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Comment by kls | Hacker News Reader

It is a pet peeve of mine when I hear a scientist parrot this trope:

"always kind of wondering why there’s persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more or less settled on"

It seems like we have lost all rational and respect for skepticism and correlating verification in science.

Personally I think warming is real (I am skeptical about all the doomsday predictions, as all of them have been flat out wrong.) but I would far from venture to say it is settled, there are still really big issues like the disapproval of the Hockeystick paper which a portion of other research relies on. The Pause Buster paper and the major discrepancy in Tree Ring data. Not to mention that the CRU antics gives plenty of valid reasons to be skeptical of clear agendas invading science. These bots being more proof of the case, there are clearly agendas on both sides and everything needs to be validated. Skepticism is a health part of science and making authoritarian statements like "it is settled" only invites the suspicion that one is trying to deflect true scrutiny, whether that is the intent or not.

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>there are clearly agendas on both sides and everything needs to be validated

one side features scientists who have been developing the same story for nearly 40 years with ever-greater detail. they don't have paid PR professionals or troll farms, but they have a body of facts, which, when taken as a whole, are unimpeachable in their prescription for what needs to happen to prevent future global warming. perhaps you may say that an individual paper's finding is refuted. sure. we expect that to occur with no fewer than 5% of all papers within most fields. the other ~95%, while imperfect, will continue to support the same broad stroke conclusions as well as many of the most relevant supporting details.

in contrast to this standard of evidence, the other side features people who stand to lose money by allowing the body of facts to be acted upon. they have the money to pay PR professionals and make advertising campaigns, etc. they can pay their own scientists to do some fake research, but the cat is already so far out of the bag that it's career suicide to do so. in other words, their position is so hopelessly lost that they can't even find credible fall guys within the field of climate science to make up nonsense which supports their agenda. think about that for a minute.

in this situation, we should expect the scientists to continue doing what they've always done: developing their research to be ever-more comprehensive and detailed, thereby giving the other side a smaller and smaller space to live in. in reaction, the other side will try to muddy the waters as much as possible for as long as possible to give them time to pivot their money to somewhere where the scientists can't harm it by exposing facts. this is what they're doing with the bot campaigns: repeating talking points like you have to muddy the waters and prevent meaningful organized action which would harm their financial bottom line. it's appallingly clear.

this isn't really a situation where you talk about "both sides" having agenda and "needing to validate" everything. there's no contest anymore. everything has been validated. the agenda of one of the sides has been exposed as utterly devoid of merit, not to mention egregiously underhanded. the agenda of the scientists has been simply to be listened to all along, so that the common good can be serviced rather than discarded.

> one side features scientists ...... they don't have paid PR professionals or troll farms.

Who are "they"? If they means scientists, I can totally believe they don't have paid PR professionals or troll farms. If they means the "side", do they really have no paid PR professionals or troll farms? I doubt it. The article itself reported 5% bots on this "side".

Not to mention that the internal Exxon-Mobil climate predictions matched up with current public scientific consensus forty years ago and nearly exactly predicted the level of warming we had today, as well as the need to combat the public perception of them as the cause.

The science is (secretly) correct even on the corporate side too - they just say otherwise.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

https://skepticalscience.com/1982-exxon-accurate-prediction....

[Just an edit to clarify - I'm not saying climate change isn't real, or that we don't need to do something about it. I'm steel-manning the grandparent poster because I don't think the parent to this post was giving them a fair hearing.]

Does the term "Baptists and Bootleggers" mean anything to you? One side can have (all?) the scientists and still there could be an agenda on that side to push through legislation that has nothing to do with fixing global warming (and instead be, say, about consolidating power). [Not that I'm saying this is the case, but there are many reasons to be against particular policies besides climate change not being real]. Take, for example, the infamous case of Prohibition in the US. Much of the political agitation was funded directly by bootleggers who stood to make an enormous profit off of alcohol being, and remaining, illegal. Even though it was true that "alcohol had ill societal effects", and even though real people really did want it banned, it was still, in its implementation, mostly a power play by people who had no good intentions. (See, for example, most drug stores having 'medicinal alcohol' for sale during this period, and many high-level political and other actors completely ignoring prohibition in their own daily lives.)

