Necessary illusions

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…e majority of scientists think differently, the public perception will be one of confusion and doubt. It's kind of a well known tactic. (a nice book on this is Chomsky's Necessary Illusions.) To be sure, at one point I was a climate change doubter, and so was a friend of mine. We were both PhD students in Plasma Physics, working on nuclear fusion. So there is clearly some decoupling of political background and belief. But I did two weeks of research, and pretty thoroughly convinced myself that global warming is humankind's doing -- my friend did the same. I knew about Dr William Gray from before, however. He's moderately famous for starting hurricane season forecasting -- this is kind of barebones statistical work that doesn't have a well developed physics basis but is still quite helpful. He's done a number of other things too. He attrib…