Thread: Catastrophic Failure of Earth Within the Lifetime of Someone Alive Today!?

It doesn't take a lot of knowledge of statistics to understand what I'm saying. There is no "valid" method of interpreting a confidence interval, just general guidelines. As far as climate change goes the scientific evidence is extremely strong (95% according to the ipcc), but not as absolute as most scientific principles. Choosing at what confidence interval you feel comfortable is down to each person, preferably based on a rational formula taking various factors such as priority into account.

Science doesn't say differentiate between these claims, because neither is valid/invalid, there is merely a confidence interval. It is naive to assume a 95% confidence interval doesn't represent strong evidence, but at the same rate there is still a large enough margin of error. Some people wish to wait until that error is smaller, a completely scientific thing to do.

Edit: This does not represent my opinion. This is the way science works, because science is merely a collection of knowledge in the form of probabilities. It does not make assertions as to what constitutes a legitimate or illegitimate statement, as all statements are worthy of scientific analysis, even if the conclusion opposes the statement completely.