Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

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I'm inclined to believe this data because I trust MIT and believe that climate change is a very serious problem.

But this app alone doesn't do a good job of convincing anyone of anything. For starters, it's just a bunch of graphs. I doubt most people who deny climate change are going to understand what they're looking at.

But most importantly, there's no straightforward way for anyone to verify this data on their own, and it seems like this app is kind of bullshitting the numbers. For example, how could they possibly know that "highly subsidized" bioenergy will result in exactly 0.1F increase in global temperatures 80 years from now?

> I have a bunch of coworkers that think scientists are making up this data and skewing results

Can't you see their reasoning after using this app?

I'm not saying this app is useless or full of lies. Not at all. But I think it can only really work as part of an education session or presentation, where someone can actually explain the reasoning behind that graph, where the data comes from, how they arrived at the conclusions, etc, instead of just throwing it on the internet and hoping it reaches republican farmers on Facebook.

> But this app alone doesn't do a good job of convincing anyone of anything.

I don't believe it's meant to. This is not targeted at convincing climate denialists.

This is aimed at policy makers, and people who talk to policy makers, and people who vote on policies and policy-makers.

I think your attitude is a great example as to why many people remain unconvinced.

The idea that people who have doubts about climate science are generally too stupid to understand simple graph is ridiculous. It is possible and highly likely that they fully understand what the graphs are suggesting and still don’t agree with it.

It’s interesting how you described that as exactly 0.1F.

I have a very different way of looking at data. When I see a single significant digit I assume minimal precision. So, 0.1 is something like 95% chance of 0.1 +\- 0.05 would be optimistic, and 0.01 to 1 is pessimistic.

I suspect this is a common issue with both scientific and technological reporting for a general audience.

Increasing precision here doesn't increase confidence in these estimates.

The phrase "highly subsidized" says basically nothing, yet it's enough to estimate global temperatures 80 years from now with a margin of error of 0.05?

Click the three vertical dots to see what "highly subsidized" means -- it's a specific level of subsidy, which you can actually modify in greater detail in the "detail" view.

I absolutely agree that this thing needs a margin of error on the visual output!

>I'm inclined to believe this data because I trust MIT

Really? After the missile defense fraud cover-up at MIT Lincoln Laboratory that was exposed by Prof. Ted Postol or the deliberate "anonymization" of donations from convicted child rapist Jeffrey Epstein (both at the direction of President Rafael Reif) ... or how about the former deputy dean of the Sloan School of Management, Gabriel Bitran, who ran a $500 million hedge fund scam for which he's just finishing up his prison time in a federal penitentiary down in Philadelphia (after narrowly escaping charges that he sexually assaulted one of his secretaries a decade earlier). The Sloan School is the same MIT institution that bestowed a prestigious entrepreneurship prize on Brandon Wade, who has recently spoke on campus about what it's like to start one of the largest and most successful online prostitution businesses in the world, on which some MIT girls apparently advertise their services (supposedly to help cover the sky-high tuition that funds the bloated MIT administration).

Trust MIT? Really?

Wonder if all of the downvotes are from people who work for MIT.

If so, bring them on!

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