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Comment by unabst | Hacker News Reader

You cannot challenge science with teams. Science can only be challenged with evidence.

"Prominent scientists operating outside the scientific consensus on climate change."

That's already a red flag.

Prominent scientists have, and will continue to challenge climate change from within "the scientific consensus" (whatever that is suppose to mean -- consensus is irrelevant).

Climate change is true not because of a lack of challengers. It is true because we have only found evidence to support it. It is true because of a consensus of evidence.

The nature of climate change is highly debatable (= could use more research and hypotheses) and uncertain (= further understanding is possible). But we cannot get into "the nature of" while in denial of "the existence of".

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> You cannot challenge science with teams. Science can only be challenged with evidence.

The goal of the proposed team would be to collect evidence and examine alternative hypotheses. No one is proposing creating a team for its own sake.

DISCLAIMER: I'm not a climate skeptic.

> The goal of the proposed team would be to collect evidence and examine alternative hypotheses.

But they exist. They are all the scientists already working in the field. Which is why the next statement is suspect:

> No one is proposing creating a team for its own sake.

I am assuming this Red Team business is about funding. They want to pay people "outside science" to challenge scientists who are already doing their jobs and are quite good at it.

That is why this makes no scientific sense. But it makes PERFECT political sense. It's politics.

The idea is that the existing science is already politically biased, so a new team will be created to investigate verboten hypotheses, contributing new evidences to the conversation which might challenge or support the existing consensus. Whether or not you or I agree with the premises is a different matter.

> Climate change is true not because of a lack of challengers.

In fact, the opposite is true. The theory that the rising atmospheric carbon level is causing a rise in average global temperatures has had many competing theories going back decades. None have been nearly as consistent with the observations as this theory.

Likewise the theory that the rise in atmospheric carbon is due to human activity has had many challengers, but none have explained the observations as well.

What will come of rising temperatures is a matter of less agreement, and less certainty. Rising water levels in the back yards of most humans is a common worry among scientists, but the current situation is rather unique, so nobody really knows what will happen, much less what the timeline will be. However, temperature deviations of the magnitude we are currently in have drastically altered global climate in earth's history.

source: basically summarizing from memory this recent dive into the subject of what the established science on climate change says from the excellent 'Science Vs' podcast from Gimlet: https://gimletmedia.com/climatechange . Corrections welcome.

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