You “know” it to be true — and yet a few sentences later you reveal that it isn’t true at all If you lived in Iceland, there would be periods each year where that statement stopped being true.

And of course, within a few billion years the Sun will become a red giant and engulf the Earth and the statement “the Sun rises in the east” will cease to be true forever, under any interpretation.

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You have this idea that you can prove something to be absolutely true, not just scientifically true, with repeated observations — but no serious philosopher of science would agree with you. No sane person expects the Sun not to rise, but the scientific method does not rule it out, and tell us what to do if it one day it doesn’t rise. “The Sun rises in the east” as a scientific statement is falsifiable.

Worse, to liken the reliability of the statement “the Sun rises in the east” to “the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory is true” is logically indefensible.

“The Sun rises in the east,” relies on direct and individual experience every day by almost every human.

“AGW” is a huge and complex theory that’s built up from far more data than any thousand people could understand over millions of man-years by trained scientists and workers. It cannot be proved or disproved by any individual person’s experience.

Again, as I have argued elsewhere, decades ago we passed the confidence levels that should have spurred us to take dramatic action against AGW. Not acting because you think there’s “only” a 99% chance that AGW is true is like getting onto a plane because it only has a 99% chance of crashing.

But the confidence levels of AGW and “the Sun rises” are orders of magnitude apart. If AGW turned out not to be true, I’d be completely shocked — it would be unprecedented in the history of science. But if the Sun refused to rise, I’d be forced to re-evaluate every belief I had about the universe.