What does "The Science" tell us?

“We can keep the goal of limiting global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius within our reach, if we come together, if we commit to doing our part of each of our nations with determination and with ambition.” – Pres. Biden, speaking today in Glasgow

I still don’t get the whole “keep-the-increase-down-to-1.5-degrees-Celsius” thing. And, by the way, Biden left out an essential part of that formulation. He should have said “We can keep the goal of limiting global warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius ABOVE PRE-INDUSTRIAL LEVELS…”

We are rarely, if ever, told – in politicians’ public speeches or in Greta Thunberg-type exhortations about fighting global warming/climate change – what specific temperature the planet needs to stay below to avoid climate catastrophe, what the global temperature is right now, how it’s measured, who does the measuring, and whether a scientific consensus exists on the measuring techniques and the measuring results. A whole set of questions is raised in my mind when someone like the prez uses the “1.5 degrees Celsius” phrase. These are questions that I imagine many other curious people have.

And, as an American, I would like to know not just about global warming but also about national warming: Does the continental United States have a national temperature, and, if so, how is that measured, and what is it currently? Is it going up? And if so, how fast? Is our national temperature increasing at the same rate as is the global temperature? Is the danger of climate change uniform across the planet, or is the United States in less danger than, for example, equatorial regions or polar regions? Americans ought to be told not only about the general danger to the planet but also about the specific danger to the U.S.A.

It’s one thing to trust the science. It’s quite another to trust the scientists. And when scientists assume that the public is too ignorant, too stupid, or too simple to understand the science, they are making a huge mistake. Scientific research requires one set of skills. Effectively communicating the results of that research to the public requires an entirely different set of skills. Great scientists can be lousy communicators.

If scientists don’t trust us, the public, with the actual numbers, but they want us to be alarmed by what they say those numbers mean, then something is wrong somewhere.

Note: Perhaps we should treat the issue of measuring climate change the same way we are increasingly treating the question of electoral integrity: How are individual votes counted? How are the voting-machines calibrated and by whom? How are the vote totals tabulated? I wouldn’t be surprised to find that there are several different temperature measuring techniques that produce quite different results and of varying reliability. As a non-scientist, I probably don’t need to understand the measuring mechanisms, but if our national economy or the global economy is to be re-fashioned based on those measurements, then I would like to know that there is some global scientific body that calibrates the measuring instruments and certifies the measuring results, just as electoral results need to be checked and certified by some governmental agency.