I haven't read them yet and I didn't say they are absolutely wrong or that there were specific errors.fish wrote:Psyber can you please point out the errors in the CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology analysis?Psyber wrote:As for trusting "authorities":
The Department of Human Services and their Medicare section thinks they know all about effective health care now...
And medical authorities all over the world in the 1980s were absolutely sure eating eggs increased your Cholesterol levels - now we know it does the reverse.
Who knows what we will "know" about that in another 30 years?
I was promoting healthy scepticism about blindly believing such "authorities" and saying we should not set up, here or elsewhere, any authority's opinions as unchallengeable proof of a proposition.
(As you did.)
My point was that such authorities are not always proven right by time, and should be listened to cautiously not blindly.
I gave examples where respected authorities have been proven wrong over time, though believed by most when they published their conclusions.
That's what my comparison with religion was about - religion is the ultimate form of believing authority.
Devotees tend to chastise any who express even mild reservations about swallowing their pronouncements without caution.
(Which is what you tend to do.)