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Comment by metalliqaz | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone ever got Pruitt in front of a camera and asked him the following question?

"Contaminants in our air and water cause X billion dollars of added health care costs and lost productivity to Americans every year. Rising sea levels and extreme weather patterns cause Y billion dollars of damage to real estate and crop yields every year. What is the EPA going to do to control these losses?"

I really want this anti-science conservative to answer the question about what he really cares about: the wallets of people who own lots of things. His side doesn't care about "good science" or objective truth, and they don't care about the public's well being. They care about money above all else and I think that's where the discussion should be focused.

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Critiquing a hypothesis is part of the scientific process, not "anti-science". If the science is sound, it will withstand scrutiny.

I have followed this debate closely, and I haven't seen anyone on either side put forth detailed policy proposals other than voluntary carbon caps. In my opinion, advanced technology will solve this problem before any major policy changes are needed.

Unless you he scrutiny is biased and meant to discredit the science that is. Republicans lie about scientific consensus on climate change all the time. Do you think, it by some miracle this review is not biased, that they will suddenly accept those findings?

Vested interests have vested interests. Reviews of publications doesn't change that.

> Unless you he scrutiny is biased and meant to discredit the science that is.

The entire point of scrutiny is to discredit and of course it's going to be biased. That's the point. If the science is solid, it'll withstand the scrutiny. And if it's not, it won't.

Any kind of scrutiny or inquiry should be encouraged, regardless of where it comes from.

In a bubble, sure. In reality people still believe the thoroughly scrutinized paper linking vaccines to autism.

Once the news cycle has chewed through the "EPA says climate change is not real" headlines and that's soaked in, it will be regurgitated for years to come. No matter how biased the scrutiny.

We don't really care about laypeople in this discussion, that's the domain of journalists who are expected to do their homework.

Biased scrutiny is the best kind. Scrutiny needs to occur and I would rather the people doing it sincerely believe that community at large is wrong rather than someone playing devil's advocate. They should make the best possible case against climate change they can.

> We don't really care about laypeople in this discussion

And that's why this discussion is pointless, because they are exactly the people who will be fooled by a flawed and untruthful study and are exactly the people who a) will suffer most due to climate change and b) are able to take action to stop it.

Okay suppose somebody raises a concern about the state of the research. Climate scientists address the concern and show that it is not meaningful. Then two decades later people raise the same concern. That's what is happening here. There hasn't been any new criticism. It is the same debunked arguments over and over and over and over and over. At what point can we stop encouraging that?

> At what point can we stop encouraging that?

At no point. That's how science works. Those who are opposed will bring up the best arguments available, even if those arguments aren't new. They'll get evaluated, rebuffed, accepted, etc. That's how it's supposed to work.

Many of the ideas you currently believe in were at some point rejected and ignored, frequently for decades and sometimes centuries. Bringing stuff up again, over and over, is a good thing.

If you are so thoroughly convinced that you are right, that is the surest evidence that you're doing it wrong. Always allow for the possibility that whatever you believe may be off and can be improved, even by ideas that aren't new.

> At no point. That's how science works. Those who are opposed will bring up the best arguments available, even if those arguments aren't new. They'll get evaluated, rebuffed, accepted, etc. That's how it's supposed to work.

No, this is not how Science works.

Repeating ad nauseaum the same debunked arguments is not how science works.

Or perhaps you think that is still valid to bring the Thomson atomic model today? Or the flogistum hypothesis?

The only thing those are doing is mudding the waters to stop the actions, nothing more.

Real science should even welcome biased, hostile scrutiny. Actually, that's the best kind of scrutiny.

Read Blaise Pascal's work where he demonstrated how to create a vacuum experimentally. At the time, everyone thought that was impossible. Pascal calmly addresses tons of detractors (many of whom had real skin in the game). If climatologists can't do that, then their work SHOULD be questioned.

This makes the naive assumption that the people evaluating the conversation are rigorous logicians who are not moved by emotional appeals and bad logic that confirms what they want to believe.

But that's not how it works. The EPA scrutinizes it in a biased way and comes to he conclusion that fossil fuels are just fine.

Conservatives get a talking point, people who don't know what a P value is and wouldn't read any of the publications that would cry fowl about this are now a little more sure that it's all a liberal Chinese hoax designed to take away hard won profits from nice American oil companies.

