The problem as I see it, is that the description of what happens with photosynthesis is reliant on explanations from "members of a club", where their echo-chamber of beliefs and incentives all point in one direction. When climate change has become political, when you are incentivised to suggest climate change is man-made, when leading figures suggest you should be criminalised and thrown in jail for disputing the narritive, this will undoubtably tilt the science. This tilt can happen through deliberate misleading, but also through a placebo effect, where an unconcious bias makes you lean your inferences from the data towards a predetermined conclusion. The continual use of the "97% of scientists agree" phrase, strongly quoted by the climatologists, just feeds into the deception. If institutions like NASA quote it, it just shows you can trust no-one on the topic. You can discount this explanation, but then you are discounting human nature. "It doesn't count here." Oh really? Do you think scientists are impartial robots without bias? If so, why do scientists do double-blind studies to discount the placebo effect? Explain that one. Drug studies that do not have a double-blind protocol will get thrown out since you cannot rely on the scientist adding bias to the data.
I think to have confidence in the C02 argument above, you need to understand the topic. But how can you? You are relying on the pro-climate change alarmists perspective and just repeating what they say. You can believe their argument uncritically, but do you know the counter-arguments? Do you even want to know? Knowing that these predictions are based on models where tweaking coefficients and variables can have a profound impact on the future predictions, how do you know that the scientist is not basing their predictions on an overly negative interpretation of the data, fueled by the need to show that man-made climate change is real? You can never know. What you can do is refer to earlier predictions and see how completely out of whack they have been, all in the direction of global warming happening faster than actually happened. Feel free to also discount that fact, because inconvenient truths can be jarring to ones beliefs. It is so much easier to just go along with the status quo and not question the 97% fib.
This comment from an article in The Guardian sums up the 97% deception nicely:
Worthwhile? It is a totally worthless piece of dishonest propaganda.
The paper deserves to be thoroughly condemned by people on all sides of this argument. Dishonest research sets back finding a solution to the problem presented by climate change. It just confirms the view of many sceptics and the uncommitted that advocates are dishonest and misrepresenting the science.
This 'study' uses a technique much loved of advocacy researchers: ask a question of respondents and then report them as answering a different question. Thus some researchers have asked women if they ever had sex they regretted and then report that the women who said yes claimed to have been raped.
Likewise in this 'study', papers that acknowledge that human emissions of greenhouse gasses have had some impact on climate are classified as giving explicit endorsement of the "consensus". I would suggest that the majority of so called climate sceptics would endorse this statement.
If you define “endorsing the consensus” so broadly that even sceptics are included then quite frankly the much touted 97% number is meaningless.
It is noteworthy that nowhere in their paper do the authors define what the “consensus” is. That is deliberate and part of the trick.
We all know what the people at Skeptical Science mean by ‘consensus’. They mean that climate change is happening and it is going to be real bad and humans are to blame for the vast bulk of it and that only immediate and drastic action will solve the problem. That’s the meaning they and others who use this 97% number will imply when they tout the results even though the research shows no such thing. It is a complete crock.
There are many other problems with the research and the paper as well. The classification of papers giving implicit endorsement to the consensus is even looser than that for explicit (but still included in the 97%), classification requires subjective judgement and yet was carried out by the true believers at Skeptical Science and much more.
Dana Nuccitelli: Overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed papers taking a position on global warming say humans are causing it
www.theguardian.com