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Comment by diogenescynic | Hacker News Reader

Neutrality is a mirage. Journalism can and should be fair without trying to appear 'balanced' or neutral. For example, there aren't really two sides to climate change when 99% of scientists and experts agree. It's really only the news who tries to position issues as if they are competing arguments like sports teams. This seems like it's had a negative impact over all by giving a false equivalency, for politically motivated reasons, to issues that are by and large not contestable or debatable.

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There is a debate, it's just not on the questions you're looking at.

Climate Change is by no means a 'settled' science, one of the most important questions scientists must answer is what the Climate Sensitivity is to CO2. There's a wide range of answers to this question by scientists, depending on which climate model you use, as well as many other factors.

http://imgur.com/a/vbOM0

The only debate is over the degree of how bad CO2 is, but we know it is 'bad enough' to be avoided. Whether it's really bad or just bad, we should move on to alternatives without that problem. As someone else said below, this is roughly like asking if there will be millions of climate refugees or billions?

Whether we are looking at 1.5C vs 8C is absolutely enormous in terms of what policies we should be looking to enact. Everything in this discussion is shrouded in a cloud of uncertainty due to the complexity of weather, and the thousands of negative and positive feedback loops which can take thousands of years to stabilize.

Popular science articles misrepresent the science and ignore the variance/complexity, in the end hurting the cause in the eyes of those who don't agree with the prescribed policies to address it.

There is really no way to control 3,000 people and have them all having the same understanding of and all applying the moderation criteria in the same way.

You'll be at the mercy of whichever out of 3,000 moderators ends up passing judgment on your post, whether they are liberal or conservative, whether they are having a good day or not, etc.

I don't see this going well for Facebook.

I think the networks way over-adopted the spirit of the FCC's Fairness doctrine (1) and the equal time rule (2). It's so easy to build controversy and call if "fair and balanced", which drives up ratings while suppressing the evolution of any meaningful progress in any of the affected areas.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule

I think a lot of it has to do with CNN and cable news presenting politics as sport. Jon Stewart's take down of Crossfire is still relevant and if anything, CNN doubled down on what Jon was criticizing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFQFB5YpDZE

>"there aren't really two sides to climate change when 99% of scientists and experts agree"

So what exactly is this one side that 99% of experts agree upon?

That it's happening, that we're causing it, and that if we don't change something, we are fucked.

The only disagreements are on extent to which we will be fucked - will we see hundreds of millions of climate refugees, or billions.

Can you be more specific? For example, I really doubt anyone thinks climate change is not always "happening" or that human activity has exactly zero influence on it.

Well, I mean, the alternative is that it's a complex issue often touted as black-and-white to allow for taking a moral high ground against rational people that reasonably disagree on some of the conclusions and proposed methods for dealing with the issue.

And if that's true, then it's possible there's no grand conspiracy and at the end of the day, either the evidence isn't strong enough or the case isn't being made well enough to get everyone on board. If the debate is being lost before they even start telling people how dramatically their lifestyles will have to change to have a meaningful impact on the issue, what possible hope could they have when those realities are laid out?

But that's probably not true, so don't worry about it. Now are you with us or a denier?

A certain commander in chief has in public espoused that:

"The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."[0].

There are plenty of misinformed people that will gladly tell you there is no such thing and if there was human activity has no effect. Pretending that there aren't and even if the issue is complex there isn't a set of clearly wrong opinions is disingenuous to the extreme.

[0] https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/26589529219124838...

I asked about "climate change". You are talking about "global warming" as if I asked about that.

Are you saying these concepts are equivalent to the aforementioned 99% of scientists and experts?

I'm really not trying to act dense, just figure out what it is people even believe about this topic.

I think "global warming" was rebranded as "climate change" to avoid people saying "well it's getting colder here!" as a rebuttal to its existence

You're asking questions that could be answered with 10 seconds of Google use and you're being kind of impolite about it. That doesn't seem like a good strategy to engage with someone usefully.

I don't consider asking this question to be impolite: Can you give a quote from what you find after 10 seconds of googling that sums it up?

This is getting off topic, but do you consider asking that to be impolite?

This is splitting hairs. The consequences of human-driven climate change are widely understood to include net warming of the globe.

For example, if there is a new ice age triggered due to human activity, would that would agree with both the global warming and climate change ideas?

If cows were spherical, we could agree that cows were both cow-shaped, and sphere-shaped.

They aren't, though.

Sorry, I have no idea how this is relevant. I thought I was asking a pretty simple question: "What is it that the average person concerned about climate change actually believes is going on?"

It appears this is the wrong place to get an answer to that question.

> and that if we don't change something, we are fucked.

This simply isn't true, it's outlandish even, and is part of why moderation is tricky. Why do you believe this?

We are not 'fucked' even at the worst estimates.

In 1990 almost 2 billion people were on less than $2.00 per day.

Were we 'fucked' in 1990?

Are we currently 'fucked' with 700 million people on less than $2.00 per day.

When someone writes "we're fucked", the only completely wrong response is to assume "fucked" has a precise and technical definition. As a bit of language, it merely means "things will be shitty". What does "shitty" mean? C'mon… yeah, this is all relative.

You might like Merchants of Doubt which goes deep into false equivalency in media coverage.

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