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Comment by blahi | Hacker News Reader

I don't dispute there is climate change. It is pretty self-evident at this point that the climate is changing.

What is not clear at all is whether humans are responsible for it.

Sorry, but at this point this gets absurd. I can understand that for some people it is beneficial to deny the idea of climate change. But since you are already acknowledging the self-evidence of it, how is it "not clear at all", that the change is not human made?

The climate has changed many, many times throughout history.

But wasn't that on totally different timescales?

Not as dramatically as in the last 50 years.

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

The scientific consensus is that it is probably man made.

The scientific community could not possibly hope to have a definite answer to that.

Hard liners on "man-made" climate change are sponsored through various channels just like hard-liners on no climate change at all.

I am no ecologist, but I know my statistics, math and logic. From what I've read on the subject, claims that it is man-made are based on assumptions which don't hold and huge jumps in logic and conclusions.

What we can safely deduce is that there is some shift in the climate with temperatures increasing. Humans probably are a contributing factor without any way of knowing how much we contributed overall.

Every paper which claimed something differing from the above made HUGE jumps in their logic.

The claims that climate change is likely mostly man made are based on a combination of well-established physics and chemistry as well as observations of how climate change correlates with the various conditions which are theorized to drive it, which gives a pretty clear idea of the direct contributions, and we have very good ideas of the root causes of those direct contributions, at least to the extent of which ones are largely the result of human activity (e.g., atmospheric CO2) and which are not (e.g., variations in solar conditions.)

Yeah, those physics and chemistry models are made by scientists who are really, really smart and are 100% correct, 100% of the time. They have lab coats and all.

It's definitely possible to model the whole climate system. Amazon is making recommendations with machine learning AI and shit.

And your qualification is that you read HN? I'll stick with the scientists thanks.

No, my qualification is that I create statistical models for living and I know how flawed they are. What are yours?

I wasn't giving mine, I am leaving that up to the experts in the field and trusting that they will do a better job than me.

"The scientific community could not possibly hope to have a definite answer to that."

Do I take that by your logic we should not even try to understand the environment? Since definitive answers are not possible, and if the current expert's opinion is not sufficient, then I fail to see what argument could possibly be of any higher quality.

"Hard liners on "man-made" climate change are sponsored through various channels just like hard-liners on no climate change at all."

Evoking "hardliners" sounds like all debates would be about selecting the most charismatic authority and sticking with their opinion.

I prefer to peruse the reports of established scientific bodies http://www.ipcc.ch/

No, it sounds like balanced opinions are always better than radical opinions. Radicals are almost always wrong and always unproductive.

And to answer your other question, environmental NGOs have plenty to do with atmospheric research. They publicize it some of it. They fund some of it. They use some of it as a political lever.

Are there any links between NGO "environmental fud" and IPCC federated results that would point out stronger political rather than scientific drivers for the results?

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