Science Quote by Kanya Kusano

There’s a lot of rhetorical work packed into Kusano’s careful, lab-coat phrasing. “I believe” softens the claim into personal judgment, not a defeasible argument with explicit thresholds of evidence. It’s a classic move in scientific-sounding skepticism: the grammar signals humility while the effect is to downgrade a dominant explanation into something optional.

The key lever is the word “still.” It implies an ongoing, reasonable uncertainty, as if the field remains evenly split or stuck in early-stage conjecture. In contemporary climate science, that implication lands less as prudence and more as reframing: shifting the audience from “what explains most observed warming?” to “what could, in principle, explain climate variability?” That’s a bait-and-switch between attribution (a focused question with a mature evidentiary base) and variability (a broad, perpetual feature of Earth systems).

Calling anthropogenic climate change “only one of the hypotheses” also smuggles in a false symmetry. Yes, climate varies for many reasons; no, not all hypotheses carry comparable explanatory power for recent trends. The sentence sidesteps that hierarchy. It avoids committing to mechanisms, magnitudes, or the overwhelming convergence across independent lines of evidence, and instead retreats to the safe bunker of epistemic possibility.

Context matters: coming from a physicist, the statement borrows the authority of a hard-science identity while speaking outside the most relevant expert lane (climate attribution is interdisciplinary but highly specialized). The intent reads less like exploratory curiosity and more like permission-making: giving lay audiences a respectable-sounding reason to treat consensus as just another opinion.