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Claims that the "the science isn't settled" with regard to climate change are symptomatic of a large body of ignorance about how science works.
The first thing to understand is that there is no one method in science, no one way of doing things. This is intimately connected with how we reason in general.
[...] Those who demand the science be "settled" before we take action are seeking deductive certainty where we are working inductively. And there are other sources of confusion.
One is that simple statements about cause and effect are rare since nature is complex. For example, a theory might predict that X will cause Y, but that Y will be mitigated by the presence of Z and not occur at all if Q is above a critical level. To reduce this to the simple statement "X causes Y" is naive.
Another is that even though some broad ideas may be settled, the details remain a source of lively debate. For example, that evolution has occurred is certainly settled by any rational account. But some details of how natural selection operates are still being fleshed out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 16 2016, @05:54PM
Most social scientists need to be taught what the scientific method is, and most journalists as well. We've seen countless times how social science studies claim to be able to measure people's emotions only to find out that they conducted a mere survey, seen studies that claimed that violent video games increased aggression only to find out that the social scientists used their own arbitrary definition of "aggression" and disregarded real-world results and statistics, seen studies reach a particular conclusion only to find out that there are countless conclusions that could be reached from their vague data, etc. There's a serious lack of rigor in the social sciences that's even more prevalent than in other fields.
Journalists love the social sciences because their subjective, largely unscientific nature allows them to easily push an agenda. Too many times we've seen journalists aggressively cite new studies that just came out and acted as if the debate was over, even though those new studies had yet to be replicated and no scientific consensus on the matter had yet been reached. Instead of caring about actual science, they care about playing the 'citation game' where truth is set aside as an irrelevancy. Oftentimes, the studies the journalists cite don't even reach the conclusions they claim they do, or aren't as rigorous as they claim they are. This leads to some people getting misled by ignorant or dishonest journalists who appear to be speaking with authority because they're supposedly just reporting on a study.