And, even if you can convincingly argue that the entire climate change side is completely well-intentioned [which I believe most of them are], that does not mean that scientists' policies are actually going to be effective - an expert in one domain does not automatic translate to expertise in others, and multibillion dollar mistakes have real costs beyond money.

Yes. Another way of looking at this is to say "there are more than two sides". Many lay people have no direct contact with the thoughts of scientists concerned about climate change, but do have direct contact with the thoughts of science illiterate journalists writing clickbait articles, or science illiterate activists making hyperbolic claims.

I don't think it is helpful to view all people who agree "anthropogenic climate change is real and a real concern" as the "same side". If we insist on this, then we have to admit that this "side" has a lot of agenda driven liars on it, which is not fair to the scientists.

Agreed in the entirety. Thanks for taking the time to write this reply.

This comment is typical of HN climate-change skeptics:

  - "Warming is real", *but*
  - "skeptical of all the [unnamed] doomsday predictions", *and*
  - dropping a few random facts about specific puffed-up  "discrepancies"

You're way in the weeds, and you're not an expert. The place for technically-literate outsiders to start is https://nca2018.globalchange.gov, or the science-specific report linked on that page. The folks who compiled those reports specifically waded through the literature and summarize it technically.

You are right I am not an expert, that being said I have a confidence in my scientific background enough to weight a science as a whole, and there is no doubt that climate science is not on par with say physics or chemistry. I think this validates my skeptical position, until it matures into a more solid science that can make accurate predictions.

That being said, I am not an expert and I do not plan to become an expert, but I will remain skeptical until repeatable outcomes can be produced. Just because my post fits a pattern does not negate the need for those answers.

I will freely admit that I have developed a bias and my skepticism comes from personal experience with reef restoration and the sugar industry funding climate papers to deflect from nutrient reef poisoning. It has shown me that there is an agenda on the other side as well.

To note though my skepticism is more towards the predictive outcomes and not towards there actually being something to climate change.

I just want to point out that the theory of human-caused climate change rests directly on our understanding of thermodynamics, and was first proposed by scientists who were initially developing that understanding over 100 years ago.

To say that climate science is not on par with physics does not make sense; it's like saying a wooden house is not on par with a piece of wood.

Climatology is not thermodynamics just as organic chemistry is not biology. To equate them is a false dichotomy. Just because one builds on the other does not mean that they are as fundamentally sound in their predictive ability.

Yeah, right. There's a bit of a jump from "it's thermodynamics" to "do everything Greta says". Skeptics (like me) tend to have a problem with the parts of that science on the right of that spectrum.

But even staying in the most scientific part of that spectrum (that goes from science to politics through economics and policy), it's a jump from "it's thermodynamics" to the data torturing that goes on in e.g. proxy reconstruction papers.

I am rather curious about your sugar industry and coral reef claim. Do you have any good sources I could check?

As for climate science and its predictions, I tend to keep an open mind myself, too much advocacy seems to be floating both ways and I don't want to wade through all the Marc Moranos and Greta Tunbergs to get to tangible information. That said, I have recently found this article comparing climate model accuracy over the years.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00227-019-3538-...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/01/sugarcan...

I'm really heartened that you admit to not being an expert. Often when I have raised this issue on HN in the past, my discussion partner claims that their physics or math background makes them qualified to draw policy conclusions from journal paper press releases.

As long as we're trading perspectives, I'll say that some years ago I had what I'd call a "generically skeptical" attitude. (e.g., "the consensus has been wrong before.")

I happen to know and speak regularly with a few actual climate scientists (i.e., PhD in the field, then postdoc, now publishing papers, editing journals, etc.) -- and they gently tried to tell me that I should pay more attention to the known facts than my generic skepticism. So I try to point out the NCA reports (which are very good) to interested, technically-literate, nonspecialists.

Unrelated to that, I started to interact more (professionally, i.e., joint research and publication) with Earth scientists in several domains. I learned that general physics training is not enough to predict what dominant effects turn out to be ("is Greenland gaining ice, or is the ice altitude just rising due to post-glacial rebound?"). You really need actual problem-domain experience, which is a full-time job. The Earth system is very complex.

