Hacker News Reader

Comment by saudioger | Hacker News Reader

The authority here is insurmountably large and the data is readably accessible. It's like a blind person claiming the sky isn't blue despite the determination of every sighted person.

There isn't even a single point of authority here. The determination is made by climate scientists, biologists, ecologists, etc... across multiple independent governments, allies and enemies alike.

Argument from authority is meant to avoid groupthink, but there are many many disparate groups coming to the same conclusion here while relying on entirely different sets of evidence.

If you can use argument from authority to dispute this, then you can use it to dispute any consensus ever made.

View on HN

But for other consensuses, for example evolution, any individual person can readily explain how it works to a anyone else. Then it is up to the person hearing the model to accept it as fact, and maybe they make some logical error rejecting it. But until you explain to them the model, I don't think you should have any expectation that they should believe you.

It sounds like no one responding to me actually understands how climate models work. How do they work? What are their assumptions, their dynamical models, their uncertainties? I don't think you or anyone else in this thread can tell me that. You can tell me "the data is there", or vague assertions like "there are papers everywhere" - that's it, no specifics. If you were writing a scientific paper with such vague assertions it would be thrown in the trash.

Only specialists are qualified to even enter the debate. That is the essence of the fallacious appeals to authority that undermine all climate arguments. And the specialists are terrible communicators.

You can Google it for about 5 minutes and find enough evidence to occupy your time with months of reading. There's a huge variety of available data across various complexities. You can go as deep as you want. Hell, there's a webcomic visualization (https://xkcd.com/1732/) that cites multiple sources. There are multiple documentaries outlining it. How much more accessible are you requiring this information to be?

You're going to lengths to make a weak argument here.

And if you don't want to/can't do that - then you can trust the climate science professionals who spend their life doing just that. And they are all screaming at the rest of us.

I'm guessing that these deniers don't question other complex things like how their hardware and software works, how gravity works or how papers is made.

You've shown no evidence whatsoever that you personally understand climate models. You are still making the "the data is out there" argument, without getting into specifics. You are doing, precisely, what I've been saying is bad for the past few replies. It's like you are just responding to the oldest post in the thread without reading through it. Did you read it? Did you process any of it? Clearly not. Don't say my argument is weak if clearly none of it registered in your conscious mind.

Why would I waste my time explaining it to you for the sake of argument when I can literally just copy and paste a much better explanation after a 30 second google (I've read this article before, so assume I understand climate models at least this much). https://www.carbonbrief.org/qa-how-do-climate-models-work

You're just dicking around for seemingly no reason. It seems as though you're trying to win a debate that no one else is interested in by being exhaustingly pedantic. You didn't even really use the appeal to authority correctly, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt there. Good luck.

I disagree that evolution can be "understood" by one person readily explaining it to someone else.

Yes you can get a brief summary of what it is about. But you are not at all in a position to evaluate how sound it is without spending months or years.

Short explanations between laypeople is essentially propaganda, no matter which side of the issue they are on. What I mean is: How believable the explanation is is only correlated to the rhetorical skill of the presenter. It is not related to how true the proposition is.

I think this is a general problem. Climate isn't an exception in any way, it just happens to be the one area that really matters for our future (consequences of people not believing evolution is far far less).

> I disagree that evolution can be "understood" by one person readily explaining it to someone else.

Darwin did just fine in the Origin of Species ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species ).

> Short explanations between laypeople is essentially propaganda, no matter which side of the issue they are on.

While this is correct, would you like to point out a long explanation that will overcome this? A book, perhaps?

One that doesn't rely on computer models, all of which, in every field, are absolute trash because they can be twisted to say whatever you want them to say as demonstrated in the very article we're discussing.

How is it that Darwin didn't need computer models to make his point, but climate science is empty without them?

Origin of Species exists, yet somehow there's the Intelligent Design community arguing that evolution is BS. How do you properly evaluate? Would you say that Origin of Species constitutes a priori proof of the concept? No, you need a lot of context to evaluate that what is says is true. It is only a "proof" to those who are already convinced (including me BTW).

The basic thesis of climate change is even simpler than evolution (greenhouse gases causes warming in lab + nature compensates within a window, ocean acidification etc => there is a tolerance level where nature can no longer compensate and you get the effect on earth that you observe in lab).

Yet in the same way as with evolution there are opponents/deniers.

It sounds like you insist that something must be "simple" in order to be "true". That because climate isn't "simple", climate science is wrong. But: You have lots of stuff like General Relativity which is complex yet (normally considered) true. Nature doesn't have to be simple just because you say so.

