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Originally Posted by OLD BOY
I take their health advice with a pinch of salt as well. Advising people to cut calories rather than carbohydrates, advising that certain foods are bad for you, then changing their minds some 30 years later and admitting that their advice actually caused health problems....the examples are endless.
Don't get me wrong, we should take notice of what scientists say, but then apply the common sense test.
I don't know what you mean by testing climate theory. There are too many variables as to how climate works for anyone to be sure, and climate models are designed with certain assumptions added in which might be false. Rubbish in, rubbish out, as they say.
Climatologists have been caught out a few times about their alarmist predictions and we need to think about these things before we blindly accept what they say. I'd like to be able to believe scientists without question, but I'm afraid they no longer have my trust.
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A lot of this is failure of science communication rather than science itself. It's not glamorous to talk about p-values and error bars so information is given in absolutes rather than certainties and ranges and this can lead to misleading conclusions. If you read the underlying reports, there are loads of uncertainties reported but these rarely get into the public domain. For example, look at the graphs from a recent IPCC report here -
https://www.ipcc.ch/srocc/chapter/su...-policymakers/
Common sense is good filter but it should be backed up by good data and even then surprises can pop up