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Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

Most of the impression of a mainstream consensus is formed when some kids polled a ton of scientists what they thought of global warming, but then restricted their published number to a small subset of those, climate scientists. Plenty of other scientists are like, hey, these guys are full of crap.

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Scientists who aren't climatologists have uninformed opinions about the climatology, aka the climate; they shouldn't be listened to just as you don't poll brain surgeons about the intricacies of heart surgery. Being a scientist doesn't make you qualified to speak on the climate, being a climatologist is what makes you qualified to speak on the climate. You don't ask climatologists about physics, and you don't ask physicists about the climate. If you don't have a PhD in the field, you don't belong in the big discussions where consequences matter.

So even if your story is true, those kids did exactly the right thing.

Regardless, the consensus that's bandied about comes from the IPC meta study of all published peer reviewed articles from climatologists; not from a few kids.

I believe the mainstream take on climate change - but it’s worth noting that you can’t even become a climatologist today if you disagree with the mainstream view of climate change.

So it shouldn’t exactly surprise us that most of them agree.

> being a climatologist is what makes you qualified to speak on the climate

> If you don't have a PhD in the field, you don't belong in the big discussions where consequences matter.

Why?

I think what we need is accountability - there should be serious negative consequences for being wrong proportional to how strongly you stand behind an idea.

Were all the climatologists who were confident we were facing global cooling driven from the industry? Stripped of their academic standing?

Then why would I trust the industry?

That's uhh, not true. At any rate, shouldn't we be listing to the climatologists on this matter, because their specialty is, you know, climate?

Yes it is true. The often cited statistic comes from https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/200...

Counting climatologists is a bad idea because they shut critics and skeptics out of the field. We know that climate models are generally wrong. Trying saying that while having a career as a climatologist.

You're really veering off into conspiracy theory territory here. It's clear you haven't the faintest how climate models or any geophysics works. Don't mistake a facility for computers for expertise in all science. I actually have a PhD in a geophysics field, I know what I am talking about here.

1. That study is 10 years old at this point. The evidence for climate change has become vastly more undeniable since then.

2. Majorities of scientists from all categories believed in climate change, even back then, according to this study.

I'm not disputing global warming. I am disputing the impression of a 97% consensus. And this is a great example of what I'm talking about, you're trying to call me a conspiracy theorist, and making up stuff about what you think I know.

No, you aren't just disputing the consensus. You are claiming that climatologists "shut critics and skeptics" out of the field, so we shouldn't listen to them. Yes, they do shut out pseudoscience, as do other legitimate sciences. That is different from disagreement on scientific facts. Climatologists disagree about very fundamental things all the time.

There are people on the record saying certain kinds of results simply shouldn’t be published.

Also, anybody who views climate prediction as intrinsically suspect pseudoscience isn’t going to want to enter the field either.

So now you are saying that climatology is literally pseudoscience.

That isn't what was said though. This entire conversation chain is painful to read, I would encourage you to read up on the principle of charity. It's a dialectic tactic that seems to be fast fading in the world of click bait and outrage, and I think everyone is suffering for it.

Putting on my conspiracy helmet and tightening it all the way, how can you prove that that's not the same as polling the Department of Constructive Mathematics about the law of the excluded middle? Every field self-selects for people who believe that whatever the field studies is actually possible to figure out, all the way from physics to Paranormal Studies. Someone who didn't believe that climate models could predict anything wouldn't make any.

Appealing to the authority of climatologists is not going to convince anybody because everyone who thinks they are authoritative already agrees that global warming is caused by humans...

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