http://geniussolutionsink.blogspot.com/2014/08/solution-to-global-sea-levels-rising.html

The jigsaw analogy is a good one. Though I do think that there is a particular class of educated person who seems more susceptible to the denier mentality. Retired engineers, people with some maths background (Mike Jonas), and computer programmers, like Eric Worral. These are all people who are used to precise answers, and if the answer is not precise enough (in their opinion), then it is wrong. Hence the “Einstein one fact” meme.

They are not used to dealing in the probabilities, which a large portion of Science routinely deals with. (such as the large spread of ECS values), and regard that as a weakness of the theory. Hence their penchant for always choosing the lowest value as being equally probable, whereas it is as improbable as the highest value. The median of 2 to 3 degrees being highly probable. The uncertainty being exaggerated by people who really should know better, like Judith Curry.

That and the inability of these people to realise and acknowledge their lack of expertise, to be totally ignorant in a subject and yet make confident pronouncements. To maintain the pretense of being objective and claiming to be prepared to modify their stance when presented with better evidence, but somehow, the evidence is never good enough, or fraudulently obtained.

It is an interesting psychological conundrum. I once had an argument with Eric Worral about Polar ice, where I asked him if total loss of summer polar ice would convince him that AGW really is a serious issue. He allowed that it would. The fact that 80% of it being lost in the past 30 years though, obviously didn’t register with him. Using his logic, he would wait until his child was killed at the crossing opposite the school before campaigning for speed bumps or warning lights.

You just have to shake your head in disbelief. They would rather wait until everything is 100% certain before doing something about it, by which time of course, it will be too late.

Absolutely. It’s the house of cards can be knocked down by the merest whisper of a breeze approach. My puny factoid or graphic can destroy the whole of oceanography or physics. When the correct approach is to be constantly correcting a huge jigsaw as more details of the picture become clearer.

The fact that a few jigsaw pieces that were originally placed in a roof in a picture’s background turn out to belong on one of the boats in the foreground … doesn’t alter the fact that the whole of the picture is coming together pretty well. GW happens to be a jigsaw with an unimaginable number of pieces, but the picture we’ve so far assembled is looking pretty good.

I like the jigsaw analogy because anyone who’s ever been faced with putting together the cloudy sky in a 4000+ piece jigsaw has a personal, but not scientific, experience of what it’s like when you’re nearly there but all these pieces Look The Same. Seems to be the play table equivalent of accounting for the mixed effects of clouds on global climate – but super complicated by being one of those jigsaws with two different pictures on the two surfaces and both of them have to be right.