....
I guess to be a bit more accurate, what I'm getting at it's hard for an intellectually curious person not involved in these fields to have a genuinely strong conviction based on their understanding. I tried looking at the data a couple of times. It's so heterogeneous that you'd need to know a lot about the technical details of measurement techniques to even start evaluating it. And many of these things you can't easily look up, and without significant resources you won't get around to play with. I'm sure many of us have an opinion or a gut feeling one way or another and that's fine.
With something like P/NP, at least the "insiders" have less of an edge which is mostly access to other smart people thinking about it I guess?
Yep. Even asking the question P/NP narrows the group addressed to one in a hundred, and that's extremely optimistic. But "climate change" broadens the focus, to almost a ridiculous chatter with noise everywhere, signal rare.
The prior question I posed to another forum member illustrates the essential issues behind the science of climate change quite nicely.
Can you state the equilibrium temperature of the planet Earth, and show how you derived it? Fools rush in where wise men fear to tread.