UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters | Hacker News Reader

UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

timesonline.co.uk

41 pointscwan36 comments

"Some researchers have argued that it is unfair to attack the IPCC too strongly, pointing out that some errors are inevitable in a report as long and technical as the IPCC's round-up of climate science."

Yeah, especially if you willfully ignore them when they're known, in favor of a position.

I'm getting the sense that advocacy is playing too high a role in both the science and the policy of climate change. Indeed, advocacy seems to have coupled science and policy into one large system.

I'm also wondering if "climate change" shouldn't even be a phrase in common usage, at least not the way we use it to refer to an accepted direction in policy and earth science.

The problem is that there are concentrated vested interests in disputing and denying the evidence. It's in this kind of environment that pro climate change advocacy formed, to counteract self-interested lobbies.

There isn't a simple solution here. When profit-making corporations have unlimited free political speech, how does science make itself heard, without also seeming to turn into political advocacy?

This is a problem. Indeed "politics has no place in science", but if politics does have a place in business (and it does whether we like it or not) then how are important scientific challenges to entrenched businesses to be approached?

I think the notion that profit-making corporations with vested interests are to be found on only one side of this debate is completely false. Companies such as GE, Siemens, the renewables industries and essentially all industries that are users of energy as opposed to producers of energy from fossile fuels have a massive vested interest in driving the current climate panic forward.

Even auto makers, who have indeed been lobbying against far reaching regulation, are in a double bind situation. I cannot imagine a greater opportunity for them to make loads of money than governments forcing people to buy expensive electric vehicles and subsidising them massively.

Last (and probably even least) there are the climate scientists themselves whose funding and career prospects depend heavily on politics and advocacy.

That only adds fuel to the fire, though. It doesn't reduce the temperature of the conversation such that there's more light than heat, more reason than emotion involved.

Unlimited free political speech should not be a problem, whichever way you approach it.

Especially from corporations with billions of dollars to burn on it and a clear profit incentive. I mean, who do we think should run government, the people? We the people? Pssh.

For years I've heard this, and I think I've reached the limit of my credulity with the line of reasoning that goes something like this: "X has billions of dollars! Billions of dollars! They will control politics as we know it!"

Lots of entities have billions of dollars. People who sell peanut butter have billions of dollars. Billions of dollars spent every day trying to get me to do something or another -- buy soap, change deodorants, purchase a new car, go to the mall. Very little of it has any impact. We're a society that is extremely used to outsiders using all sorts of clever tactics to try to get us to do things.

So unless these corporations have "special" billions of dollars that somehow magically control my mind, they are welcome to bring their message to the political discussion. In fact, everybody who wants to speak are welcome. Bring them on. All I require is that you disclose to me who you are and what you're trying to sell. Welcome to the party.

Not trying to pick a fight. I actually held the opposite view and have been slowly changing my mind over the last ten years or so.

Wasn't there a chapter in Freakonomics about how, contrary to the popular perception, the amount of money spent on a candidate's campaign has very little impact on the outcome of the election?

Well, I'm sure you could put together a graph that supported that point, but every single full-time politician who gets elected to a living seems to disagree with them, based on the amount of time they spend fundraising.

The health insurance industry spent 750 million dollars this year lobbying against healthcare reform. That pretty much guaranteed that the bill we wound up with would be a piece of garbage.

lobbying != political advertisements

Well, here's the deal - corporations are obligated, by statute, to protect profits at the expense of all else, including moral behavior or the good of the country.

And that's fine. I'm not some dreadlocked hippie who wants to burn the corporations to the ground as I'm consuming things that are produced by them. I recognize their value. That's great.

They are not, however, good citizens. They're obligated, by statute, to be bad citizens if that's more profitable to them.

If someone I disagree with wants to influence the process based on a set of principled beliefs, well fine, I'll fight them to the extent I can but I'll certainly respect them. However, corporations aren't people - if they were people, they'd be psychotic, amoral people who only lived to sell peanut butter or whatever. They don't deserve to have more of a say in the process than I do.

