Giant Middle East dust storm caused by a changing climate, not human conflict
sciencebulletin.org
sciencebulletin.org
Is the HN population actually like that, or are these people trying to push an agenda and otherwise not participating in the site? Either way, I sure wish we could discuss these things instead of getting bogged down in "it's all nonsense" every time.
I've seen both cases. Even people with completely reasonable histories.
How would you "discuss these things" without having different points of view? Should we all just post 'this climate change is even worse than I thought', then respond 'I knew it was this bad, see my post from 2 years ago'?
Instead, we just get these condescending posts completely dismissing any notion of climate change at all.
I do not see this phenomenon with other fact-based topics discussed here. When there's a story about vaccine, we're not flooded with people telling us how vaccines are full of toxins and don't prevent disease. When there's a story about genetics, we're not flooded with people telling us that evolution is a hoax. Physics stories don't get flooded with comments pushing Time Cube or whatever. Yes, we do get some comments like that, but not many.
Sure, something like Signal is controversial, but that's something that's naturally based on opinion. Dissent about the tradeoffs of something like Signal is quite different from dissent about the reality of climate change.
If you have some non-viewpoint-based standard for what is a legitimate topic of debate, I would be happy to see it.
Even if you have a high standard in the first case, and a low standard in the second, I can find a citation for almost any proposition, but there's usually no point to doing so because the people you argue against will just find a different paper to support their prior beliefs.[1]
My basic issue is that it seems mikeash is trying to impose their arbitrary standard on others.
If you want to help prevent climate change, put up solar panels, get an electric car and hook it up to a renewable grid, eat less meat, fly less, whatever, just do something, because arguing with strangers over the Internet changes nothing at all.
My comment has no effect on climate change either.
The group of scientists who spend their careers studying this stuff is not "some arbitrarily selected group." If you think it is, well, that's a problem.
It seems to me that all of these decisions are arbitrary, and often practiced inconsistently.
Edit: as proof, I will soon have at least two replies telling me that I'm wrong and that all proper economists agree on idea X, where each comment's X is incompatible with the other's.
Or maybe you dismissed the result because you dislike the conclusions and conveniently believe John Lott is untrustworthy?
I picked this example because I suspect it's an issue you will be extremely reluctant to change your mind on.
[1] http://crimeresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Survey-o...
Anyway, on to the actual link. My first question is, why is it useful to survey the opinion of economists on gun violence? That doesn't seem like the right field to poll at all. Shouldn't you be asking criminologists?
This is a very "American" focused survey both in content and in responses. I'd be wary that you're oversimplifying. I wouldn't label the survey response to Question 3 "consensus" either.
>> Of the valid email addresses, 43 were Americans, 4 were Canadians, 2 were Australians, and one was Swedish.
>> Yet, while researchers from both the United States and Canada have extremely similar views that private gun ownership makes people safer, the few researchers from Australia and Sweden are much more supportive of gun control.
Aaand this is why I hesitate to suddenly generalize the American solution to other parts of the world. I'd like to see the opinions of a statistically significant number of non-american economists before coming up with non-american answers.
> I picked this example because I suspect it's an issue you will be extremely reluctant to change your mind on.
My mind hasn't changed here - but my views already align roughly with the "consensus" you've pointed out - although with the additional, gigantic caveat, that these views apply to gun policy in America, where among other things, I believe there's no possibility of putting the genie back in the bottle with regards to widespread firearms availability.
I feel it would be jumping the gun to try and apply the same approach to violence and crime in, say, Japan - based on only the above survey.
Does that make the majority of economists actually wrong?
Of course, this doesn't mean climate science is at all easy or that we have figured it all out.
I actually don't "deny" that there could be anthropogenic climate change, but until the left wants to have an honest debate on the costs (economic, freedom), and also when the left stops "denying" that it fits conveniently into their ideological economic model, then there can be no honest conversation.
There are plenty of things to discuss within the broad camp of "accepts that climate change is real and a potential problem." For example, the severity, the cause of individual events, the best responses, the potential dangers in the future, etc.
So you really don't want to discuss it? It's either your reality or the highway, as your other respondent alluded to.
What is this leftist ideological economic model you speak of?
But that's separate from the question of your position on the thing itself. Do you think anthropogenic climate change is a thing, or not? If not, then you're kind of dancing around it. If so, then I don't get why you're so upset.
I wasn't upset, but was pointing out that there's many things that you believe in that other people don't. I'm not sure what's so hard to understand.
For example, I believe that there's a huge political motivation on the left to believe in global warming that is separate from the science. I'm assuming you disagree. That's fine. You won't change my mind, and I won't change yours.
There is no consensus of agreement, so I'm not sure why you would assume that there would be on HN
So the question isn't whether anthropogenic climate change is a thing. The questions are to what extent are the effects? What are the costs and efficacy of combating climate change?
Twenty years ago when this debate was starting, the right said the left want to destroy the economy by forcing everyone to use renewable energy that costs twenty times what fossil fuel energy does.
Nowadays, renewable energy is as cheap as fossil fuels for many applications, and rapidly getting cheaper, and so it is being voluntarily adopted all over the world. But the right continues to assume it is just as expensive as it was twenty years ago. In fact, Donald Trump has said he loves solar, but its problem is it is very, very expensive.
and: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/feb/21/climate-...
and: https://thinkprogress.org/denier-bots-live-why-are-online-co...
and: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2485252/social-media/ar...
Unless this person is tremendously emotionally involved in the idea of climate change, I don't see why an average HN reader would spend this much time on a single thread or create new accounts to post.
It leaves me feeling like this is the efforts of a publicity firm or something similar - I remember reading some years back (well before the recent drama) about Russian government-run media control orgs that hired people to post comments to promote their view or damage opposing ones with bad arguments. Years before that, there was similar material from SF-based firms doing manipulation on reddit and digg. No reason to assume this no longer exists imo.
HN also has a strong libertarian bias. There's some correlation between subscribing to that type of dogma and being an active climate change denier.
But I admit I can't think of a purely free market solution for avoiding climate change, and perhaps as libertarian types haven't figured out how to innovate those incentives they just have to deny it's not real rather than admit the free market isn't going to innovate those incentives and arrive at a correction on its own before it's too late. The reality is, it's already too late. Now we're in the position of having to manage the consequences of our failure: soft landing vs hard landing.
Climate change won't kill everyone at the same time, though.
HN also has a strong libertarian bias.
> Summer 2015 was unusually hot and dry relative to the last 20 years
So data over last 20 yrs is enough to conclude "changing climate" ?
> Middle East becomes more arid in the long term due to climate change
This article[1] blames it on ' farmers who pump water from limited underground aquifers '. Is there any proof that middle east is becoming more arid and it due to 'climate change' ?
1. http://www.aljazeera.com/video/middleeast/2013/03/2013322185...
1. They might be wrong.
2. If they are wrong it almost certainly isn't for the reason I think they might be wrong.
3. 2) is especially true if the reason I think they might be wrong came to me within 5 minutes of thinking about the issue.
4. My first glance thought about the paper being wrong most likely is itself wrong.
Instead of concluding that the reporter writing
" Summer 2015 was unusually hot and dry relative to the last 20 years"
means this is the sole reason for the conclusion of the scientists it's better to wonder what all the factor are that led them to their conclusion. What is it that they know that I don't know that makes them believe this conclusion? That's the right starting point for investigation and understanding.