Comment by bb2018 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bb2018 | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have good information for how rare this actually is? To me - as someone who believes in global warming but believes the media does a disservice exaggerating its effects - this seems like a misleading article.

How many times during a 365 day period does the temperature read 20 degrees above (or below) the average? How many times does this happen per day, per weekly average, per month?

As someone who grew up in New England it doesn't seem like it would be that rare. There were weeks in July where it was over 95 when the historical average was probably 75 and weeks in February when the average was 10 even if the historical average was 32. What is the standard deviation for temperature in certain areas and how rare is it to see 20 degrees variation if you are looking at multiple windows of time that vary in length?

Sure, global warming did not cause it to be 20 degrees higher than usual? If anything it would be +3 degrees global warming +17 degrees random variation? Why run with 20 in the title if there is no way that global warming would be responsible for the random variation.

I think we need to stop saying “As someone who believes in Global Warming”. It is as ridiculous as saying “As someone who believes in theory of gravitation”.

It somehow perpetuates an awareness that Global Warming is optional to believe in. The belief part is off the table.

Same thing with debates about whether earth is flat or earth is 6000 years old. The fact that these debates take place gives undue credibility to the non-scientific opposition and elevates to the same stage as the scientific views.

> It somehow perpetuates an awareness that Global Warming is optional to believe in. The belief part is off the table.

This is a pretty odd take. Believing anything is optional. You may believe that the evidence is incontrovertible, but even that is an optional belief. The person you're responding to is just signaling that the questions are not based on climate change skepticism. In 100 years that signal may no longer be valuable, but today it probably is.

That’s my point. Believing in anything is optional - except for hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally to a “believable” level relative to the other side which is presenting anecdotal evidence.

Everything can be wrong. Even theory of gravitation. That’s besides the point.

> Believing in anything is optional - except...

Except nothing.

> hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally

Science isn't in the business of proving things. Science develops explanatory models that account for known evidence. Saying that science proves anything is super wrong and leads to all kinds of problems.

Fair, you are absolutely correct. Science is in building models about how nature works. Mathematics is in the business of proving, I guess. I think we are engaging in unproductive pedantry while going away from my original point.

I want to emphasize my point again - we have 2 arguments. Argument A and argument B. A is presenting scientific evidence, in your corrected terms - presenting a model of climate change. Argument B is anecdotal evidence. The fact that they are both argued on the same stage gives the audience (who may not know anything about A or B) a false assurance that both A and B are arguable and therefore, they are on the stage. It is fine for casual conversations, I am speaking about large debates that we still fucking have about whether Earth is flat. It is equivalent of "Trolling" and should not be entertained.

Many times the consensus has provided scientific evidence (e.g. geocentric model) and has still been wrong. For some reason, I feel that something similar is going on with the climate debate. Mix money, politics and some aspects of religion and one just might arrive to the place where we are in today.

I've seen this trope around for a while now, that is, people who insist that it's somehow incorrect to say, "I don't believe in global warming" or "I don't believe in evolution." I used to find this bizarre, as it seems straightforward for a climate denier or creationist to say such things.

I think what people who get rankled by this have in mind is a certain, pluralistic connotation of "believe." Often when someone says, "I believe in Christianity," it's implied that atheists or people of other faiths are not unreasonable to believe differently. (Something similar could be said about political or ethical beliefs. It's difficult to spell out the sense in which you can view someone who disagrees with you as reasonable, but I think you know what I mean.) So people who think "belief" is not applicable to global warming or evolution are trying to deny that we should be pluralistic about these matters.

I still think this is a somewhat obtuse equivocation on the word "belief," but I think I understand the intuition beneath it.

I was simply stating I have trouble with this issue because of the media aspect not the general scientific consensus.

The article makes no mention of how local people, businesses, etc. are affected by the temperature change. The intended article takeaway is clearly about climate change and how this fits into the current state of climate change. Yet, the chance that one specific area is +/- a certain average over a flexible and short amount of time has nothing to do global warming.

It paints an inaccurate picture for those who don't read academic papers on their own. It reminds me of articles that talk about how a stock is down 5% when it is up 100% in a few years and make it sound like the company is imploding. By not framing it with a general sense of regular variation the article itself is confusing.

The problem is not the people who feel a need to clarify that they believe the science. The problem is the large number of people who don’t believe the science. Focus your ire at them.

Nobody doubts gravity, so it doesn't make sense to declare belief or disbelief in gravity to put one's self on a certain side of the gravity issue, because there is no gravity issue.

People double global warming, so it makes sense to declare belief or disbelief in global warming to put one's self on a certain side of the global warming issue, since it's actually an issue of contention.

It doubly makes sense if you want to alleviate the knee-jerk responses that will dismiss what you're about to say since people seem to respond emotionally rather than logically to such a contentious issue.

Prefacing the side you're on in this case is like going up to a guard dog at your friend's house and saying "It's ok buddy, I'm on your side. Don't worry." in a soft non-threatening voice.

Placing global warming on the same tier as gravity is a stretch. One theory has hundreds of years of math and scientific experiment and exploration behind it. And the other is a 2-3 decade old hypothesis built on weak modeling that's not very predictive, I might add. The climate is a complex system and we don't have a model of it that works as well as the Gravitational constant.

If you're gonna downvote, would love to see you point to a specific climate model, and the math behind it...that has the predictive capabilities that the Gravitational constant does about how the universe works.

Global warming is not a great name, it could be called something like: (human-induced environmental and) climate changes, ... This planet is a complex balance, and once you remove more than 50% of the forests, suck up significantly hydrocarbures reserves, destroy more than 80% of the insect population, of the soil life, reject huge quantities of pollutants in the air, water and soil at planet scale, it's a matter of logic to understand the climate is affected

I don't know exactly when we went past the balance point. But we could probably be 10 billions humans without a negative impact on the planet. The problem comes from the way most first-world and emergent countries people live, the lack of a sustainable system

We can't even predict, or agree how to predict which direction a hurricane will travel outside the span of a week or two. Weather predictions, like climate change predictions, are based on models- models which are based on different theories of how air masses, temperatures, and pressure interact to affect the atmosphere.

It's not unreasonable in the least to say, "Perhaps the climate is changing, but I am highly skeptical of the models that specifically implicate AGW in certain weather patterns, or insinuate that certain weather patterns are the direct result of climate change" In fact I think it's much more plausible that a few decades of "dry weather" would be categorized as weather phenomena and not climate phenomena, since such decades-long changes in weather patterns are frequently a part of the historical record.

I think he said it because he wanted to make clear he is not a member of the group of irrational people who disbelieve in global warming. That is so his comment would not be taken as an attack on the idea.

The 3 degree rise is an average, not a total. Also, I suspect warming is way under estimated right at this moment. I would be completely unsurprised if we lose the polar ice caps in just a couple of decades.

this criticism, while accurate, is just utterly pointless sophistry. yes news articles are not infographic packed reports, nor are they academic research papers. your overdeveloped contrarian reflex is an impedance mis-match here.

it is well past time to make a conscious decision of which side of the 'debate' you choose to lend your voice to. regardless of what caveats you may put up front.

> this criticism, while accurate, is...

Forgive me, but doesn't your response boil down to "this criticism is accurate" and then, accuracy be damned, railing against it? If the answer is "it's really fucking rare", then that's exactly what the OP is asking for. If the answer isn't that, well...

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