QUOTE(Herschelkrustofsky @ Fri 14th October 2011, 6:56pm)
QUOTE(radek @ Fri 14th October 2011, 4:06pm)
Here's the thing:
"scientists who truly believe in man-made global warming" = something like 90% of them. You gonna be generous, let's say 85%.
scientists that "recognize that they might be wrong" = this one's more of a guess. There really isn't much of a reason to doubt it, evidence wise. So, as a scientist, you'd really have to be an ultra-skeptic (and really, "recognizing you might be wrong" to a scientist would mean something like assessing the probability that one might be mistaken but nm). So out of that 85%, 90% probably don't see a need to doubt that they're wrong (not in any significant sense).
Any real scientist knows, from the history of science, that most theory will eventually be superseded by better theory. And any real scientist knows that this is not a typical scientific controversy -- there is a lot of political pressure, big bucks are involved, and there is a kind of McCarthyism afoot that demonizes the "deniers." Competent climatologists will tell you, in private, that all the theorizing is based on an extremely selective array of data, and that major factors, such as the influence of solar activity and cosmic radiation, are excluded from consideration, because that might undercut "the message."
"most theory will eventually be superseded by better theory" - that's actually almost a definition of science, except I'd replace the "most" with "all". That doesn't make existing theory "bad" or "useless" or even "wrong"
"big bucks are involved" - yes, but pretty much on the "denier" side. The "yes, it's happening, and yes it's human caused" side on the other hand is coming out pretty much from all quarters, even from, or even mostly from, people's who's financial rewards are not in any way tied to finding the "right result" - the same thing is not true for the "denier side", to the extent that it even still exists (15, maybe 10 years ago, there was still some question here, but not so much anymore).
"Competent climatologists will tell you, in private" - here we get into personal experience and anecdotes. In my experience what the "competent climatologists" say in private, over some drinks, is that yeah, sure, we don't know everything, but that all the data that exists points in one direction. You can always try to argue that since we don't know 100% for sure, we don't know. But in the real world, that's not a very good argument.