Which makes it rather a tricky thing to validate, I'd imagine. It's like... I Don't know much about science, but whenever I go into a GAF thread about dieting, you see a person say that people just need to cut out sugar and they'll lose weight. They'll then post a bunch of links to articles filled with scientific stuff backing up their argument. Another person will say that saturated fat is the problem, whilst another says that actually the amount of fat isn't a problem, that eating fat doesn't make you fat, and that it's calories that matter. Another will say that avoiding carbs will mean you'll lose weight because you're left with meat and vegetables. And so on an so on. They all post links, and I don't have the biological knowledge to know who's right, if any, or how many of them are even mutually exclusive.
I sort of feel the same about climate change sometimes, and the problem is that there's a sort of new-age Bible way of determining that basically everything is a result of climate change, irrespective of what it is. Dry summer, wet summer, hot or cold, freezing or flooding, high or low humidity etc. It seems that whatever weather happens to be occuring where I live, I can find an article that'll explain why it's climate change that's causing it. And when I read the article, I find myself following along, understanding and agreeing. This was hot, it caused that, this melted, that stopped a hot water current which meant less evaporation here, etc etc. But then the next year, when it's the opposite, I see the same articles with the variables changed and again, find myself nodding along and understanding with what's being said. Now, I'm happy to acknowledge that I basically don't know enough about the subject - it's a level of science that I think even our top climate scientists would admit that we, as a species, are still fairly new to, let alone numb nuts like me. But I can see why a lot of people with somewhat less patience than me (or perhaps they're finding their lives made more difficult by legislation intended to curtail climate change) saying "Uhuh, yeah, sure" whenever they hear that today's weather is being caused by climate change. Maybe it is, but as long as it's "regional" and basically entirely unpreditable (the flooding in the UK recently has been worsened by the UK Met Office predicting we'd have a very dry winter. Its been the wettest on record. I appreciate that the weather isn't the climate, but it does suggest the odd hole in the modelling methods, perhaps) I think people are going to struggle to be convinced who aren't already convinced.
