To all the people in the northern hemisphere who are currently reeling under extreme heat waves: your assessment of global warming is correct, but not for the reasons you think you are seeing.
Common sense is a general intelligence that enables a person to manage concrete everyday situations. It is common sense to switch the power off before removing a bulb from its holder. Wearing a protective glove before touching the metal pot on the kitchen hob is another.
In a survey conducted in Australia between 2010-14, 22% of the respondents thought climate change was not happening. When specifically asked about what their opinions are based on, about 37% of them attributed to common sense. It might sound absurd that about 20% of the people who believed in human-induced climate change also attributed their belief to common sense. And the views of both parties are not surprising. Phenomena such as global warming are understood only through the laborious examination of scientific data from hundreds of sources through the lens of mathematical models. And there is nothing commonsensical about it!
The offspring of hindsight
It is a fact that some of the lessons learned from science can later become part of the common sense knowledge in everyday life. But trusting that the opposite is also true is dangerous. We have seen multiple examples of logical fallacies previously. Availability bias is one of them. For a climate sceptic, the last year’s winter might be the guiding principle, whereas, for a climate believer, it’s the heat wave of this summer. One can prove either of these as instances of random events, even when the number of hard facts on climate change is irrefutable.
Overdependence on experience
Common sense is primarily a manifestation of personal experience; science, on the other hand, is a rational, evidence-based approach that operates through the collaborative actions of hundreds of trained minds. While individual scientists are fallible mortals with cognitive biases and beliefs, the rigour of methodology – validation and falsification – known as the scientific method, by its community elevates science from those shortcomings.