You make a very persuasive case -- much more than I would make if I tried to argue the other side of this.

I'm left with the conclusion, however, that I'm free to associate with other people and pool money to run political ads. Whether or not I do that as a corporation shouldn't factor into it.

Let's assume five of us play poker every Tuesday night and we're all plumbers. A new candidate is running for office that wants to license plumbers, which we're against. So we pool our poker earnings and start running some radio spots calling his mother a fat alcoholic. So far pretty standard political fare.

But if we were a corporation of plumbers, suddenly the rules change.

Or another example. Let's say I'm General Motors and I don't like Candidate X. So I just tell MSNBC to run negative stories about him right up until election day. No harm no foul. But if I'm Ford? (which doesn't own a cable news network) I'm crap out of luck.

There's just too many self-contradictions here. The basic theory says that I'm fine pooling my money with others to speak out. Whether or not that is done with a corporation or not doesn't seem to come into it. Yes, corporations are single-minded. But so are PACs. So are all political organizations. In fact, the entire purpose of a political organization is to be single-minded about something or another.

So I like what you're saying, but it doesn't carry the argument with me at the end of the day.

You hit on the exact point that I left out and was wishing I had covered -- I have no problem with individuals, or politically organized groups of individuals, mobilizing politically even if they have more money than me, and regardless of where that money came from.

That applies to PACs, too, as long as they aren't blatant fronts for corporate interests, which we have a bunch of today anyways.

I suppose my real issue is that if you can't motivate individuals to give money/time out of their own pockets, you don't deserve to be part of the political process. If we remove all restraints on the ability of corporations to influence the process, it rapidly becomes something that they can't afford not to do -- then we get someplace where corporations "just doing business" have 10X the impact of individuals who are genuinely motivated by their principles or even their selfish interests. The damage from that scenario isn't really quantifiable -- either you get what I'm saying, or you don't. I'd consider it another major leap on our trajectory, as a nation, towards idiocracy.

"That applies to PACs, too, as long as they aren't blatant fronts for corporate interests ..."

What if the PACs are merely subtle, hard to detect fronts?

This thread, plus the thread on the recent SC decision removing restrictions on corporate political spending, has caused me to change my mind. In that other thread I made a comment that was negative re the decision.

After reading that other thread and its related articles, and this thread, I've moved closer to the position that massively financed corporate political speech has its problems, but limiting that speech opens a new and just as problematic can of worms.

So, thanks HN. I'm still confused, but I feel better about it.

My favorite parts of the article:

The 2007 study should be seen as a snapshot of what was known then. Science is progressive. If something turns out to be wrong we can fix it next time around.

In this case, it turns out the mistakes were fixed the first time around: before the paper was published.

A hint: in general, when writing a review article, you don't both to write about stuff that isn't finished.

At most, you give it a brief mention in a section "future directions and open problems". You discuss it with superlatives like, "this looks promising". You don't, however, pass it off as part of what is known.

The 2007 study should be seen as a snapshot of what was known then.

We now know that "snapshot" wasn't the intent because the "no glaciers in 2025" claim was included even though they knew that it was wrong because they wanted to influence the politics.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scie...

FWIW, while they're trying to distance themselves from the claim, they've kept the immediate author on-payroll. Are they buying him off or protecting their own?

This looks even worse for Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC:

- The scientist that made the glacier claim now works for Pachauri - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherboo...

- A possible motive? "Pachauri ... may have raised millions of dollars for his New Delhi institute on the basis of the totally bogus ‘glaciergate’ claim by the IPCC that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035" http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2010/01/23/ipcc-h... (Walter Russell Mead)

Even if the claim wasn't bogus, we have yet another example of a supposedly objective scientist/official personally benefiting from pushing AGW.

And yet, most of what we hear is that the "deniers" are in it for the money because some of them used to work for the petroleum industry.

Science is progressive. If something turns out to be wrong we can fix it next time around.

