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Yesterday, The New York Times Science Times included an essay, "On the Climate Change Beat, Doubt Gives Way to Certainty," which seems to me a pretty good test case for the story of science-as-unending-skepticism that we've been invited to entertain in this class. The essay claims that it has become so obvious that human activity is responsible for a continuing rise in average global temperature that no other explanation is plausible: "the fact of global warming itself can now be considered 'unequivocal'...11 of the last 12 years were among the 12 warmest on record worldwide...the most striking aspect of the 2007 report [of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] is the sheer number and variety of directly observed ways in which global warming is already having a 'likely' or 'very likely' impact on the earth."

And then comes the caveat:

"to say that reasonable doubt is vanishing does not mean there is no doubt at all. Many gaps remain in knowledge about the climate system. Scientists do make mistakes, and in any case science continually evolves and changes. That is why the panel's findings, synthesized from a vast body of scientific studies, are generally couched in terms of probabilities and sometimes substantial margins of error..."

So: do you "believe" the findings of the panel? Or is that now the "wrong" question to ask--and to try to answer?