Evangelizing the Unbeliever

I have been spending my blogging energies over at Lumo's place, preaching to the unconverted. The natives haven't yet tossed me in the cooking pot, but there are signs of restlessness. The venue for my mission was the gigantic comment thread (300 plus) about a Lumo climate post.

There is a futility to trying to persuade someone of something they don't want to believe, so I try to avoid that. Consequently, I try to stick to just pointing out facts. This is a conceivably useful activity, because many of the commenters are deeply misinformed about what climate science is, what climate scientists do, and how they reach their conclusions.

The most serious problem for the climate missionary is that the subject is complicated. There are a lot of facts, ideas, and mathematical concepts needed to understand how the climate system works. Most of the readers don't have the necessary background to understand - one reader suggested that anyone talking math was incapable of writing English and was hence just putting out gobbledegook.

Some can understand, of course. Lubos in particular has the physical and mathematical background, but I suspect he knows less about the details of how the models works than he thinks he does. He is too stubborn to be persuaded by anyone else of course.

I can't help holding the probably silly hope that he might persuade himself though. He is the one person clever enough to do so.

On the plus side, I did learn one thing: the difference between bond albedo and visual geometric albedo.