This is a very dangerous attitude. There's a huge stigma against questioning global warming claims because skepticism has been associated with simple-minded denial, conservative ignorance and because "Duh global warming's happening".
It's not skepticism, it's gullibility.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away?
It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because
it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a
number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something
must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why
something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to
Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated
the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that.
We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that
kind of a disease.
WRONG!
In science it is acceptable to be wrong. There is no direct stigma attached to overruling a previous theory (like the models of the atom! Also luminiferous aether!). The stigma is attached to not carefully and meticulously evaluating evidence to be sure it was correct. Milikan ran the experiment with enough methodology to get pretty good results when there were no results before. To undermine his accomplishment because he wasn't right enough is like undermining the work of Eratosthenes because the Earth is oblong and not a perfect sphere.
When the answer is "duh, global warming" it becomes very difficult to think/show/publish otherwise which further perpetuates the stigma. For people who understand this susceptibility, it only makes the claims harder to believe because they, in fact, hold less value.
No actually, there are genuine scientific skeptics of the theory that humans are causing global warming. The theory proposed is called
cosmic ray forcing.
It is a weak theory because it has very little real evidence, but you don't see it shot down when people suggest it because it implies they actually know a thing or two about climate science. Mostly because they don't suggest dumb shit like the sun or equivalent garbage (we just connect the dots on a graph when we do mathematical models, right?).
It's shunned to use your, "common sense" in science because it's wrong, a lot. It often comes down to people outright
not knowing basic science but then declaring a very complex and evidenced theory to be false.
The equivalent here is declaring with fervor that Einstein was wrong because he didn't account for gravity. Yes, you would get laughed at for that.
My point is not to harp on global warming, but to say that we should never make skepticism taboo. Global climate is an enormously complex system. If every climate scientist in the world agreed that in 50 years the world with freeze over, I would believe them, but I would not be the least bit surprised if they turned out to be wrong.
There are real skeptics, but it's being used as a buzzword to manipulate people into thinking their often rather uneducated position is reasonable, and that without knowing anything much about
basic science, they know with certainty that they are in the right.
We don't call that skepticism, we call that gullibility.
How about some skepticism for your current position please? As Tempz stated, there there is a lag time between CO
2 and subsequent rise in global warming. Yet earlier in the thread he stated that a drop in CO
2 production after WWII led to a cooling of the Earth in the 70's and 80's. So what is that little dip in the graph and what does it mean? Why do scientists and experts still advocate that the Earth is warming even with a lag time? And what about that correlation doesn't mean causality thing?
Clearly all good questions brought about by skepticism.
For those that think you are quite well educated in the ways of climate science, and that your position in the face of a large majority of experts is definitely right, ever hear of the
11 year solar cycle or the
El Niņo-Southern Oscillation? How about that methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide?
None.