Comment by 300bps | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 300bps | Hacker News Reader

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Is it so unbelievable that people could just disagree with you that you have to assume they’re espousing a fake or paid for position?

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.

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/?ref_=fn_al_tt_0

easily falsifiable claims like “this was caused by climate change and we can expect more of this”

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.

Unbelievable, no. I'm making a meta-observation about a pattern of social commenting on this particular subject that spans many sites.

> Instead we had hardly any hurricanes make landfall for over a decade

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.

Does “hardly any hurricanes make landfall for over a decade” still hold if you look beyond the continental US?

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