Anthropogenic climate change, evolution, and scientific theories
One of the common misconceptions about science is the nature of scientific theories. Much of the confusion stems from the word "theory" having two very different definitions. Among non-scientists, a theory is a guess, possibly an educated guess based on some facts, but a guess nonetheless. It's little more than an opinion and less than a known fact (itself is usually taken to mean the unchanging truth) on the hierarchy of truth. Skeptics often dismiss climate change and evolution with statements like "Human-caused global warming is just a theory, not a fact" or "Evolution is just a theory." Those statements reveal that the person stating or writing them are using the non-scientific definition. In science, "fact" and "theory" have very different meanings from their nonscientific definitions. "Facts" are data, discovered and verified via repeated observations and experiments to the point where it's ridiculous t...