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Comment by zerogvt | Hacker News Reader

I'll probably get downvoted to the ground but somebody needs to say it. The problem is not with climate change deniers. Most people agree that climate change is happening. That's hard to deny when it's all around you. The million dollar question is whether and to what degree is human-made. And that's where science messed up big time. It is scientific bodies that have chipped away their credibility with their malpractices. Reproducibility crisis and flu-scares just to mention a few that come to mind. So - given that the authoritative voices in the matter seem all too often not to practice science but rather a variant of "research" with a lot of strings attached - then it is no wonder that people choose to not trust them at all. Enter hard-core climate change deniers, anti-vaccination and what have you.

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Million dollar question to whom? Randoms in the street and darker corners of the net perhaps, but as far as the science is concerned, it's settled. The most quickly accessible page I know:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2015-whats-warming-the-wo...

More data, and reference to IPCC, who consistently err on the conservative side, over the years:

https://www.ucsusa.org/global-warming/science-and-impacts/sc...

https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/

So where is the controversy?

I'm being very specific in what has gone wrong and it has nothing to do with the climate. Hitting me with a ton of links that have nothing to do with my main argument is irrelevant. Downvoting also does nothing more than proving my point further. Science is little more than another papacy to the eyes of many and public discourse is slightly better than a Mad-Max pit. Under these conditions I regret that I even bothered. Good luck resolving this.

> I'm being very specific in what has gone wrong and it has nothing to do with the climate

I don't see any argument or proof there apart of "scientists lie"

...scientific bodies that have chipped away their credibility...

I don't understand why it is so hard to get my message across. Perhaps it's my English (not a native speaker) or maybe the crowd in here finds it very hard to look the sorry state of science atm mostly because they feel invested in it one way or another.

> ..scientific bodies that have chipped away their credibility...

How? Examples

I believe that most of what believe about our climate has been pushed by "researchers" operating based on the attached strings, going back to the mid to late 80's, and I also believe that things are much worse than anyone thinks.

The earth and climate was operating in a very delicate balance, and humans disrupted the balance starting with the industrial revolution. Humans kept disrupting the balance until the changes we've wrought pushed the earth and climate past another tipping point, a tipping point where the earth and climate started operating independently of human greenhouse gas output. Which is where we stand today. Human output isn't helping, but we've gone past a point where eliminating our output will bring the system back into balance. The earth itself is now driving the climate changes, not humans.

The earth and climate have 3 very large and powerful positive feedback loops running, warming oceans, thawing permafrost and melting glaciers, and the resource driving all three feedback loops are greenhouse gases. The oceans, permafrost and glaciers harbor massive amounts of greenhouse gases, and typically positive feedback loops don't stop until they run out of resources, and I believe it's true for the 3 I've outlined.

Hubris got us here, "oh, how can humans disrupt the earth and climate, it's so massive, everything will be fine." Back in the day I got labeled as a tree hugging crazy hippy, basically by everyone.

Hubris still driving us, "if we reduce our output just a little bit we can completely change the direction of the earth and climate, this massive system" Today I'm labeled as climate change denier, because I don't think we can fix things, and I'm still labeled as crazy.

https://i.imgur.com/KOCTrVV.jpg

> The million dollar question is whether and to what degree is human-made

What part are you struggling with, that CO2 causes warming or that the CO2 is produced by humans? Because the evidence for both is about as solid as something gets in science.

> The million dollar question is whether and to what degree is human-made.

This is just another form of denial.

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