The article we are discussing is illustrating statistical incompetence and says nothing about computer models at all.

If you want to insist that computer modelling is garbage, say goodbye to most of the science you have previously accepted. My PhD is in astrophysics and we certainly did a lot of computer modelling and equation solving (since the 70s...take computers away and there is nothing left of cosmology as a field, the same holds for many other fields). If you don't trust computer modelling say goodbye to anything you think you know about the age of the universe, etc. etc.

There is good science and bad science with the aid of computers just as there is good and bad science without the aid of computers.

I don't have any book recommendation for you. I just know how to do science (from an astrophysics perspective) and from what I know, the climate "sceptics" seems to be making a lot of rookie mistakes when they crop out, and the climate scientists seem to make sound claims. But that is definitely just looking at the surface and applying my preconceptions. I don't have time to spend a year or two to go in depth; so I see no choice but to trust the climate scientists the way I would trust an oncologist if I got cancer and so on. Reading some "propaganda" about the subject (as defined in my previous post, i.e. popular science) from either camp won't make me much wiser anyway.

> But for other consensuses, for example evolution, any individual person can readily explain how it works to a anyone else.

The greenhouse gas hypothesis is readily explainable to elementary school children. Explaining the actual mechanisms is, obviously, far more complicated.

But the same is true for evolution. Origin of the Species pre-dated the discovery of DNA by nearly 100 years. Even a not particularly bright Biology undergraduate has a better understanding of evolution than a hypothetical re-animated Darwin.

A thorough explanation of our best knowledge about evolution requires a graduate-level course in genetics (and a few other things). A thorough explanation of our best knowledge about climate science requires a graduate-level course in mathematical modeling (and a few other things).

> It sounds like no one responding to me actually understands how climate models work. How do they work?

I've actually implemented toy versions of some of these models so that I could have a better understanding of the relationship between computer models and raw data. I have a graduate-level understanding of ODEs, PDEs, and numerical analysis, but was still in pretty far over my head.

My take-away form that experience: unless you have the time to devote to getting (the equivalent of) a PhD in climate science, you likely don't understand these models well enough to comment on them.

So I actually do think it's just objectively true that:

> Only specialists are qualified to even enter the debate.

Which, as you note, is a serious problem. But the way I see it, each citizen has three options:

1. Get a Ph.D. in climate science.

2. Superficially engage with climate science.

3a. Trust that people who spend a lot of time studying these probably have well-informed opinions (an appeal to an appropriate authority).

3b. Trust some other authority (e.g., the PR experts working for conservative senators and fossil fuel companies, who are admittedly better communicators).

Obviously, option 1 is ideal.

Option 2 isn't necessarily better than Option 3a. How do you know what you don't know? How do you know when you come to a terrible conclusion based upon a misinterpretation of data?

Let's take me as an example. When experimenting with these models, I'd often find surprising results. But then I'd ask a climate science friend only to find that I had made some subtle but in fact ridiculous mistake. And they'd be able to explain to me what that mistake was, because I have lots of experience with ODEs/PDEs and enough experience reading scientific literature that I could read the papers/datasets that used to justify their assertion that I had chosen an unrealistic value for some parameter or another. And enough experience with statistical modeling that I could apply some common "validation" tricks and notice that I could reproduce some of the critiques of my mistakes.

How do you do that if you don't have a Ph.D.-level understanding of dynamical systems, plenty of programming experience, AND a climate science Ph.D. friend? Not to mention no family and plenty of free time...

That leaves Options 3 -- both appeals to authority. However, not all appeals to authority are equally fallacious. Listening to a quack pot cult leader and listening to a trained nurse are both appeals to authority; however, only a fool would believe these are equally inadvisable.

If you don't have the time to seriously engage with modern science, is trusting your own judgment really more advisable than listening to experts? I don't think the answer is quite as clear cut as you make it out to be. When I see arguments like yours, that Emerson quote always comes to mind: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

I.e., just because you avoided a "logical fallacy" doesn't mean that your mode of reasoning is more likely to result in Truth. See also: the millions of "proofs" that Sqrt[2] is rational. On this question, the person who listens to the blind authority of the mathematician has a strictly better route to truth than the person who believes their own mistaken reasoning despite (or, more typically, to spite) expert testimony.

I submit the same is even more likely to be true for more complicated issues, such as climate science or evolution.

The sky isn't blue. Not always anyway. And not from everywhere.

Great point on how significant perspective is.

And on how willful misinterpretation of an analogy isn't actually a point against the analogy

There's no misinterpretation here.

It's a strawman

Reply on news.ycombinator.com