HOW TO HAVE A DISCUSSION WITH A SKEPTIC
If you are like me, some of the people with whom you interact may have quite different views from yours regarding the effect human activities have on our climate and, more generally, on the global environment. Some of them are skeptical in the true sense of the word but most are, for understandable reasons, in various stages of denial.
There is nothing new or particularly revealing about the above. However, I have found that a gentle persuasion via the use of small nudgings can be more productive than any amount of grandstanding or lofty pronouncements. Earlier this week, however,r I discovered a trenchant piece in Scientific American that I urge all to read. For me, it effectively encapsulates the consilience* of evidence we should use in any discussions with a skeptic...or denier.
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*There: I got to use that terrific word I learned from this article.
Here is a snippet from the article's most powerful paragraph; for copyright reasons I'll let you upload the rest of the article as the subsequent two paragraphs join the first in the most prominent place in my office bulletin board.
From Why Climate Skeptics are Wrong, or Why Climate Skeptics are Wrong By Michael Sherman on December 1, 2015
...there is a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry—pollen, tree rings, ice cores, corals, glacial and polar ice-cap melt, sea-level rise, ecological shifts, carbon dioxide increases, the unprecedented rate of temperature increase—that all converge to a singular conclusion. AGW doubters point to the occasional anomaly in a particular data set, as if one incongruity gainsays all the other lines of evidence. But that is not how consilience science works. For AGW skeptics to overturn the consensus, they would need to find flaws with all the lines of supportive evidence andshow a consistent convergence of evidence toward a different theory that explains the data.
Source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-climate-skeptics-are-wrong/