This problem (HN commenters trusting their general physics/math competence beyond its limits) is endemic and omnipresent in HN climate threads, especially discussing press releases linked to climate-science research papers.

This is often compounded by the press release itself being designed to maximize visibility! So, now you have two problems: the press release is sensational, and the journal paper it links to is written for climate scientists.

Would you consider avoiding this style of quotation for quotes that don't benefit from monospace? It renders poorly on mobile.

Your link gives access denied.

I was able to access it, maybe they were breifly overwhelmed?

Edit: If you still can't access it for some reason here is a direct link to the PDF:

https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/downloads/NCA4_2018_FullRep...

And here is the first paragraph:

"Summary Findings

These Summary Findings represent a high-level synthesis of the material in the underlying report. The findings consolidate Key Messages and supporting evidence from 16 national-level topic chapters, 10 regional chapters, and 2 chapters that focus on societal response strategies (mitigation and adaptation). Unless otherwise noted, qualitative statements regarding future conditions in these Summary Findings are broadly applicable across the range of different levels of future climate change and associated impacts considered in this report."

People who have lived through previous 'this is going to kill us all' doomsday cycles are just a lot harder to convince.

My parents are the same. The oil crisis in the 70s, death of the forests in the 80s, the ozone hole in the 90s must have been at their peak on the same hype level over here in Europe as the current climate crisis.

Do you know why the ozone hole crises isn’t a crisis any more? Because collective action worked.

This is precisely true. The ozone hole is what sparked us to build the global earth observing system that we now have. It was originally not known how to observe and monitor atmospheric chemistry at a global scale.

The point of “The Boy who Cried Wolf” is not that we should stop caring after a few false alarms. It’s that the wolves tend to show up when we do.

This is nonsense. The only agenda here is money. Those bots are all twisting discussion towards climate denialism and in support of fossil fuel companies. You can draw a straight line to mass disinformation from the budgets of major oil companies. It's a PR expense, and why wouldn't they? On the margin it's in their interests and they won't have to foot the bill from any sort of environmental issues that follow. They don't have to care if the world burns.

You can't have pure science in a world where financial incentives are towards lies and obfuscation. This isn't justifiable skepticism, this is information warfare.

> You can draw a straight line to mass disinformation from the budgets of major oil companies

Citation needed.

It's a rhetoric not a fact, but any logical person can deduce that an industry that stands to lose money, and has a lot of it, will use some of it to push a narrative that everything is fine. This is tutorial level critical thinking.

It is also the basis of much conspiracy theorizing. The chain of logic is:

1. Group X has an incentive to do Y

2. We observe Y

3. We also observe specific instances of X doing Y

4. Therefore, all Y is caused by X

The problem, obviously, comes in step 4.

Not OP, but the oil lobby in Canada runs rather disingenuous commercials on television on a regular basis.

https://www.youtube.com/user/cappvideos

https://www.youtube.com/user/cappvideos/videos?view=0&sort=p...

It's more like they gloss over the impact of oil while talk about all the good they do. "Mass disinformation" is an overstatement because while you're seeing selection bias, at least the first few videos weren't untrue.

No, they’re not untrue. You’re right about that.

The disinformation comes in the complete denial that they’ve done any harm in the first place because they make any attempt to rectify that harm.

My grandmother worked for Gulf/Shell in Toronto and then Alberta mid-century and even after she retired (twice) was very committed to the very same messaging.

It’s subtle—but as an outsider with that perspective into the industry it seems quite apparent.

I’ll add that none of it is black and white except for the effect that we’ve had on our environment.

> I am skeptical about all the doomsday predictions, as all of them have been flat out wrong

Can you give an example of a ‘doomsday prediction’ made by a mainstream scientific body - rather than a commentator or politician - that has proved to be flat out wrong?

National Climate Assessment (No. 4), May 2014.

"Climate change is contributing to increases in wildfires across the western US and Alaska."