Yeah well the hostile scrutiny isn't trying to bias towards a different scientific conclusion. They are trying to undermine the entire concept of science. They don't want there to be objective facts. What we're talking about isn't biased scrutiny, it's dishonest scrutiny. Anything that endangers short term gains on Wall Street is to be destroyed.

There is no way that's compatible with such a complicated, subtle, and slow-moving field of study like climate science.

> If the science is sound, it will withstand scrutiny.

Only if both parties to the debate are acting in good faith. In this case, one party has financial and ideological incentives to push for a certain outcome.

After all, you cannot convince someone of something if their paycheck depends upon them not understanding it.

Conservatives say the same think about the "liberal scientists", at least with respect to the financial incentives. Basically they say that the only reason so many scientists claim climate change is a problem is because their funding (and thus jobs and livelihood) depend on there being a climate problem for them to research.

> Basically they say that the only reason so many scientists claim climate change is a problem is because their funding (and thus jobs and livelihood) depend on there being a climate problem for them to research.

Thing that is false, if there is no climate change thwy still we be studying the climate

But there's far less urgency to just studying the climate. I suspect a lot of conservatives view it as an alarmist conspiracy designed to give liberals more power.

> advanced technology will solve this problem before any major policy changes are needed

There's no way to know if that will happen, you're just blindly hoping the magic technology fairy will fix the problem because you hate taxes or liberals or both. Every ton of CO2 we spew into the atmosphere today will stay there for centuries. And there's a lag of decades between the spewing and the feedback effects to be felt, so there's little market pressure to fix the problem now.

Critiquing a hypothesis is part of the scientific process, not "anti-science".

"Critiquing" the same hypothesis by sea-lioning ("We're just asking some questions," when the questions have been well answered a hundred times), over and over again for years on end, is very much "anti-science." It's the same minimally-within-the-rules strategy used by the Holocaust deniers, Gamergate shitlords, and the neo-Fascists. It's not debate in good faith, it's a strategy of attrition, an attempt to waste human resources.

> I haven't seen anyone on either side put forth detailed policy proposals other than voluntary carbon caps

You missed a carbon tax, in my opinion the mechanism most likely to make a difference.

> In my opinion, advanced technology will solve this problem before any major policy changes are needed.

I agree with you to this extent: with the current state of affairs, only advanced (and as yet untried) technology can avert disaster. I don't think it is at all likely to happen, and major policy changes were needed twenty years ago.

> what he really cares about: the wallets of people who own lots of things

He only cares if those people pay him off, like the fossil fuel industry did: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

I think the reality is that those things do not impact immediate-term profits the way environmental regulations do, so it won't help sway anyone who sides with Pruitt and the rest of the Trump administration on climate change.

X is his job. Y is a question of science that he is working on right now, as the article shows.

> extreme weather patterns cause Y billion dollars of damage

We have no idea what global warming related Y is yet, so we can't give him that number.

But Pruitt isn't someone who is going to listen to reason anyway, he is paid to protect the fossil fuel industry.

I take your point, but I'm not really talking global warming here. I'm just going with the stuff everyone can see right now. Rising sea levels, drought, hurricanes, etc. The idea being that you get Pruitt to respond without having to invoke the buzzwords that shut everything down.

The talking points have moved from "it's not happening" to "it's not our fault" in the last decade or so. The response would just be "the science isn't settled on whether humans caused that" and stuff like "plants need CO2, so maybe it's good!"

Strangely enough, there seems to be a believe among non-science-literate liberals that CO2 is a poison. Obviously this is not the case and plants can increase biomass like gangbusters with extra CO2, as long as they have the sunshine and water. There might even be a measurable difference in certain crops. I imagine that would be little consolation after losing major fisheries to the secondary effects of ocean acidification.

>plants can increase biomass like gangbusters with extra CO2, as long as they have the sunshine and water. There might even be a measurable difference in certain crops.

Not universally true, some plants will be negatively affected by the co2. Either way its not the case that we are going to get amazing plants or that plants will grow to solve the situation.

This. They've started saying things like, "The earth goes through natural cycles. How do we know this isn't normal? There weren't any humans around to cause the last ice age." Honestly I can't event say I completely disagree with that logic. But for me I'm not willing to risk being wrong about climate change.

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