If you have not, and as you have said, you've only «tried to follow the debate by reading journal articles and posts», and I think «tried» is your operative word; then from a scientific point of view, are not then your opinions more in the «less likely» or «very unlikely» category of confidence, from an objective or
qualitative argument perspective?
Perhaps this is the source of Dyson's dreadful misjudgment on the climate question: he sees that the possible errors are large, but does not factor in that they are likely to be large in the wrong direction, and does not credit
obvious qualitative arguments from simple laws of physics.»
I will say a few things, however, about the selective use of ISCCP data in this article to
construct qualitative arguments that do not stand up to detailed quantitative analysis.
I hope we can reach some middle ground, where both the quantitative data and
the qualitative arguments can find a way to intersect.
English literature students, for example, read texts critically to form
a qualitative argument or analyse the reliability of sources, while engineering students often use the quantitative results from models to further their experiments or research projects.