US Forest Facts and Historical Trends

"the U.S. forest area has decreased by less than 1.4 percent over the 90 years from 1907 to 1997"

https://file.scirp.org/Html/1-8601410_67248.htm?utm_campaign...

There are also countless predictions on the intensity of hurricanes by scientist related to climate change. But one has to ignore almost 100 years of research on the natural 9 to 13 year cycles of hurricanes to make the models work.

Unforested land burns too. It burns frequently, in fact. And it tends to destroy crops and kill people.

The scirp.org paper you linked, which was published in 'iBusiness,' a journal "dedicated to the latest advancement of Internet and Business," spent a bit of time railing against single-variable studies and then proceeded to make claims based on Google searches for statistics, then evaluating them in context of a single variable. For instance, he measures the slope of the fit-line of the number of wildfires, but completely ignores the size of those fires -- which has increased measurably since the 1980s. It's an easy mistake to make, especially since the author is not a climate expert, a wildfire expert, or any other kind of physical scientist -- he's an economist. I'm hoping it was a mistake, despite his footnotes being a stream of angry ranting about unnamed malpracticioners and assumptions about other people's motives.

This kind of surface-skimming faux-literature-review is extremely harmful. I'm confident in that assessment of your selection of this paper because you left the adwords UTM tag in your link.

A better paper to support your position would have been this one: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-010-9858-... which posits with some evidence that some forms of climate change may reduce burn fuel, via killing off vegetation that is sensitive to temperature change. Here is an example of the other side, which focuses on a specific bioregion and does consider both incidence rate and size of fires: https://www.pnas.org/content/108/32/13165

Both of these papers, incidentally, were referred in the very same fourth National Climate Assessment.

Please evaluate the qualifications of the people whose papers you read to inform your opinions.

How do stats the end in 1997 relate to an assessment from 2014? Is it possible that the 17-year gap is a factor?

I'm also not sure this is a doomsday prediction, so it doesn't really address the request.

It is evidence of a prediction, there are plenty of them out there. I used the first one I found as I have several threads going on, on HN so I was trying to provide a quick link that supported the claim that, there have indeed been predictions by academia and that it is not just journalism engaging in it. These predictions have been going on for decades and they are not getting them right.

SNOWFALL will become “A very rare and exciting event… Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Dr David Viner – Senior scientist, climatic research unit (CRU)

“Winters with strong frosts and lots of snow like we had 20 years ago will no longer exist at our latitudes.” – Professor Mojib Latif (2000)

“Good bye winter. Never again snow?” – Spiegel (2000)

“Milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms” – IPCC (2001)

Among others documented here...

https://climatism.blog/2019/11/18/snowfall-will-signal-the-d...

Ah, David Viner's quote. He wasn't actually quoting from a research paper or anything there though, was he? He produced an (ill-judged) quote for a newspaper. I like the was that Climatism tried to link the IPCC to it - but only comes up with... "Warmer winters and fewer cold spells because of climte change will decrease cold-reloated mortality'.

Are you arguing that there haven't been warmer winters and fewer cold spells in temperate countries?

> He wasn't actually quoting from a research paper or anything there though, was he?

Unfortunately, most people get their information from the media. When a Climate Scientist, recognized as an expert, makes a declarative statement, that statement will be in the minds & discussions more than a scientific paper. Re: the science, there is plenty of criticism & the statements in the media by scientists, media, & politicians present more certainty than scientific papers.

> “Milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms” – IPCC (2001)

> Are you arguing that there haven't been warmer winters and fewer cold spells in temperate countries?

The entire statement is the prognostication for milder winter temperatures AND a decrease in heavy snowstorms. I'm not aware of a decrease in heavy snowstorms or milder winter temperatures. I am aware of adjustments to measured temperatures, by the NOAA, which make the 1930s adjusted to be cooler and modern temperatures adjusted to be warmer.

>It is a pet peeve of mine when I hear a scientist parrot this trope

I don't think scientists are the ones saying that. At the very least you're right that they shouldn't be. It's unscientific.

Laymen tend to underestimate the complexity and chaotic nature of climate and climate models. And the very limited time window with which we are analyzing a phenomenon which occurs on hundred thousand to million+ year scales. And the number of tweakable parameters in climate models which give you the freedom to [accidentally] get just about any results you want while simultaneously backfitting data...

