The problem is that since the sixties scientists are predicting doom and this is causing people to become skeptical about new insights.
For example, after decades of sea level doom scenario's people are saying it is "slower than expected".
For example, after decades of sea level doom scenario's people are saying it is "slower than expected".
No. Popular media. Scientists will say something like "wow, this particular study shows us hitting 1 degree of warming by 2010, and 2 degrees of warming by 2030 at the current rate, which would lead to gradual melting of the ice caps", and in the popular media that becomes "SCIENTISTS PREDICT ICE CAPS WILL BE ENTIRELY GONE BY 2010!" Because the nuance was not understood, and alarm gets readers/watchers.
I will also remind you the same people who would claim it's slower than expected because of what scientists have said in the past are the same people who will call out that in the 1960s scientists were predicting global cooling as evidence why the science is wrong. I.e., even though those positions are counter to each other, they both work in service to "the science is always wrong" narrative, and that's really the bias at play.
Can you give me some citations for this? I've looked around a bit and all I can see is "faster than expected"
In fact sea-level rise is another great example of what I'm talking about. Dr. Richard Alley gave a fantastic talk this summer about how we can expect very rapid, very sudden ice sheet collapse, and therefore should also experience potentially very rapid sea level rises[0].
However, as he repeatedly points out in the talk, because these sudden collapses are incredibly hard to simulate and predict they are excluded from all IPCC models. He doesn't deny that predicting when and exactly the impact is an incredibly hard modeling problem, but at the same time makes it pretty clear that this known unknown, so to speak, is very real and very likely to have a major impact.
Edit: you should watch at least the beginning of the talk because he explicitly mentions a 2008 piece in the guardian and other cases of "slower than expected".[1]