Good science. But it's kind of difficult to undo mis-spending of taxpayer dollars, not to mention the economic damage caused by policies based on such mistakes.

I seem to disagree with you about much on this issue, but here I'm with you: They should just say: "Yeah, we f.ed up." instead of trying to spin it.

If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I feel like there have been an increasing number of posts like this: posts that straddle relevance. I find the topic of climate change and the associated politics interesting. However, this type of story comes up in my political and more mundane newsreader. (I don't mean that to sound snotty, but I believe many readers are like me in that regard.)

I come to HN for very interesting stories that get pushed by a community composed of smart people. They propagate good stories that either are breaking news or could have been missed.

I don't think this story qualifies...but I am not sure how to properly disqualify it. However, I think PG's TV news rule is a very good acid test.

I think a lot of the worth of HN is in the analysis by the intelligent people who roam these virtual halls so even if the story is mundane I often learn a lot from the people who follow climate science and politics much more closely than I.

I do agree that the 2nd or 3rd story on <highly regarded panel cooks the climate data> has diminishing returns but I don't think a mundane/popular media story should be grounds for disqualification a priori for the afore mentioned reason.

I agree with your first statement. In fact, the conversations -- especially the arguments -- may exceed the value of the stories themselves. They often do for me.

However, the topic of climate change seems to be a lightning rod for bad arguments. Ones that devolve into comment trees that provide good examples of bad arguments that PG can use in a follow up to "How to Disagree."

Good arguments on climate change have occurred on this site. There has been a lot of good debates over the limits of science in the face of complexity, the politicization of science, etc.

However, as you put it, there are diminishing returns on this story. The good arguments have been exhausted, and now it is becoming a political gotcha style story. Again, I don't know why I was bothered by this post, but it may be because it was the third or fourth thread on this topic, just with a new small piece of information.

(P.S. I do not mean to sound like the arbiter of "Good Arguments.")

Here's the thing (from an admittedly biased observer):

The big version of the climate story is about politicization and over-reaching. Assuming for a moment that professional scientists make a course correction and come out with some sort of ethical guidelines about social activism, public standards of proof, open data, and letting some sunlight in the publishing process? These things are going to take a long time, probably several years. All the while there will be little spikes in the story here or there. The main theme, however, may take a decade or more to play out.

That means that the story isn't going away as a serious science (by science I mean the practice-of-science) story. It's just going to simmer.

I happen to agree that sometimes this particular story leads to long threads of he-said, she-said, but at the same time I think it's a legitimate story about something we're all somewhat interested in. You could make the same observation about functional programming, or Apple products -- lots of things tend towards pointless conversation. Lots of things appear on TV news.

It's just a guideline.

And for the record I don't think long threads are necessarily a bad thing. The assumption is that they have limited returns for readers, but if a discussion is a conversation and not a debate I think it's usually helpful to all involved.

I agree with everything you have said. My comment may have been a manifestation of my fear that HN is becoming increasing politicized with dynamics that favor arguments over conversations.

However, you may be -- and I believe you are -- correct regarding the utility of story. Each time this topic is explored, it tends to move to a slightly different region of the conversational search space: new data, new movements, new ideas. My comment was not without merit; however, it was misplaced.

(The weak irony is that, as someone who thinks the IPCC does "bad science" (TM), I found this story self-gratifying.)

I agree. I think HN is moving towards people talking past each other and pointless posturing, A lot of it, no doubt, is people consuming political material from other media and then sort of regurgitating it here. That's great if you can barf up more than just an arguing talking head. It's not so cool if you all have is rancor and mindless talking points.

I find that I have to be the most careful about the stories I agree with. That's when the critical thinking shields are down and bad stuff slips through.

As a defense to the HN-is-going-to-heck problem? I just don't read HN comments that much any more. I use my aggregation site to view all major tech sites and browse stories from there (shameless plug: http://project-management-methodologies.net/)

HN is still a great place to hang out with like-minded technical guys working on startups. It's just moved from a small coffee house to a large stadium, and the crowd has changed from people wanting to make things people like to a smorgasbord of folks in all kinds of situations. It's a lot noisier and the chit-chat isn't as focused as it used to be. I still like it, but I find the downside of engaging in idle non-focused chatter to be bigger than the upside of learning something that can make a difference in the world.

