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Comment by jogundas | Hacker News Reader

I would say that putting climate change and flat Earth into the same category is not totally fair. While the geometry of the Earth has been pretty clear for millennia and the local CO2 level can be accurately measured, many more subtle questions on climate change still don't have clear cut answers.

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If you want to make that argument, then be aware that many more subtle questions on the Earth's geometry still don't have clear cut answers.

That is, as "geometry" becomes more and more refined, there are questions of why the the continents are they way they are (Wegener's theory wasn't rejected until the 1900s!), why certain volcanoes exist where they are, why certain rock formations exist where they are, etc. That's why geology is still an active field.

There are no subtle questions about whether or not the earth is flat. Continental drift and geology are very much irrelevant.

I did not think that "geometry" meant only "is the earth flat or not".

Geometry, geography and geology are different things.

There are no outstanding subtle questions about the Earth's geometry as far as I'm aware. It's not a perfect sphere but we have literally mapped the surface of the Earth with detailed 3D point clouds - we can model the geometry down to near arbitrary levels of detail, and we do. Look at Google Earth!

Questions about how the Earth got into its current state and why it looks the way it does are not geometric questions.

Even if you speak only of shape, WGS 84 != EGM96 != EGM2008. The geometry handles increasingly more and more subtle details.

Yeah, but those aren't subtle questions, they're subtle answers :)

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