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Comment by fallingfrog | Hacker News Reader

Except the people predicting climate change isn’t the club of Rome, it’s an entire scientific community, who have been double, triple, and quadruple checking every measurement and assumption for 50 years. This is not some hysterical group of panicked hippies. We’re talking about broad consensus among all the most educated and intelligent members of our civilization. Please show a little respect and listen to them.

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You are missing the fact that the salesmen of climate change have been politicians, and politicians lie, and politicians propose political solutions, they want more and more of my limited money, and browbeat people who already don’t like or trust them, and frankly that is a bad combination of tactics if the solution is needed that badly across the broad spectrum of the population.

If climate change stops being sold as a one sided political problem with one sided political solutions, you may see momentum on it, but speaking as a conservative, when your pitch men and women are Bernie Sanders, Warren, and Cortez, amongst others, people I don’t trust and disagree with already, people who have tried framing me as a stupid person who doesn’t get it, you have already lost me entirely on the pitch before it left their mouths.

Change the salesman and the tactic, because the current one doesn’t work, and it is doomed to failure because of that.

The conservatives will never support addressing climate change honestly, because they are getting too much money from the fossil fuel industries. I mean honestly, that’s like saying, I won’t believe that we are spending too much money on the military until I hear it from Northrop Grumman. So you’re going to be waiting a long time if that’s what you’re waiting for. None of those people care at all about you or your kids or the worlds future. Not one single bit.

You are literally listening to the people who have the greatest conflict of interest on the subject and the least competence in it. It’s no wonder you’re confused.

Perhaps instead of assuming a position that he didn't actually state and calling him "confused" you could have addressed his larger point that the vocal proponents of climate action alienate large portions of the population by painting them as ignorant or stupid instead of attempting to engage with them.

No, his central point was that he would never listen to anyone on the issue that didn’t have specific ideological positions, which turn out to be the least likely people in the world to accurately represent the science due to blatant conflicts of interest. It’s in impossible request.

To my knowledge the only major political party anywhere in the world to deny the science of anthropogenic climate change is the Republican Party in the United States, and those are the only people he will listen to. It’s an absurd situation.

Absolutely this, the fight for climate change was lost 20 years ago when Al Gore made it one of his campaign goals. Things like CO2 climate change or net neutrality that 90% of the population had absolutely no opinion previously on are best resolved in the background because as soon as a politician tells people what opinion they should have, 50% of them are going to take the opposite side simply because of the letter next to their name. Politicizing anything is a guaranteed way to ensure it will be in a substandard limbo forever.

I understand your point, though I can't help but think that if the US had more than only two viable parties, maybe things wouldn't be so polarized?

Yes, and they are repeatedly wrong in their predictions. We can't accurately forecast the weather a few days out. All our great hurricane model forecasts are off and that's typically a day or two out in the future. There are just far too many variables at play that we don't even know about for us to accurately forecast anything climate related that far into the future.

You don’t have to be able to predict weather to predict climate.

Think of it this way: it’s impossible due to quantum uncertainty to predict the path of a single particle in a gas. Yet out of the chaos, you can still draw out nice mathematical rules like the ideal gas law PV=nRT

I agree. My issue is the climate predictions that we do have over the last 50 years have been grossly inaccurate. We don't have any mathematical proofs for climate at this point like ideal gas law. But yet that is not how it is presented to the public.

I think you have it wrong. Gravity and momentum are very well understood, but a double pendulum or three body problem is chaotic such that prediction past a certain point is useless.

So is the climate well behaved like the ideal gas law, or are there complicated sources of feedback like clouds, plant growth, and albedo which make it chaotic? There are quasi-periodic alternations between the fairly cold periods of the current ice age and the interstitial we're now in, so you should recognize it's substantially more complicated than just averaging the speeds of all the molecules.

I'm all for a cleaner better world, but I'll never believe someone who says they can usefully predict a chaotic system.

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