This particular Nature article gives a brief overview of a number of the consequences of global warming accompanied by photographs. Every article can’t be everything all at once.
That is a false statistic.
This is not a compelling argument for a skeptic.
>99% of all numerologists agree on the science
You need to highlight the backing by the rest of the scientific community to give confidence that it’s a real science.
Same for psychics, priests, and on and on.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but the burden of proof decreases as the claims become less extraordinary. I'd suggest "a whole line of science which until this point hasn't been controversial" can probably be trusted, and that immediately choosing to disregard a group when it says something you don't like strikes as more reactionary than skeptical. I very much doubt you considered all of climate science a hack science until it started to butt up against your personal beliefs.
Nope. Once you’ve there is backing from fields that you already trust experts in, then you can be relatively sure that the field is following scientific methods closely, etc.
>a whole line of science which until this point hasn't been controversial
Any science that makes predictions on complex systems without the ability to run tightly controlled experiments is pretty controversial to many in hard sciences. To see why: see social psychology for an example of a field filled with trash.
>I very much doubt you considered all of climate science a hack science until it started to butt up against your personal beliefs.
I very much doubt you read my comment if you think this has anything to do with my beliefs. I was pointing out a fallacious argument from authority that holds zero weight to people who don’t believe that authority.
If saying that 99% of climatologists agree was enough to settle the argument, it would be enough for 99% of police to agree that police abuse isn’t a problem.
99% of the sailors on a lifeboat say, "We need to paddle West, or we'll all die."
Sure, you have every right to be skeptical. But don't you think we should probably paddle West?
If someone starts trying to paddle East, shouldn't everyone in the boat try to stop them?
Yes, the sailors may be mistaken. But given the divisions of labor we have, and our limited understanding of the world, don't you think we should follow the best advice we can get?
Is there some better way you can imagine to gather the best advice?
In your scenario, there's no way for the sovereign individual to go East unless he can find the ones in the 99% with the cognitive dissonance. Abandoning ship would be the metaphorical equivalent of becoming a hermit and giving up on society.
There's no Other Earth. If Climate Change is real, then we all need to paddle in the same direction.
A man, Allan Savory, acting on what was near unanimous scientific agreement on the cause of desertification, could have remained a mere scientist raising the alarm about deserts. Thinking he knew what the solution was, and getting the approval of other scientists, he went on to kill tens of thousands of elephants.
https://www.fastcompany.com/2681518/this-man-shot-40000-elep...
How do you think we should decide what to do?
I say we elect representatives, and they act as though scientists are the best way we have to measure reality. If they're concerned about the proposals of the scientists, it seems to me as though they should ask for ways to try experiments out, to see if they work, and to try to scale those up. Something like that.
What do you think?
If yes, what do you think should happen next?
Beyond that I am filled with doubt. I've read a lot about the replication crisis in science. It started with psychology but has hit medicine especially hard too. Ioanndis' paper had a big influence, where he argued 50%-90% of all research findings are false. The papers about how scientists routinely misuse statistics also. I've seen first hand how enormous quantities of what appear to be scientific knowledge, things people believed were watertight consensus truth for years or decades, simply evaporated once someone who was serious about statistics sat down and tried to replicate the findings.
Likewise with economics. Is an economist making a prediction? Unless that prediction is "the current trend will continue" they are virtually always wrong.
Put simply, I don't trust academia much. I think most people trust academics far too much. The track record of failed predictions whether it be on the economy or the climate is enormous, and there are no repercussions.
Some of the most powerful arguments climate skeptics make aren't actually criticisms of scientists. They point out that academics are frequently portrayed as saints who float above mortal vices like self-interest or greed, vs "Big Plastic" or "evil lobbyists" or whoever who are assumed to be corrupted by their salary. But climate scientists and charity workers like money too. They have the same distorting incentives everyone else does. Important predictions = grant money, it's obvious. Why do people get so upset by this basic fact?
All that said, in the end, it's right and good to move away from fossil fuels. There are plenty of arguments for this that are stronger than "scientists say we'll all die, and this time they might be right!". For instance dwindling supplies of oil, coal and natural gas in regions of the world that are friendly and stable is, by itself, a good enough reason to switch to green power. I have no problem with carbon markets or government subsidies to this end as long as they don't destabilise the grid.
I do have a problem with people presenting any random weather event as "proof" that small children shouldn't go to school though. That's not a useful next step regardless of your presuppositions.
99% of Christians believe Jesus Christ was a magical being
Would you be satisfied by 76 Nobel Laureates?
http://www.mainaudeclaration.org/
> As of 1 February 2016, 76 Nobel Laureates have expressed their support of the Mainau Declaration 2015.
But what are you on about with the world freezing. That's new to me.
Well, because this was a thing in the 70's, so before you were born. I remember the headlines in pop-sci magazines were screaming about "the coming ice age" and artists depictions of glaciers in New York, Chicago, etc.
It doesn't invalidate the current climate science, but plenty of people remember that old sensationalism.
"Global cooling was a conjecture, especially during the 1970s, of imminent cooling of the Earth culminating in a period of extensive glaciation. Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect."
I would describe it a sample of irrelevant pop science noise from the past, that AGW deniers like to mindlessly compare to the current well established theory of AGW.
“An international team of specialists has concluded from eight indexes of climate that there is no end in sight to the cooling trend of the last 30 years, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.” – New York Times, Jan. 5, 1978
Here we have the paper of record making some rather official pronouncements and claiming the weight of scientific authority in said pronouncements. That sounds like more than "irrelevant pop science noise" to me.
Now, hardly a month after that second quote, we also have this one:
“A poll of climate specialists in seven countries has found a consensus that there will be no catastrophic changes in the climate by the end of the century. But the specialists were almost equally divided on whether there would be a warming, a cooling or no change at all.” – New York Times, Feb. 18, 1978
Which is a fairly significant change in position that should not go unnoticed, but it does nonetheless leave me somewhat skeptical of Wikipedia's claim (I'm still reading the source of that claim).
But even if the reporting on the state of climate science in the 1970s was wrong: why was it wrong? And what has changed to fix it?
On the other hand there were dozens and dozens of news reports, over a lengthy period, about acid rain, climate and ozone in the early and mid eighties. The world bothered to do something about two. We hear far less of those two and the Millennium Bug these days. Which is taken as proof nowadays that they were never a problem in the first place. Errr...
Which is not the same as "just fading away".
Edit: 1985 Helsinki Protocol (UK and USA conspicuously absent), and superceded by the 1988 NOx Protocol that includes UK and USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_Oxide_Protocol
At the same time there were also reports of heating, which were more frequent. Though there weren't exactly loads of those yet either.
Now, there were certainly one or two that blew it up, e.g. the remaindered paperback I picked up for 50p or something round about 1980. I'm pretty sure BBC's Horizon never touched it, though they did do the odd "out there" programme each series. They did one myth-busting von Däniken's silliness sometime in the early or mid 70s.
Bad weather event: see, that's undeniably the effect of global warming, we're all gonna die by 2030.
Climate improves: climate change is not weather, you can't judge by short term effects.
TBH I don't know what this post is doing on HN anyways. I like to browse HN for technical news, not this kind of stuff.
Reality: Even with China still misbehaving about CFCs emissions, the Ozone Layer already recovered quite a bit and it's set to be fully healed by 2060.
But well, on the bright side, at least that time, ALL nations comited to stop using CFCs. This time, the idea is: stop all emissions in the western world, and allow Asia to keep increasing theirs.