Comment by Daishiman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Daishiman | Hacker News Reader

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> Personally I believe that it is a good thing to be critical about everything thats written in the mainstream media.

Are you critical about how to conduct effective medical trials in your everyday life? Are you critical about the best catalogue hierarchy for books in a public library? Are you critical of the driving techniques of truckers under snow conditions?

You can critique anything in life and there's a hell of a lot of things that are important for which we recognize that we have little knowledge in the domain and that our criticism is mere curiousity but has no relevance whatsoever.

For some reason only a narrow band of Americans think that their knowledge or their credentials on the subject allows them to challenge the topic critically or consider that the the scientific consensus on the matter is wrong.

It's a bullshit argument from bullshit skeptics. Critical thinking comes from having a minimum baseline knowledge of the subject. I have yet to meet a skeptic who does.

The actual, real skeptics are the peers of climate scientists who have domain knowledge and can ask about the modeling techniques in papers, what equations were utilized, what assumptions are taken and so on. Without that it's the same level of intellectual drudgery as anti-vaxxers.

Years ago I had little opinion on climate change. During the big email scandal[1] I decided to look into it myself, as an outsider. I downloaded the leaked emails. I downloaded various data sets. I also followed online arguments between climate scientists and climate skeptics.

After trying to grok the mammoth amounts of data, I realized that it would take me forever just to come up to speed. I decided to focus on the arguments. What I found was that the climate scientists could answer every objection, and I could trace back to the data itself and validate what they were saying. The "skeptics" would either: repeat their claim without acknowledging the rebuttal, or would switch to arguing something else completely, or would not reply at all only to go somewhere else and repeat their rebutted claim(s) without modification. Being something of a skeptic myself (in an evidence-based way), I recognize this pattern of behavior. It's not skepticism; it's denial. It's a marketing campaign.

When you have a true skeptic of climate change look into it, you end up with the Koch-funded Richard Muller deciding that, yeah, it's real science done well and that climate change is real.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann#CRU_email_cont...

Let me start with the disclaimer that I am not denying climate change, judging by some reactions that apparently wasn't clear enough.

Now to what you are saying. First of all, being critical of what the media writes about some scientific subject, is not the same as being critical of the scientist that did the research. Many times research is wrongly quoted or taken out of context.

Secondly, sometimes some research seems to contradict with other. For instance, as I mentioned already in another reply (and got already downvoted to -4 by now), while research clearly shows that the Arctic ice is melting, the Antarctic ice is growing. I find those seemingly contradicting facts interesting, they show that we apparently do not understand everything about the subjec t yet.

Science makes progress from new facts and experiments that can't be explained by the current theory. If people would refuse to see those facts, progress would never be made.

> Secondly, sometimes some research seems to contradict with other. For instance, as I mentioned already in another reply (and got already downvoted to -4 by now), while research clearly shows that the Arctic ice is melting, the Antarctic ice is growing. I find those seemingly contradicting facts interesting, they show that we apparently do not understand everything about the subjec t yet.

No, it shows that you haven't been reading the minimum baseline material.

Antartic ice surface is spreading but the volume is decreasing dramatically. The surface spread is due to lower atmospheric temperatures given the transfer of energy from the atmosphere to the ice, leading to the melt in ice shelves that used to be stable.

There is no point of contention there and if you had actually done the research this should have come up easily.

Well, it seems you haven't read the Nasa report that I was referring to. The increase that was measured was not in surface but in mass. Unless the density of the Antrarctic ice is increasing dramatically as well, that means volume is increasing, not decreasing.

The press release you reference, and the paper it grew from, has been echo-ing around HN (and the cryosphere research community) for a while. Last time was two months ago; see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796646

Short summary: the study partly conflicts other results, and the mass loss seen in that study may be more due to the limitations of their measurement technique (radar altimetry) versus other techniques (gravity).

There's more at the link referenced above. (See also: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...)

Claimer: while not involved in ice mass quantification, I talk regularly with people who do it full time, publish regularly, are leads on space instruments to measure it, etc.

And, like other commenters nearby, I want to caution you on your approach to "skepticism" and "keeping an open mind".

You seem to be selecting one press release from the hundreds released every year, and using its partial conflict with other information to call the whole hypothesis (significant ice melting caused by global warming) into question. That's not a valid mode of inquiry - especially when you don't have the training and time to keep up with current work.

It's like walking into an IC fab and asking why they are not using EUV lithography (it was in this article in Wired!) when you didn't even take a semiconductor physics class in college.

The right place to start, if you really want to get informed, is the IPCC AR5 report (https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/). Reading press releases only makes sense if you can put it into context.

Who is the "we" in all your comments?

When you see an apparent contradiction like this, why do you stop there? Do you really think climatologists haven't considered this? Here's one theory: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425716...

> As such, the behavior of Antarctic sea ice is not a paradox as some have suggested, but instead is consistent with the geophysical characteristics in the southern polar region that starkly contrast to those in the Arctic.

Of course we don't understand everything, we don't understand everything about any subject. When you see contradictory headlines, dig deeper. Don't stop and think "I knew it, these people don't know what they're doing".

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