It's actually a little more complicated than CO2->warming->catastrophe. In the same vein, anyone who says petroleum companies knew about climate change in the 80s is being foolish. No one "knew" about climate change in the 80s. It took 30 years of science to get from that conjecture to the point where we're anywhere near certain of what's going on.

And even now the science is clearly biased - what does the field do, for example, when there is consistent evidence that it's predictions are far too warm? They go digging for explanations like oceanic absorption, rather than adjust their models.

Geoscience, by it's nature as a non experimental soft science which can only extrapolate from sparse historic data, is messy. Industry geoscience is one of the highest paid and cushiest industries, far more funding and maturity of theory and tooling than that of climate science - yet we regularly drill $100MM-$200MM dry holes across industry. Climate science is in an even worse state - you have no dry holes to tell you you're wrong. To say this is settled science is foolish.

We don't have the luxury of eating the investment on a "dry hole" when this is a global phenomenon. How is the path of highest caution not warranted here? What exactly are we losing by aggressively switching to renewables?

This isn't an academic question. It is an incredibly practical one.

If we spend hundreds of billions of dollars fighting CO2 (capturing it, moving to more expensive energy sources, etc), that’s hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent elsewhere, on other problems like cancer, heart disease, etc.

Or hundreds of billions of dollars on football, flying cars, or whatever captures peoples' attention.

Or on proxy wars over more oil!

We (USA) could take it out of the defense budget if we tasked the military with climate security.

When you calculate risk/reward to efficiently allocate resources, you have to effectively estimate probabilities of both.

Yes some predictions are dire but if they have a one in a million chance of happening (for example) then it doesn't make sense to divert funds that could be better spent on more certain problems.

That is a different argument , one that needs to be made.

OP is talking about people who spout doomsday predictions.

I once had a debate with someone who was convinced that humans were going extinct in the next century. He wasn't talking about migrations of hundred of millions, deaths of tens of millions, and climate patterns of droughts and floods changing, which are all present in predictions. He really believed that every single human was going to die. There are people who literally speak bullshit doomsday philosophy.

To be fair, all that is really required for human extinction is for us to start firing our nukes. Geopolitically destabilizing events increase the potential for that considerably.

That's not in any way to say that climate change must necessarily lead to thermonuclear war or anything so dramatic as that, but human extinction is a real threat hanging over our heads at all times. It's something worth being worried about.

Just remembered, he was basing this on the planet being uninhabitable soon.

I find that laughable. Despite how quickly and how chaotically the climate changes, we are not going to go extinct because earth is becoming uninhabitable

> They go digging for explanations like oceanic absorption, rather than adjust their models.

Isn't oceanic absorption experimentally verified? So they did adjust their models correctly -- the correct way was to model oceanic absorption.

How else do you adjust models if not by finding processes previously not modeled, verify them and then model them?

>Isn't oceanic absorption experimentally verified

You cannot experimentally verify oceanic heat absorption, the same way you cannot experimentally verify anything predicted by climate science - because the scale of such experiments make them effectively impossible.

At best you can experimentally verify bits of theory on small scales - say, testing the temperature of a greenhouse with varying levels of CO2 - then combine those bits into a predictive mathematical/computational model, make predictions, and then perform measurements on the planet and look for results within a confidence interval.

But you're taking a problem with a massive number of degrees of freedom and attempting to reduce the search space to a few dozen. This reduction is non-unique, which is to say there are a large number of ways to model a complex phenomenon like climate which will agree with past and present measurements, but fail to account for the actual drivers which will influence the future.

This is partly why all climate models to date have been incorrect, and the fact that they consistently overpredict temperatures is a strong indication of institutional bias.

>How else do you adjust models if not by finding processes previously not modeled, verify them and then model them?

Excluding potential bias from researchers, there's nothing particularly wrong with this approach, it's the best we can do and given enough time and resources eventually such a search should theoretically stumble upon a correct, complete model, though this isn't necessarily practically achievable for many real world problems. But the issue here is that the confidence of such results should not be misrepresented, and that's the part that people who claim the "science is settled" are missing.

