Why it's so hard to convince a climate denier

[GliderGuider]

24. I come from a hard-science family

My father was a Harvard-educated biochemist and my mother was a physicist. I've had many opportunities to watch the scientific process at work throughout my life. The research scientists I've known tend to start with an abstract model (hypothesis) and generate observations to test it. The process of establishing a hypothesis is far more intuitive than most people (who are generally exposed more to engineers than scientists) realize. Famous tales of this process include Kekulé's benzene ring dream and Crick's LSD vision of the structure of DNA. Most of Einstein's work qualifies as a product of deep intuition, as would the work of great astronomers or cosmologists such as Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler.

A scientific breakthrough may begin from an observation (the most exciting phrase in science being "Gee, that's odd...&quot but the observation must always be placed within a model of reality in order to become testable, as required by Popperian falsifiability.

Many modern scientists may shy away from the label, but much of science is dependent on what can only be called a well-developed sense of intuition.

Here's a paper that addresses the topic: http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/Readings/Intuition-1997.pdf