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I think you're mixing up the science itself and the reporting on it. If a paper was published saying that sea level rises were going to be 20% lower than expected I wouldn't expect most people would ever hear about it. Or if they did it would be reported as showing that sea level rise was even more of a threat than we had believed.

If you want the truth the IPCC reports area great for providing the scientific consensus along with the (large) uncertainty we have about exactly what climate change will look like.

That's a fair point, although my point was more about the general population's perception of climate change and how it is shaped. That perception is most definitely shaped by the consistent reporting the general media does on climate change, which filters out the messy noise found in the actual hard science.

I think most people who don't believe in climate change don't believe in it because of the amount of money and political power that is devoted to discrediting it. Let's be honest here, most people on _either_ side of the fence (full disclosure: including me) don't actually read climate research, they're only aware of what gets covered in the press, which tends to be the research that's more apocalyptic and less focused on model adjustment, etc.

This is only really an issue because of the way that climate change has been unnecessarily politicised, though. We see dramatic stories reported on from other areas of research ("Hey, we found planet X!"), and yet there hasn't been a huge amount of effort spent on discrediting astronomical research, so the public accepts that the peer review process has worked and there's no controversy ("Scientists are all just elitist liberals, where's the research from conservatives that says planet X doesn't exist?").

It could well be. Though I suspect it's more of contrarianism in a minority of people. We also have man-on-the-moon deniers, etc.

What surprises me about climate change is that they're somehow managed to show causality between one non-repeatable event (people starting to burn fossil fuels) and one other event (global warming). Holy cow causality is notoriously hard to confirm when we can't manipulate the causes. When the cause and effect each only happen once, it's surely almost impossible. I'm suspicious of that extreme confidence.

This thread is interesting juxtaposed with the "Broken Science" piece on the frontpage now [0]. Apparently science is hard, even with laboratories and repeatable controlled experiments...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10960411

Why do you think that " If there was a study every once in a while that said X study about climate change was wrong, and we didn't consider Y factor, but climate change still seems to be headed in a dangerous direction" leads to "I think people might be more willing to accept the thesis." instead of "look the scientists can't agree on this stuff, how are we supposed to believe them at all."

(see also the "no warming since 1998" nonsense)