Here's a good discussion of error cascades in the context of climate change: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1642
On the use of terms like 'deniers':
> "Sound theory doesn’t have to be buttressed by demonizing its opponents; it demonstrates itself with predictive success."
Additionally there are well funded groups who would love nothing more than to uncover such an error cascade. Yet even a study funded by the same people who run the Heartland Institute produced results consistent with AGW. Visit a website like WattsUpWithThat to witness intelligent people trying their very best to twist data or methods to fit their worldview. If something like this is there to be found, it would have been found by now. The first order science is truly simple. All that is being debated now is when and how severe the effect will be. Sadly by the time we can scientifically confirm the 'Welcome to AGW' sign, we may be 30 years inside the border.
Using the term denier does make convincing those people more difficult. Politically, however, it may be useful to label this small but vocal group as misinformed and stubborn, and get on with transitioning to a sustainable and stable future.
Of course they do. That doesn't mean there's no error cascade surrounding our understanding of what this means.
That past human activity has produced some amount of warming is a pretty uninteresting factoid. In fact, it's trivially true in that land-use patterns alone can have a measurable impact on temperature - you don't even need a theory relating to CO2 to establish that there has been some "anthropogenic global warming" (still less to find that data is merely "not inconsistent with" this notion).
But when alarmists raise alarm, they have something very different in mind. They believe that the warming rate and/or level is unprecedented in human history, that warming has been a bad thing and is likely to produce net negative impacts in the near term. They tend to think it is sensible to talk about "climate sensitivity" having a single value and that this value is high - at least 3 degrees per doubling. All of those are debatable points, and it's wrong to assume scientists agree on them based on their agreement with a much more vaguely defined "consensus view" that humans have caused some undefined amount of warming.
> If something like this is there to be found, it would have been found by now.
Several such things have been found. The post I linked to mentioned a few. The ongoing efforts to hide or minimize the MWP (and thereby show recent temperatures to be "unprecedented") is the usual example, perhaps best documented on ClimateAudit.org .
As people who build software, we know how complexity explodes with each option - and people are complex in millions of facets. Combine a few people together, and you have intractable combinations of emotions and environmental factors. At some point you have to give up on 'exact' and just go with 'directionally correct'.
My wish would be that we could somehow find a way to loosen people's grip on "this is the right way and I've proven it." Scientists and alternative medicine, religious, the irreligious, etc. All seem to think that their brain was able to do what trillions of people before could not. I don't mean to say that there is no truth or 'right' in the universe, just that we are such imperfect measurement tools that we need to walk it out a bit more humbly.
It stands to reason that there's probably some good in the alternative medicine movement - since the goal is for people to feel better and get better. And apparently they are. And there's been good that comes from traditional medicine as we've seen.
One commenter on here was lamenting their parents alignment to some alternative medicine beliefs, stating "They believe this stuff even when it contradicts itself, " How ironic, because I think if you look in to any field there is a great deal of disagreement, and contradiction. You have people refuting and arguing in medical and science journals, both sides being convinced that they are 'correct'.
In many ways I think these behaviors are a symptom of a small-ish brain trying to collect and hold all the complexity of the world - and just failing spectacularly. Of course - we mix in some pride and arrogance, and we get what we've got now. :(
The term I try to use when thinking (and explaining) my own thought process is intuition. Often times when I try to issolate the source of my intution I come up with something that would gennerally be considered emotion.
Somewhat? That's like saying that black is a dark colour like navy blue and white is more like royal blue.
Personally, I think the US would benefit by understanding just where in the overall spectrum they fit politically and how limited their "typical" options are.
Americans probably have the most limited options of any modern democracy on the planet, and yet most people think they are so different.
