Hacker News Reader

Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

Reality -- or our understanding of it -- also is rarely a sure thing. Knowledge can often be imperfect. Attempting to deny that the skeptics have any good points at all often serves to embolden them.

Semmelweis essentially discovered germ theory (or something close to it) but everyone knew he was wrong and as a result it took another 30 years or so before "unpreventable" deaths became preventable. How many people died because folks in charge just knew they were right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

The point here isn't that climate deniers are somehow right and that history will vindicate them, it's that pretending to know something absolutely often (frequently? nearly always?) makes you a charlatan.

View on HN

But when is it pretending? I can introduce you to holocaust deniers, do they have salient points? I bet I can find people that believe the Earth is the center of the universe and the Sun does rotate around us.

There is no healthy skepticism in denying human participation in climate change. The efficacy of myriad proposed solutions are still out for discovery and debate, but that's where we should be accepting alternative viewpoints, not on whether or not human activity has any causality.

It's not a question of whether humans have any influence (I think you would be hard pressed to find any serious scientist who would hold that position) but of the balance between human and natural factors. The set of people who hold dissident beliefs is not tiny, and many of them are very serious people indeed. One can't dismiss them for saying many are not specialists in the official field of climatology because insights can come from many places (and there is the matter of playing games with the journals and people deliberately using political power to shut out dissident views).

Wiki isn't the best source on this topic, but here is one list, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_...

The work that has been done relies heavily on models and simulations. These are both not realistic (because there are many factors that are too complex to model, or that we don't yet understand fully) and have not predicted temperature well since the outturn of past years has been significantly lower than predicted by the envelope of such models.

The political climate clearly is not one where people feel free to speak (see other stories on attempts or proposals to criminalise the expression of dissident views under certain circumstances or to create legal liabilities) and in that situation many people will keep quiet and hide what they really believe. See Timur Kuran's work on preference falsification.

These things are relatively easy to demonstrate with experiments. I went to a church that believed in a 10,000 year old earth but accepted 'micro-evolution' because it was so easy to demonstrate. (Note: You may safely put me in the climate change denier/skeptic, etc category, but I believe in evolution and old round earths, and vaccinate my kids)

The problem with 'climate change' aka. 'observed warming is attributable to humans therefore we must start recycling, blah, blah, blah' is one it's mostly political, two, the science is not clear in a 'These are our predictions we passed the predictions', eg. it's clear the earth is warming, but it's also clear the computer models don't work, and it's really not clear what will happen if the warming continues, because a) we don't know how warm it will be, and b) we don't know what that warmth will do.

When people say words like consensus instead of hypothesis you can tell they are having a political debate that involves science rather than a scientific debate that involves politics, in the exact same way that the intelligent design people do the same thing.

The inability to predict exactly how a complex system will behave doesn't mean we can't predict, accurately, certain characteristics about what will happen.

If I light a piece of paper on fire, I might not be able to predict the exact shape of the flame at any given instance, but I can be pretty damn sure it will end up as ashes.

> When people say words like consensus instead of hypothesis you can tell they are having a political debate that involves science rather than a scientific debate that involves politics

Only because you don't have to point out that there's a consensus if it's not a political issue. Lots of things have general consensus - we just have absolutely no need to point out that most scientists agree on something unless someone doesn't believe that's the case.

There's a consensus that generally bad things will happen if we let climate change get out of hand. There's not a consensus on precisely what form those bad things will take.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com