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Comment by slg | Hacker News Reader

I am not sure it is reasonable for every article about the effects of climate change to start with the evidence that climate change is real. If you come to this article from the angle of "climate change is a myth", a single article from Bloomberg was never going to be the turning point in your belief anyway.

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I think it would be better for the writer to provide specific evidence for the specific pretext. You don't need to convince me that climate change is real, but climate change is a general term. I'd rather see some evidence backing up the sea level increase in Miami claim.

Evidence that the sea level is rising? Or that the cause is anthropogenic climate change?

Which claim exactly are you taking issue with? If you're going to be pedantic, you need to also be specific, otherwise you're basically asking for some kind of blanket trigger warning about climate change.

The article itself did not focus on making predictions on global warming. The title, while a bit sensationalised, is not wholly inaccurate and was probably picked by the editor not the writer. The other two claims that I could find were about the potential damage of a six-foot sea level rise, which was probably accurate even if it didn't list out the likelihood of such a rise, and the article by the Union of Concerned Scientists which made a claim about the likelihood of increased flooding that seemed reasonable to me.

Probably not but I think GPs point is that if the rhetoric of the article was different and better data included then stuff like this would be harder to tear up and dismiss. This happens on both sides on all issues.

I think most of the people making this criticism are misunderstanding both the intended audience for the article and the point the writer was trying to make. The article was focused on problems Miami will likely be facing in the next 40 years due to rising sea levels and their pattern of development over the past 50 years.

It is not trying to make the case for/against global warming to a non-scientific audience. It is trying to make the case against bullish development in S. Florida to investors who subscribe to Bloomberg. The point is basically, "Even if these guys don't end up under the ocean in 50 years, they're still going to have to pay more in taxes and water rates just to keep the city afloat"

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