Looking back at the time when I was a believer, the biggest change was the way of thinking. Back in those days my thinking was rigid. Black and white. It certainly had to do with the claimed urgency and the noble cause. This made me rather intolerant towards those who had a different idea. Those were people who “denied” the situation, who were in the grip of Big Oil (or generally Big Industry). This is what I knew from my previous history of environmental concerns and projected this onto the current global warming theory.
My thoughts were that politicians, the Government, had to fix the issue and was prepared on cutting back, was prepared to sacrifice considerably economically and in comfort. That was certainly the result of the “noble cause”-thinking. If the issue is so important and so urgent as propagated, then sacrificing something was not a problem, even a sense of duty, something we have to do.
But it was not really thinking, it was believing. I believed what the scientists in the media were saying. I believed the science was clear and settled. I didn’t look at it, I believed scientists did this for me. There was an alleged consensus and I was perfectly happy with that. More, I thought it was a good base for urgent policies.
It is hard to admit, but at that time I admired Al Gore. Although I was thinking that his film (The Inconvenient Truth) would certainly exaggerating things, I was of the opinion that his efforts on climate were nevertheless highly admirable. I thought the end justified the means. To be honest, he is thinking that also. He believes that it is appropriate to over-represent his case in order to let the people listen to his preconceived solution. And exaggerating he does!
The switch occurred when I realized that the stories I was told didn’t add up. It surprised me how small the base was for those claims. How emotionally based the message was.
Consensus doesn’t necessarily mean something is true. If the argument relies on a consensus it means it was not possible to unequivocally demonstrate the truth. I was surprised to find out that this “consensus” was an opinion, not a scientific fact. That was what I believed: that climate scientists, who examined the issue methodically, found clear-cut evidence that proved the urgency. But that seemed not be the case. The evidence is based on statistics, assumptions, scarce data, but above all on the result on climate models. The more I looked at the showed “evidence”, the more I noticed that especially the outcome of the climate models was taken as reality.
It was very strange to realize my thinking made a u-turn and to my big surprise I found myself in the opposite camp. To be honest, it is not a very comfortable position on the other side of the debate, yet it is the side I want to be on.
Trust, yet verify 