Preface: I’m skeptical in that I don’t believe that climate change is as big as it is claimed, and the currently proposed solutions are much more radical than actually necessary. So I “believe” the climate changes, and I even “believe” humans may play some part in that. But I don’t see it as any crisis that needs any urgent action. I am not here to argue, just to educate your tribe on who skeptics actually are.
I’ve seen lots of articles such as this one claiming they’ve found the magic solution on how to convince skeptics we’re somehow wrong.
Just so you know, you have not discovered a new magical solution.
The fundamental error your tribe makes is assuming that the other side isn’t educated, but that isn’t the case. In fact, skeptics know just as much if not more about climate science than warmists.
In case you dismiss this because it comes from Fox news (ad-hom is not a valid argument, btw), here is a link to the scientific paper the story is based upon, which will back the story up.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2459057
The second error you make is assuming we’re all evangelicals. So trotting out an evangelist scientist like Katherine Hayhoe actually only hurts your cause, because now you have veered away from science. She didn’t have the same scientific credibility as other warmist scientists like Michael Mann or Gavin Schmidt to begin with, so it only got worse from there.
It’s interesting how your tribe is quick to dismiss evangelical skeptical scientists for their religious beliefs, but when you find an evangelical scientist that agrees with you, you behave differently.
The third mistake you make is cherry-picking things like hurricanes as evidence of climate change. Cherry-picking is not good science. Did you know that prior to Harvey there was 10-year drought in hurricane landfalls? The CO2 and temperature were still high during that period, so the supposed “cause” of hurricanes was still there, yet we didn’t get any major ones hitting landfall in the US. Where were the articles then about this being evidence of not-climate-change? You didn’t see them, because that’s how cherry-picking works.
