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Originally Posted by Arragonis
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Could you or anyone else design a Boeing 787 by yourself? I didn't think so. No one individual can hope to match the similar professional efforts in understanding climate science.
While we like our scientific heroes, like Einstein, Newton, Watson and Crick et al, there are very few of those (and what they did was based on earlier work, and took lifetimes to achieve). Most work is collaborative and incremental, especially where it's based wholly on well established physical principles like is climate science. Understanding the Earth's climate doesn't require insight, rather application.
There is a very poor grasp of how scientific understanding - in any area, not just around climate - is increased. It doesn't help that there are groups of - often media savvy and well resourced - people in who's interest it is for there not to be that understanding.
What you see in a scientific paper is a summary, not the work required to achieve it. Worse than that, what you see in an abstract for a paper (which is all the vast majority of the population can access - without purchasing subscriptions to journals, although there are a couple of free to access journals around now), is a summary of the paper.
It's not the way in which science was taught in school either, where there was one "right" answer. In the real world there is a fundamental truth, but in the process getting to it there's a often a lot of uncertainty. By definition it's at the edge of human knowledge and one piece of work may contradict another, at least by degree.
Every scientific problem is approached from more than one direction. If you get similar results from alternative approaches, that's good evidence for the results being accurate.
The earlier example of modelling the Pliocene and matching that to the real world data and finding where the discrepancy lay is just one example.
Another is that genetic - DNA - evidence backs up the evolutionary origins of life as first determined by evidence from fossils and extant life; two completely different lines of enquiry with the same result.