If people are trying to follow these kind of discussions but perhaps struggling to sort the wheat from the chaffe, some simple rules you may wish to apply?
1) If they say "scientists say" but do not link to at the least a peer reviewed study, treat their claims as highly suspicious. At best they are likely to miss much of the nuance of what scientists said at worst they are just making it up.
2) If they start waffling about "climate debates" also treat their comments as highly suspicious. Generally those kind of comments are akin to "why wont scientists debate evolution". Where science is debated is in the peer reviewed literature. Its really unfollowable for most people, but that is what you get with a very technical field built on a foundation of maths and physics.
3) Anyone who starts talking about "models". Also a red flag, almost all of physics for the past 500 years has been about building mathematical models of the universe around us to try to make predictions and test ideas. It is literally what Johannes Kepler, Galileo and Newton were doing. The fact that climate science relies on models is because it is a branch of physics. (
quick primer from NOAA on them.)
4) When people start talking vaguely about feedback loops (I seen the XR bod on the youtube thing with Andrew Neil pull this stunt and others on here), again bit of a red flag someone is about to bullshit and bluster. Sometimes its how climate change is only a threat from "computer feedback loops" and other times its "worst than we thought" because of some mystery feedbacks. Svante Arrhenius, the first man to predict that our CO2 might warm the planet, knew about feedback loops, in his case his hand calculation included warming from the extra water vapor. They are not something that only eco-activists or right wing billionaire owned think tanks know about.
If you have insomnia, here is about 60 pages of the IPCC talking about them.
5)If someone starts talking about methane..... They are probably talking crap. There is many doomer blogs that spout unending predictions of near term doom invoking methane and often articles will appear in mainstream press about it only to get shredded by the actual scientists.
Scientists explain what New York Magazine article on "The Uninhabitable Earth" gets wrong
If people are interested or concerned\panicked about these issues then I would encourage you to go to the science forum and ask there. Better yet find one of the many online courses where actual scientists are keen to teach you about this science.
