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Comment by whitegrape | Hacker News Reader

Hasn't this been the party line for..decades? (Since sometime in the 90s at least?)

A headline can not contain enough information to convey scientific findings. For some more broad context, see this quote from the article:

>“Some of the claims in this paper are indeed extraordinary,” said Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “They conflict with the mainstream understanding of climate change to the point where the standard of proof is quite high.”

Indeed, my comment wasn't about the quality of the science. I read the abstract, and concluded it's beyond my ability to analyze critically (at least without devoting a ton of time to it and learning new things) so I'll leave it to the other scientists. But the public messaging sounds the same as it's been for a long time, so it's a curious headline especially as "news". (Authors often not choosing their own headlines is irrelevant here.) The article itself even notes the movie-version of a perilous shift is over a decade old. Perhaps a better headline would be "Scientists argue compromised global warming limit not good enough" (edit: especially since talking about linear vs exponential is way too complex).

It's OK if you don't want to take the time to dissect the paper's findings, or to keep up with the major highlights of climate change research, generally.

But perhaps you shouldn't attack their findings as some kind of "party line", then (and implicitly, the researchers as being party shills, basically, for toeing it).

is there a science party?

In the US, I think the closest is the Green Party - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Party_of_the_United_Stat...

Perhaps... the left has its anti-science bugaboos as well though.

As long as it isn't nuclear science.

Edit: I do mean nuclear science, not just nuclear power.

Or GMO's, or vaccines (for a subset of those folks).

Is the hatred of nuclear really so irrational? It's an expensive way of generating electricity which has frequent safety issues and gives the state the means to build nuclear weapons.

...with a track record of concealing problems by supposedly neutral and trustworthy experts.

If one weren't invited, one wouldn't know...

I'm pretty sure the current party line is something like, 2C warming is acceptable, beyond that is bad, but the big negative effects are a century or two in the future, albeit some major problems show up on a scale of decades.

That might be what cautious scientists have been saying, but that's way too complex for a party line. To rephrase my original question, since when haven't (according to news organizations) scientists been warning about perilous climate change within the span of decades?

What's the point of this question, if you're just going to define away anything that disagrees with your apparent point?

I guess the point of the question is really a flippant "why is this on Hacker News?" You can call it defining away if you want, I don't think it's charitable to assume "party line" means "what the peer reviewed scientific papers say in their shortest summaries." A quick google search found http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2004/climate.shtml where "it is impossible for an ice age to strike within days, as happens in the movie. They warn, however, that climate change may have significant consequences for society in coming decades." Emphasis mine, since it's pretty much the same warning as the title. It was interesting to watch the first comment's vote tally fluctuate, anyway.

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