Thread by @SteB777

@GretaThunberg At the end of my ecology degree, in a group tutorial, the director the course said to all the students, you've heard all the ecological theories now, do you believe this is how the natural world actually operates?

I said "no", at the very best these are crude approximations.

@GretaThunberg "Crude approximates" of something much more complex. All the other students rolled their eyes, to sort of say, here's Stephen going off on one again. Then the director of the course said to the students, unfortunately Stephen is correct, and at best these are approximations.

@GretaThunberg He said I'm sorry that you've invested all this time, effort and expense, trying to understand this, only to be told that it is much more complex than this, that what you've been taught are only crude approximations, some of which might be mistaken.

@GretaThunberg This does not mean ecologists know nothing and that the deniers and naysayers who try to cast doubt on science's understanding of the crisis we face, know as much as if not more. In fact, it tells us that they have zero understanding of the crisis and profoundly misunderstand it.

@GretaThunberg The success of the scientific method is to allow great progress in understanding the workings of the natural world, without understanding how all of it works. Since Ancient Greece, our understanding of the natural world made no progress, because of appeal to authority.

@GretaThunberg The great philosophers tried to explain everything, in great big schema. But sadly they failed to test their hypotheses with evidence, and relied up this great philosopher said this, that one said this. So for 2000 years, there was no progress.

@GretaThunberg The during the Enlightenment, science split from what had been called natural philosophy, summed up in the motto of the Royal Society, the oldest scientific society in the world "Nullius in verba" i.e. take no ones word for it.
royalsociety.org/about-us/histo…

@GretaThunberg What this new scientific method was about, was testing these hypotheses against the evidence. The rest is history, and science made incredible progress in understanding "some" of the workings of the natural world, without understanding all of it.

@GretaThunberg Climate change deniers and anti-environmentalists, often use crude pseudo-science, misrepresenting these principles, to try and claim because science does not know everything, their crude misrepresentations are as good as the science. This is sophistry i.e. sophisticated lying.

@GretaThunberg This is the strength of science, to progress without knowing everything. There are no absolute facts in science, just better and better models of reality. It's an ongoing self-correcting process. It is the best method we have of understanding how things actually are.