Hacker News Reader

Comment by justadudeama | Hacker News Reader

These are valid points, and it is important to figure out what changes in the model is causing such a dramatic change and scrutinize it more.

> The ability for science to change and adapt is what makes it so strong

To me this article is them _resisting_ change, looking for a reason NOT to accept it, because it goes against what they previously said. Maybe this is all to early, and in a year or so we will be seeing 4 or 4.5 degree predictions, but this article describes them trying to change their inputs to match previous answers, not getting new answers.

View on HN

Again, that's the way that science tends to operate - a la Kuhn and his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. You have some novel research that seems to contradict well-established consenus. It comes under close scrutiny, because science tends to be conservative. If after giving it a good kicking, its clear that the old consensus is wrong, science takes the wrecking ball to it. But it prefers not to get the wrecking ball out of it can help it.

> You have some novel research that seems to contradict well-established consenus. It comes under close scrutiny, because science tends to be conservative.

Indeed, even people we nowadays consider brilliant minds of their time, encountered plenty of resistance [0] during these very same times because their proposed ideas just seemed too outrageous.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_theory_of_rel...

If your model suddenly changes its predictions, you need to make 100% sure you know why and that is valid.

Just imagine they would go public with this "Scientists found climate change is worse than previously thought with updated model" and then weeks later find an error in the changes made to the model "Scientists made mistakes, climate change less severe than previously thought".

What do you think would hurt their credibility more?

Well this is the problem. People are reticient to make public a private finding that is different, because it is probably wrong and they'll probably lose credibility. But if everyone is doing that...

They are not reticent to make it public, they are publishing papers and are asking for peer review. There is a public newspaper article about it with quotes of the involved scientists. They couldn't be any more transparent about this.

They are not throwing away their findings and they are not burying it. They are working to valdiate/invaldiate them, because they are scientists.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com