Prehistoric Climate Scientists Get into a Turf War | Hacker News Reader

Prehistoric Climate Scientists Get into a Turf War

wired.com

9 pointsdavidhcs4 comments

I like that this piece does not try to tell the reader in advance which "team" they should be rooting for. Is the "Coexistence Approach" something favored by Climate Skeptics or Climate Scientists? Does the Paleoflora database in its current form show that paleo climates were hotter than today, colder, or the same? Should the data be open for the good of the world, or kept private so it's not abused?

We (assuming most readers are not already familiar with this particular debate) don't know, and thus have to assess who is doing "good science" and who is being "obstructionist" without knowing in advance whose side we would be supporting. I'd hope that articles like this can help achieve communication across the otherwise overly politicized divide.

Edit: In case anyone else is trying to track down the original sources, I think this article conflates two of Grimm's similarly named articles. "Fallacies and Fantasies: the theoretical underpinnings for the Coexistence Approach for palaeoclimate reconstruction" which is mentioned in the article is by Grimm and Potts (http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/11/5727/2015/cpd-11-5727-20...), while "Fables and foibles: a critical analysis of the Palaeoflora database and the Coexistence approach for palaeoclimate reconstruction" is by Grimm, Bouchal, Denk, and Potts (http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2015/03/10/016378.f...).

You're doing it wrong if you read scientific debates as a question of just deciding who to root for.

In this case most on either side of this debate are going to be on the side of climate science. The question isn't where our climate is going in the 21st century. It is what methods we use to determine what climate was probably like 5 million years ago. And in particular whether a particular closed and poorly audited data set is acceptable to use to produce answers.

I agree with all of this, and was praising this article because it avoided the cheerleading approach that I think dominates the media. That said, one of the main contentious issues in contemporary climate science is whether current conditions are "unprecedented". Usually this concerns times more recent than those talked about there, but the more parallels that can be made with the past, the better we can model the future.

One particular approach to Climate Studies - "Coexistance Approach" - is being criticized by folks following the other approaches. And it appears that the controversy is heating up (sorry...).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com