Is climate change real?

The climate and nature are just too big for us to understand

Question: Is climate change real?
Position‹3 of 3: We can't know for sure if climate change is real
Argument: The climate and nature are just too big for us to understand

We can't really know for sure what is happening with climate change because the climate and earth systems are too complex for us to understand.

The argument

This position is an argument about the limits of knowledge rather than a claim about the climate itself. Proponents of this view do not assert that climate change is not occurring; they hold that the question cannot be settled either way. The reasoning begins from the scale and diversity of the natural world. Nature is so diverse, on this account, that any description of it is necessarily partial. Proponents point out that scientists haven't explored all the depths of the oceans, and that there are even forests that haven't been fully explored. Parts of the system remain unobserved, and what has not been observed cannot be accounted for in a description of how the whole behaves. A second element concerns change over time. Facts about nature, proponents argue, change as understanding develops. What is held to be established at one point may be revised later, and on this view such revisions are not an occasional exception but a feature of studying something this large. A conclusion held today therefore carries no guarantee of surviving. Put together, these produce an argument from incompleteness: if a system is only partly observed, and the parts that have been observed are subject to revision, then claims about the behaviour of the whole exceed what the available observation can support. The objection is directed at the confidence of the claim rather than at any particular finding within it. Proponents therefore conclude that the climate and nature are simply too big for us to understand, and that we can't truly say whether climate change is real or not.

Premises

[P1]Proponents of this view hold that nature is so vast and diverse — with unexplored ocean depths and forests — that human knowledge of it remains incomplete. [P2] Because facts about such a large, under-explored system change over time, they argue we cannot be certain of claims made about it. [C] Therefore, on this argument, we can't know for sure whether climate change is real.

Counter-arguments

Just because there’s things about nature that science doesn’t know, doesn’t mean that what scientists know now is false. There are many things that scientists have determined about nature that indicate that climate change is real, for example, the depletion of the ozone layer over the Arctic.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Although science doesn’t know everything about nature, it doesn’t mean science is ignorant about everything concerning nature.