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Comment by oarla | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that most people who deny climate change, may actually mean that humans are not the primary reason for climate change. Since this topic has been politicized a lot, it has shifted the meaning of what people mean when they deny climate change.

Regarding the data, it's not very conclusive. Given the scale of time over which data has been collected, is it sufficient to create a reliable model and predict the future changes in climate?

Even if we were to assume that everyone agreed that human activities are the cause of climate change, it would still require huge amount of participation and co-operation among countries across the globe to fix it. That is impossible.

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> Regarding the data, it's not very conclusive. Given the scale of time over which data has been collected, is it sufficient to create a reliable model and predict the future changes in climate?

I think this part of the debate hinges critically on whether or not you think that core samples can be used to project temperature samples. If so, the data available to the models is vast and conclusive. If you reject that, the amount of climate data we have covers only hundreds of years.

It's more than just accepting the current data.

In order to verify if the current data can predict temperature or other key metrics accurately, more data needs to be collected, which needs time, in the order of a few decades. But a wait of that long, may bring more changes, which would render the model inefficient or incorrect. A very tricky systems optimization problem!

Then how did things like the Paris accord come to exist in the first place? It's strange, somehow the world manages to cooperate on things like the internet, international banking, and all sorts of other stuff - not perfectly, but substantively - and yet the notion of cooperation on this one issue is 'impossible.'

It seems tome that no amount of evidence will ever be sufficient for folks such as yourself, no matter how many predictive milestones are passed.

Paris accord hasn't been around for long enough to see if it'll actually produce meaningful results. Kyoto Protocol was around longer, and would you call it a success? If it was, then why have a Paris accord? The examples you have listed are things where the benefits are pretty immediate, not a couple of generations away.

To get to the level of co-operation needed, a significant investment needs to made in educating people of all mindsets, about the benefits of this co-operation. That itself is going to take a couple of generations.

I didn't say it was easy, but dismissing it as impossible doesn't do anything to accelerate that process because it drains people's morale at the beginning of the task.

It makes more sense if you ask: "what economic interest group would be significantly impacted if consensus was achieved?"

Basically, follow the money.

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