If I were an Atheist

[Mudhammam]

Pilots take aviation weather people seriously and so should we. I'm willing to defer to the better-informed opinion of climatologists. But that's trust, a form of belief. And facts never come in future tense, so the predictions of these climatologists are also a form of belief. We see nothing wrong with believing, provided the beliefs are in accord with generally accepted standards for such things. That remains as true in our scientific era as it was for Essenes hiding in a Dead Sea cave twenty centuries ago.

When predictions are made on the basis of an enormous body of facts and mathematical principles, they're usually a safe bet; sure, you can say that trusting scientific consensus is a "form of belief," but when that belief is of the substantial sort that allows NASA to safely put a man on the moon, comparing it to religious belief is just downright disingenuous.