tryonenow

There is nothing basic about climate science. You're talking about a massive, chaotic, nonlinear system.

Case in point, from the article:

>present thinking holds that man has a time window of five to 10 years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategies might become critical

Yet decades later that window continues to shift. This was an unverified theory in the 70s, and rightly so - we had spatially sparse measurements at the very tail end of a time series which naturally cycles on the order of hundreds to millions of years. For example a consensus has only recently formed that the oceans have been absorbing energy and delaying atmpspheric temperature rise.

Finally, the sources for that Scientific American are InsideClimate and Greenpeace, which are at least as biased as any oil company, just in reverse. I know that oil companies are the Philip Morris du jure, but this article is just retroactive demonization.

>Shell is an evil oil company

No one "knew" about climate change in 1986. It took 20+ years of research to gather and analyze enough evidence to prove such an enormous claim, that humans had been inadvertently geoengineering the planet. Also shell employs tens of thousands of people - this myth comes from one internal communication that maybe a dozen eyes at most even saw.

Interesting how much people's perception can be influenced by simple framing. The revelations in this article are actually quite similar to some of the "conspiracy theory" type of allegations made by those questioning the legitimacy of the most recent election.

>That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information

Not to choose a side, but considering Trump only lost the popular vote by a few percent, one could argue that this constitutes mass disenfranchisement, especially in light of the fact that republicans are underrepresented in the institutions that the article is alleging colluded.

The real danger here in my opinion is that it's incredibly difficult for laypeople to form unbiased opinions, as the media that we all consume has very clearly chosen a side, perhaps moreso than in the past, under the guise of "saving democracy". So in a way this article also legitimizes trump's infamous claim of "fake news".

Edit: won -> lost

I think it's reasonable for laymen to be skeptical of expert consensus in soft, non-experimental fields, especially when the consensus frequently changes significantly and is strongly influenced by industry, e.g. the views on dietary sugar/fat, cause of alzheimer's, lobotomies...

Particularly when consensus is not unanimous.

>We studied mice, but the effect we observed is equivalent to kids having a Western diet, high in fat and sugar

Is there any evidence beyond correlation that high fat diets are unhealthy?

Also the researchers measured mice intestinal biome at 14 weeks, given that the lifespan of bacteria is probably similar whether in mice or in humans, I wonder if the comparison to human lifespan is valid, considering that a transition that takes x mice-years may only take y human-months, so to speak.