That is the insidious nature of being uneducated or ignorant in a heavy science subject. I'm fairly well educated, and had a meteorological related job for many years, and I still have a hard time parsing many of these papers. So my options are:
A. Spend huge amounts of time learning the heavy math involved
B. Find someone else who seems educated enough, and trust their ELI5
C. Make my own conclusions based on an imperfect understanding of the science
D. Make my own conclusions based on experience and whatever knowledge I have at the moment
Now I do understand enough about atmospheric dynamics to know, at a high level, that human induced climate change is occuring, why it's happening, and some fuzzy understanding of some of the effects we will see. But I don't think a generic USA highschool level education will be able to inform people enough to have the same understanding, which is why we are in this boat. It seems mostly the people who really understand the what/when/why/how of the situation are STEM field graduates.
I have an extensive (ie graduate level) background in a natural science but nothing directly climate related. I too find the primary literature on the subject difficult to understand but that's only to be expected.
What frustrates me is the apparent lack of reasonably technical secondary resources that are both relatively objective (ie not sensational, don't omit important details) and up to date. When I've previously taken the time to dig in I found it difficult to figure out what the various prevailing hypotheses were other than "things will change somehow" and also quite difficult to gauge the confidence of various longer term projections that I came across. Basically it wasn't readily clear to me what was and wasn't known. It would be nice to see a broad but still technical picture laying out a range of concrete scenarios and their estimated probabilities.
Meanwhile, everywhere I look I'm bombarded with overly sensational media pieces aggressively telling the layman which superficial beliefs to adopt without much in the way of why. It seems angry and religious to me and I strongly suspect that introduces psychological bias against whatever is said.
> What frustrates me is the apparent lack of reasonably technical secondary resources that are both relatively objective (ie not sensational, don't omit important details) and up to date.
This is a really good point. As you say, it seems the only two places to get information about climate related research are at the extreme ends of a spectrum, one heavily rigorous but prohibitively technical, and the other extremely flippant but very accessible.
> When I've previously taken the time to dig in I found it difficult to figure out what the various prevailing hypotheses were other than "things will change somehow" and also quite difficult to gauge the confidence of various longer term projections that I came across.
I think this is a symptom of the way we conduct the scientific process in the modern era. It takes a lot of time to do good research, and it takes a mass of research to develop a consensus, especially when it comes to predictive analysis.
A. Spend huge amounts of time learning the heavy math involved
B. Find someone else who seems educated enough, and trust their ELI5
C. Make my own conclusions based on an imperfect understanding of the science
D. Make my own conclusions based on experience and whatever knowledge I have at the moment
Now I do understand enough about atmospheric dynamics to know, at a high level, that human induced climate change is occuring, why it's happening, and some fuzzy understanding of some of the effects we will see. But I don't think a generic USA highschool level education will be able to inform people enough to have the same understanding, which is why we are in this boat. It seems mostly the people who really understand the what/when/why/how of the situation are STEM field graduates.