Here is an article describing mechanism of oceanic heat absorption (something to do with changing gradient of surface layer exposed to infrared radiation affecting heat exchange) and referencing multiple studies that indicate oceans do heat up [0].

"Observations of ocean temperatures have revealed that the ocean heat content has been increasing significantly over recent decades (Willis et al, 2004; Levitus et al, 2005; Lyman et al, 2006)"

[0] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/09/why-gr...

> Excluding potential bias from researchers [...]

That's a good point. There is a potential for motivated reasoning bias, when you scrutinize evidence you don't like more, and stop scrutinizing evidence you do like earlier. But in this case effect is measured, verified and explained (as far as I can tell). And it makes models more precise.

Is it possible that people looked too hard for negative feedback loops instead of looking for faults in already modeled processes? Maybe. But they did find such a loop and explained discrepancy. Now you need another discrepancy between model prediction and incoming data to see if anything needs adjusting.

> You cannot experimentally verify oceanic heat absorption, the same way you cannot experimentally verify anything predicted by climate science - because the scale of such experiments make them effectively impossible.

You can level the same complaints about general relativity, but for some reason folks rarely do. Wonder why...

That's not the same thing at all. General relativity makes incredibly precise predictions about very specific phenomena. There have been hundreds of separate natural observational experiments (transit of mercury to gravitational lensing) and plenty of human created ones too (every GPS satellite in orbit).

Global climate science has it even harder than economics as an experimental science - we've got exactly one fully integrated system to observe, and we can't control for any of the variables. We can't re-run the same experiment again. We need to be objective and honest in how we communicate about climate science. Drawing false equivalences just undermines the very real and very urgent discussions we need to be having about climate as a species.

No. We have measured time dilation by putting atomic clocks in orbit.

> And even now the science is clearly biased - what does the field do, for example, when there is consistent evidence that it's predictions are far too warm? They go digging for explanations like oceanic absorption, rather than adjust their models.

I was in academia and reading the literature as this kerfuffle went down (2012, IIRC). The models of temperature overshot, but the models of global heat flow did not, so the net effect of the misprediction was always going to be a delay rather than a change in the ultimate effect. To use the hydraulic analogy, we could see water flowing into the barrel at the same rate (satellites can measure total heat influx / outflux from Earth very accurately) but the barrel's rising water level slowed down in an unanticipated manner. They eventually tracked it down to oceanic mixing. In the hydraulic analogy, the barrel got wider below where we expected it to get wider. The water is still pouring in, though, and it doesn't change the fact that the water level in the barrel is rising.

Academia treated the matter with the utmost professionalism. The journal articles minced no words about the models that had failed and the implications, limited as they were.

Liberal media didn't report it at all. Bias? Sure, a little.

Conservative media sang the temperature models' failure from the rooftops, ignored the success of the heat models, and jumped to the conclusions that global warming as a theory was in doubt and that scientists had biased the results. The conservative media's bias was the worst of the three, by my reckoning.

You have to be clear about what is "settled". Understanding that we are changing the balance of greenhouse gases, and that those changes will have impacts on the biosphere and human society, is settled.

Specific predictions, i.e. future weather reports for specific parts of the planet--are far more complex and difficult. To precisely predict the impacts of human-caused climate change, you're combining all the reasons it's hard to predict the weather with all the reasons it's hard to predict the stock market and politics.

But that doesn't mean it's not happening. I can start a fire in your kitchen and challenge you precisely predict the patterns in the smoke at 10-second intervals with a resolution of 10 cm; you won't be able to. But we both know that your kitchen will be full of smoke after a while.

> Understanding that we are changing the balance of greenhouse gases

Are we? How settled is the science on anthropogenic part of AGW? Between the natural ocean cycle of carbon dioxide emission and absorption and constantly changing cloud cover and the generally chaotic climate system, how can we reliably tell that it is the human contribution in particular that is causing the changes?

Do you think that the sudden rise in co2 level after industrial revolution and the ever steepening slope is just a coincidence?

I don't know. But if all we have is a correlation, than calling it "settled science" is misleading.

