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Comment by jplayer01 | Hacker News Reader

So you'd rather just ignore all scientific results until somebody does a NASA-level code review because there might be bugs? You're basically on par with an anti-vaxxer, and the potential consequences are far worse. Congratulations.

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He said he's skeptical, not that he thinks it's wrong. I've got to say that this kind of rabid response from climate change proponents kinda prods my inner contrarian.

I think at this point the group think is so strong that if anyone came out with evidence against global warming they would commit career suicide by publishing it

> I've got to say that this kind of rabid response from climate change proponents kinda prods my inner contrarian

Oh good. So you'd rather see millions of people be displaced. We're fucked as a species when "I'm a contrarian" is a valid reason to disagree.

I agree with your point, but note..

> they would commit career suicide by publishing it

Meanwhile some researches create their career by publishing this sort of stuff, even when it isn't well researched

Automatically reducing an argument to saying someone is equivalent to an anti-vaxxer kind of sidesteps the issue and is a logical fallacy. If there is a problem with the argument, elucidate the issues, but "Reductio ad X" arguments are not valid. This is a large and nuanced issue, which requires more thought and argumentation than can usually be contained in a HN comment, but I think the reduced thing we have here is whether computer code predicting a certain outcome should be trusted -- and, more importantly, making major decisions based on that prediction, given the nature of bugs and problems we see in normal code. I believe we all agree that potential consequences are far worse, we simply disagree on how to treat those consequences and where they come from. Because there is so much at stake, it is best to be more sure of what is happening and to take the right choice, instead of the first one we thought was correct based on a limited, and potentially flawed, computer model. If the computer model predicts dire catastrophe, then we should take it seriously and do another one with even greater resources in order to ensure the prediction is correct and what course of action should be taken. Perhaps it is right in predicting catastrophe, but not in predicting the -right- catastrophe, in that case we could spend a large amount of resources on the wrong solution and miss the right solution, which could end up being even more catastrophic.

If he has some actual basis for an opinion that contradicts the large majority of scientific consensus, then he should have at it. But to reject science out of hand with no reasoning other than "Well, there could be bugs" is just insane.

> So you'd rather just ignore all scientific results until somebody does a NASA-level code review because there might be bugs?

The bugs, if serious enough, can make it not scientific, in the same way that a paper that has grave errors in it is wrong and thus obviously not scientfic. So, before we do a thorough review of the code, we should treat it with due scepticism.

EDIT: this can also be expressed in terms of risk analysis. For typical software, the consequence of a bug is low - most software is commercial, so the impact of the bug will be limited to that company's bottom line (with exceptions of software that can kill, but these people already are serious about bugs). Also, most bugs in most software are either highly evident (the button does not work, you get random segfaults etc.) or have limited impact.

On the other hand, the bugs in climate change models, given their "pipeline" nature (wrong result from one module is propagated downstream all the way to the final prediction of expected temperature change), can quite often have severe impact. They can also be not evident at all - they can for example change the final outcome predicition by 1 C.

Compound that with the fact these predictions are used to make trillion dollar decisions on global policies, and you can see that the actual damage done by bugs is not unlikely to be in the trillions. And that's why I say it's probably wise to subject the models to extreme scrutiny.

There's enough proof that we're destroying our environment on a grand scale - literally the only place that we can survive as a species. All of what you said is just rationalization for the kind of behavior that has gotten us to this point and will continue far into the future. It's easier to deny anything is wrong than it is to do anything about the problem. And I'm not at all surprised by how many climate skeptics there are here - intellectuals and really fucking smart people who are incredibly good at rationalizing their behaviors and beliefs to avoid the feeling of having to do anything and who think they're able to think about the subject matter more clearly and productively than the scientists who work on it day in and day out.

There is enough proof that the additional CO2 caused massive greening of the Earth.

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