Sometimes I feel like there's a bot-army monitoring all channels for new articles invoking the words "climate" or "global warming" and forwarding those pages to a waiting battalion of troll-soldiers.
Occasionally the person's comments only include political opinions, but I would say that, for the majority of these posters, the technical/programming comments outweigh the political ones.
I don't know about other discussion boards. HN is the only forum on which I actively participate -- maybe because it's so good at self-policing that the trolls don't tend to survive long here.
It’s not just climate change. Another prominent example that comes to mind is dark matter. HN posts about dark matter tend to have lots of comments about how it’s a cop-out, or how MOND is a better theory despite failing to match many observations, or whatever.
I consider myself a conservationist so I think outrageous and easily falsifiable claims like “this was caused by climate change and we can expect more of this” destroy the credibility of the people making the claims and the dangers of climate change in general.
The most famous was the 2000 article that claimed snowfall was a thing of the past which was finally deleted after years of mocking:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/12/one-of-the-longest-ru...
There are so many more examples including Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth being released shortly after Katrina and being advertised with a hurricane coming from the smokestack of a factory saying we can expect hurricanes like that will be much more common going forward. Instead we had hardly any hurricanes make landfall for over a decade.
If it was easily falsifiable we wouldn't be having this discussion. Not much on this board concerning astrology, for example.
Instead we had hardly any hurricanes make landfall for over a decade.
Since you're running at 300bps you have apparently missed some news.
The fact of the matter is that by the time Al Gore put out his movie (disclosure: I never watched it) even skeptical scientists like myself were taking note. It's not that there was proof, but something happens with scientific measurements when you start sniffing the truth: As you look closer, with better technology and more detailed measurements, the results tend to go in one direction. Not always, and it's certainly not proof, but it's enough to make our spidey senses tingle.
The danger in this game is that the system is chaotic (indeed, chaos theory was invented around weather prediction). So there is a point where even a small, incremental change will lead to wildly non-proportional changes. And we still have no idea where that point is. Hell, some politicians are trying to stop people from even talking about it.
Climate change doesn't predict more hurricanes making landfall (at least not until quite a ways in the future), nor even more total hurricanes. What it predicts is in increase in the average strength of hurricanes.