, headline seeking writers who report on what the science writers wrote. Not only is the information dumbed down in each step of popularization, but sometime facetious comments are misreported.

An extreme, but illustrative anecdote, a vague recollection of an early lesson about the reliability of reporting, was a science article in a magazine that ended with the facetious line, "Of course, it could have been aliens." Soon after, that was popularized as an actual possibility in the nightly news in the 1970s. I suspect someone was trying to fill space, skimmed the article, & tossed it out there only to have it snatched up by the popular imagination of the time. "Chariot of the Gods" & "Encounters of the Third Kind" were popular.