The FP Guide to Climate Skeptics | Hacker News Reader

The FP Guide to Climate Skeptics

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12 pointsrauljara19 comments

I think if anyone on hacker news wants discussion on GW there are plenty of sources for it. don't need it on HN. I was fine with it when it was occasional but this is like the 4th story in the last two days to make it to the front page.

So flag it.

i did. just hoping that by drawing attention to the overabundance others will flag these stories too.

As someone who has been upvoting and submitting AGW-related articles, I just want to defend why I do so. Over the past several months, it seems as if the HN community has been plagued with a deluge of articles promoting outright and utter climate denialism (no, not skepticism-- there's been precious little of that). It is my hope that by offering and supporting articles which give substantive answers to denialist rhetoric, we can move past that kind of denialism and back to a community which values both solid scientific evidence and a healthy skepticism.

The current strand of denialism articles shows that the HN community is becoming one where perpetuating blatant falsehoods is seen as a constructive and valuable mode of discussion. Despite being somewhat of a relative neophyte on HN, I am still concerned with this monumental shift in tone.

I appreciate your rationale and I agree with you and this article but frankly I'd rather see no AGW articles at all than continuing the kabuki play here as well.

as daniel notes, this really started on HN with the hacker stories. unfortunately the naturally contrarian nature of the HN demographic led to some over-zealousness on the AGW skepticism. your response is understandable. I just think that any serious discussion of GW delves too much into economics and any lightweight discussion delves too much into politics.

I'm borderline beginning to think these should be flagged, and here's why:

The problem is that this is Hacker News. New stuff. If an article just causes the same knee-jerk reactions to it by all same players? Not only is the article not new, the entire discussion is not new.

This is why, for instance, I have not posted many climate articles over the past month even though I have read a lot of them, pro and con. Scientists emails get hacked? Hell, that's an awesome HN story. You have hacking, scientists, climate science, politics, startups -- all rolled into one.

"The Twelve things Deniers won't tell you"? Or "Ten Reasons Warmists are Wrong"? Not so much. This is a fairly intelligent group, and I think we've covered a lot of this material already. Submitting non-news articles -- on either side of this -- is beginning to look a lot like trolling to me.

I'm a firm believer that it is vital that this discussion continue among educated people of varying beliefs. But 90% of these stories are starting to get a herd mentality aspect to them, both in submitting and voting, and that's not a good thing.

You're absolutely right that this discussion is not new, and nor is it news. Though there are some particular events that are new (for instance, the "no significant warming" quote being propagated without the statistical details that show that the quote is anything but anti-AGW), they contribute nothing to humanity's understanding of AGW, much less to this specific community.

That said, I continue to try to engage the HN community on the issue of climate change because I feel that if climate denialism is seen as acceptable by HN, that we as a community have very little ground to stand upon when we say that we are skeptics. Indeed, it seems to me that what is new is that the denialist mode of thought is gaining acceptance here at HN, and I think that presents us with the very real danger of a "herd mentality," as you aptly put it.

Once the basic issue of tone and community standards has been established more firmly, then that opens the floodgates for actual news, such as startups making money by making it easier to reduce CO₂ omissions, or about the wonderful hacks (and I use that word very fondly!) that scientists use to make observations. The basic issue of whether climate change is real is a decided and non-newsworthy issue, but there's a wealth of awesome HN stories in how we as a global society deal with it.

And I, on the other side (or perhaps in the middle? Is there a middle?) see the AGW debate as important because it teaches critical thinking, it's a great example of how hard science (such as the absorption spectra of CO2) can get muddled with softer sciences (such as paleoclimate research). It's even a great example of how the activist scientist is his own worst enemy, a lesson that we still seem to not have learned. It's a great discussion about causality -- surely the climate is changing, so the term Climate Change Skeptic is somewhat rigged. From there we can drag out Chomsky and Wittgenstein and talk about how language and definitions are critical to informed debate. And we can hit the Philosophy of Science concepts which usually causes all sorts of consternation.

But still it's not news. And still it's the same old discussion. And still the same people vote the same other people up or down based on their preconceived notions.

Green startups are awesome. Let's hear more about them. Hacking science measurements is also a great topic. I'll read stuff like the VASIMIR drive all day long. You're not going to find people trashing a startup because the startup is solving a problem that they may have political issues with -- at least not that I've seen. (They may ask if you are solving a real problem and if there is a real market, but they'll do that regardless)

Like I said, I'll go another hundred rounds if I have to. It's that important. But I know a topic that people aren't going to change their minds about, and this seems like such a topic. So I'm going to try to restrict my new posts to real news about AGW. Or about how this scientist-as-activist/standards-of-research story develops. But not the I'm-right-and-the-other-guys-are-assholes stuff.

I kept the original title, but the pedant in me can't help but point out that there are very few people who are skeptical that climate exists. There are many more who are skeptical that global warming is caused by humans, which is what the guide is about.

This is actually quite a good article, thank you. It does a very good job of separating out the varied concerns of climate skeptics from each other: from those with a specific issue within climate science from those who primarily have a political agenda.

It is not good at all - it asserts on the first page that evidence for global warming is piling up, which is just not true. It is more of the same politically motivated bullshit that the UN has been spreading.

What, specifically, are you calling out as untrue? Are you saying that the earth isn't warming up? Even most of the listed skeptics would disagree with you.

The only skeptic, I'm aware, to have a decent criticisms of the temperature rise (as exaggerated rather than claiming there's no overall rise) comes from Ross McKitrick and Stephen McIntyre, of which many issues have been addressed, and some are still up for debate. In other respects, an overall rise is kind of a red herring: urban temperature rise killed 35000 in Europe in 2003, agricultural zones are changing with exceptional rapidity (wine regions are moving Northward, for example. There are even successful vineyards in Nova Scotia, in Canada, where I come from, now.)

In any case, regardless of global warming, we are making huge changes in the atmospheric composition. Sudden changes in atmospheric composition have been implicated is most of the mass extinction events throughout Earth's history. How can calling the wisdom of these drivers in to question be politically motivated bullshit rather than a genuine concern for sustainability/survival?

http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_ward_on_mass_extinctions.html

Expansion in my head:

The Functional Programming Guide to Climate Skeptics :)

If you want skepticism go to Climate Audit or Watts Up With That, then use your brain to decide if their arguments have merit.

I have. The decisions of the respective bloggers to, instead of relying on facts, rely on misleading half-truths, misquotes and outright fabrications makes it difficult for me to find any reason to associate either site with skepticism. Rather, I find that both Climate Audit and WUWT are perfect examples of a sort of knee-jerk denialism that I find to be such a perversion of the word "skepticism."

The parent article, on the other hand, lists several examples of honest skeptics as well as of dishonest denialists. I would encourage people to evaluate the arguments of those skeptics, and not the pseudo-skeptics at CA and WUWT.

I wasn't talking to you. You're the guy who pulled his thread when valid arguments were brought up that didn't support your point. I'm sure that's why you feel right at home at Real Climate.

I did no such thing. If I know which thread you mean, it was downvoted and closed so that I couldn't even comment on it.

Sorry about that,then. I assumed it disappeared becuase you deleted it. I thought it would stay around in threads even if it was downvoted.

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