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Comment by rainyMammoth | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately climate change became a political stance more than a science.

It is now extremely difficult to get straight facts from both sides of this debate. Both sides feel like thy need to completely overstate and exaggerate the facts in order to create fear, urgency and hate for the other side.

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Yah, it's a real shame that the fossil fuel (and adjacent) industries spent decades spreading misinformation and disinformation, and funding the hell out of any effort that created even the tiniest bit of doubt in the public mind (be it fringe research or straight PR).

There's not really 2 sides to the debate over on the science side.

“I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.”

Do you think they are describing "2 sides" there?

Any science that doesn't have the luxury of proving by experiment is always on shaky grounds. I work in finance and have seen enough beautiful backtestings that perfectly predict the past but run into walls as soon as they go live, to take a prediction purely based on backtested mathematical model with a pinch of salt.

It's not nearly as clear-cut as one might hope. Cliff Mass, a respected University of Washington Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, is a noted 'skeptic' of the urgency of climate change, at least the anthropogenic causes thereof. I've heard of others, but he's the one that comes closest to mind.

I'd only say Mass is a skeptic of the shrillest, dumbest climate change predictions: the kind you get in the local alt-weekly, rather than the kind you get in actual scientific papers.

Here's his most recent summary of his views, specifically how they apply locally: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-science-based-appro...

It's really fucking clear-cut from a risk management point of view.

I mean, so is Pascal's Wager. I'm no climate scientist, but from what little I've read is that _all_ climate models are terrible at predicting more than 10-20 days out, and are on the same level of accuracy as financial forecasting models (i.e., 'not at all'). In my vast and inky ignorance, I'm just not convinced we need to _drastically revamp the entire economy soup to nuts_ in order to satisfy predictions from inaccurate models populated with bad (or at least 'wildly variable') data.

> I mean, so is Pascal's Wager.

I agree.

> climate models are terrible at predicting more than 10-20 days out

Note that if your weeding is in 30 days at noon, and you want to know if it's going to rain, then you are doomed. There are no good enough models for that precision.

But if you want to estimate the total rainfall during the year the problem gets easier. Not very easy or easy, just easier than predicting which day will rain in approximately a month.

Even though I trust scientist in this field I also believe it became increasingly politicized and not all papers are equally welcomed.

As far as I can tell there is still a lot of work and debate around how much people contribute to climate change and what are the future previsions. It is important to let the ability for researcher to publish research that goes against the consensus.

There is serious debate on the science side about the extent to which we can do anything about it. From what I've read, some think yes, others think yes but only by reducing population and living like it's 1563, and others think it's already too late. These arguments mostly rest on opinions about technologies like carbon capture.

The smugness is definitely one sided.

This is probably the best article on the subject I've seen: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/1/3/21045263...

The short version is that the 1.5° C target favored by climate activists is completely unrealistic, and it's harmful. We've passed the point where limiting climate change to 1.5° C is realistically feasible: it's still theoretically possible, but it would require the entire industrialized work to engage in the same level of total societal mobilization as WW2 for a whole decade. That's not even remotely feasible.

And when these activists say "it's 1.5° C or nothing", people are going to choose nothing. Voters will elect climate change deniers and/or decide that since they can't hit 1.5° C they might as well not lift a finger to stop climate change. However, it's not too late to limit climate change to 2° C, and while 2° C will have no shortage of harmful repercussions, it won't be the end of the world, and limiting climate change to 2° C is going to be way better for the planet than letting it run away to 3° C or 4° C or more. But the "1.5° C or nothing" rhetoric actively gets in the way of attempts to stop climate change at 2° C.

The perfect is indeed the enemy of the good.

Also the fact that climate change is being weaponised as an anti-capitalist vehicle by the left doesn't help persuading conservatives that it may be real/man-made/of the stated magnitude.

Conservatives: a group famous for being easily persuaded by the opposition.

As opposed to?

Both sides are not equally responsible for politicizing the issue and both sides of the "debate" are not equally valid.

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