Didn't used to be that way, sadly

The provided shameless plug is not working for me. I'm getting an HTTP 200 response with content length 0.

It's just moved from a small coffee house to a large stadium, and the crowd has changed from people wanting to make things people like to a smorgasbord of folks in all kinds of situations.

Well put.

Up now.

I had some weird behavior that appeared just after I posted that link. I posted an Ask HN article. But a few minutes later, the problems disappeared. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1073806

It's not a commercial site -- just a notebook computer doing some scrapes and updating a static html file. But it's useful (to me) to quickly scan hundreds of articles as fast as possible instead of loitering on any one site.

"However, the topic of climate change seems to be a lightning rod for bad arguments."

I'd say these stories are more about scientific rigor (or the lack thereof) than they are about climate change per se. There is only really one position on that here (I hope) and that's that science should be above that and where it's not that worth getting some attention.

But the scientists are faced with a conundrum, here. When they do proper science, "Evolution is a theory", they get attacked for it by bombastic blowhards - "It's just a THEORY!". So they've been forced into adopting some marketing principles simply to get their voices heard.

Meanwhile, it seems that everybody's lost their mind about the whole purity factor. If you give them, say, a 50% chance of being right, when "right" means trillions of dollars of damage, common sense says we should be doing something. Yet we're spending all our time arguing over whether they have a 100% chance of being right or not. That's because the people on the other side of the argument are not arguing in good faith - many of them have a direct financial or ideological stake in the matter and science is the furthest thing from their minds.

It looks like the credibility of the IPCC is diminishing by the day. I hope some trustworthy body which is concerned about climate change but strong enough to avoid the kind of bias and shoddy lack of rigour we've seen from the IPCC can come through to take its place.

Politically speaking, it won't happen. Global warming is inextricably bound up with the IPCC in people's minds. So much effort was expended on telling everyone that they had to believe the IPCC because it was a consensus of all the scientists in the world (what, you think you're smarter than all the scientists in the world?) that to come along now with "Did we say that consensus? We meant this consensus" can't possibly work.

I meant to post this the last time the subject came up, just for the record: it's beginning to look like the IPCC (and with it, perhaps, the entire issue) has hit its peak.

The issue here is that the IPCC has wielded the 'peer reviewed' phrase like a hammer, and repeatedly knocked anyone on the head with it if they presented something that wasn't peer reviewed. There are many, many quotes from the IPCC brushing off conflicting information with 'it's not peer reviewed, like all of our science'. Now that they've been found to not apply their own standards, others are using that same hammer to hit back with. Even if it's only one or two instances, the damage is done.

Now that one error involving a non-peer reviewed (so called 'grey' reference) has been found, people are crawling all over the rest of their reports, finding other instances. The WWF report from 2005 that contained the himalayan glacier melt story is still cited throughout the report - they just removed the offending factoid about 2035.

Until they comprehensively go back and apply their own standards more rigourously, they are going to attract more and more scrutiny, more errors will be found (the sheer length of the report almost guarantees that). And their current position of 'it's only one error' is going to look bad.

If they are to be effective, there's going to need to be some serious changes put in place. People's support for the IPCC-backed science and policies in Western countries is eroding (if you believe the polls) and while not yet under the 50% mark, it's not in the direction the IPCC wants. Until they make some changes, I don't see their support rising again.

So what? People do bad science, bad business, bad education all the time, because of unconscious biases, because of pressures to 'succeed', publish, etc. How many people are 'playing the game' in this old world?

Not to excuse exaggerations: but just because some people get overzealous, that doesn't change the facts ... e.g. that glaciers worldwide are shrinking, the oceans are becoming more acidic.

Many GW deniers are also guilty of being blind in one eye.

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