> I am skeptical about all the doomsday predictions

If you want to see how fast it changing, come on up to Alaska and the Yukon and spend a few years if you want to see it with your own eyes.

I saw a glacier in 2009 that has now receded 8 kilometers.

Alaska sets high temperature records every summer now.

Or, you know, go hang out in Australia.

> "always kind of wondering why there’s persistent levels of denial about something that the science is more or less settled on"

> It seems like we have lost all rational and respect for skepticism and correlating verification in science.

There is a huge gap between skepticism and denialism. The deniers aren't out there gathering competing data; they are simply declaring 'no' to established data.

If CO2 had a color or a smell it would be settled.

Conspiracy theories tend to play upon things that people can't easily directly observe.

Any modern epistemological system results in increased posterior probabilities of the AGW hypothesis given the evidence we have so far to the point that extraordinary evidence is required to nudge that probability.

This is no different than saying "the science is settled on the Earth being flat - it's not". That's not a dramatic cover-up of the flatness of the Earth or a rejection of the scientific method. It's an expression of surprise on the part of an informed person who looks at the balance of evidence for falsifiable theories that fail to falsify.

In the end, we all have our own epistemological systems but if yours does not lead to high probabilities for AGW, your model probably doesn't have high predictive value for reality.

That doesn't mean I'm mad at you. I'm just as surprised you'd waste your time on it as much as I'm surprised other people waste their time on other stuff like flat earthism, creationism, etc.

> making authoritarian statements like "it is settled"

If you are allowed to have and share your opinion that it's not settled science, would you be willing to elaborate on how it is "authoritarianism" for a scientist to share their opinion that it is?

> These bots being more proof of the case

With tweets like "Get lost, Greta"?

They come from a position of trusted authority. I am just some hack on the internet. It is not settled, it may be settled that the world is warming, it may be even settled that we are contributing a significant potion of it but the impacts are not settled and there is intentional bad science putting the blame of climate change to deflect it from real environmental poisoning. Claiming it's settled yields victory to said bad science as they get to parrot that it is settled and no more action is needed.

Genuinely trying to understand your position here: It's "authoritarian" for a scientist to claim, based on their good faith expert opinion, that a particular scientific question is "more or less settled" if...you disagree with their assessment? Surely that's not what you believe?

They are an authority, Saying it is settled tried to end the debate in the laymen eyes.

OK maybe I can draw an analogy maybe it will just be more confusing but I will try. I see it as akin to a police officer telling you, you are under arrest. Where I am just screaming citizens arrest at you. In the one case you stop what you are doing, and don't make any sudden moves it's the end of the conversation you are under arrest by the authorities. In the other case you are just looking at me thinking what the hell is this crazy person screaming citizens arrest and expecting me to freeze. In the case of the cop, I expect him to not go around telling people they are under arrest unless the are certain the person needs to be arrested. They have a moral duty to not try to arrest innocent people. They come from a position of authority. Scientist are like this their words hold more weight, I understand that it can be aggravating to believe something and just want to shut down the conversation but that is not beneficial.

> They are an authority, Saying it is settled tried to end the debate in the laymen eyes.

Granted. And we further assume this scientist has a bona fide good faith expert belief that it is in fact, settled science.

Is your position that a scientist in this position should never use their authority to say "X is settled science"?

Like, suppose I'm a physicist, and I say, "general relativity is more or less settled". Is that wrong somehow?

If that's not wrong, could you help me understand the difference between the two situations? Is the difference simply, you agree with one scientist and disagree with the other? Surely that can't be our moral standard; for instance, lots of people believe that the earth is flat, and so presumably also would reject general relativity. The physicist could reasonably be accused of using their authority to try to shut down a debate over whether the earth is round. Is that wrong?

Honestly I don't think they should ever say it, had we said that Newton's Laws where settled, I mean they are laws after all, we may not have general relativity.

I don't think science is ever settled and if we find a unified theory it may bend relativity to the point that relativity bent Newton's laws.

You could certainly say that Newton's Laws where settled, you could certainly say that relativity is settled but it creates an undercurrent that there is no stone left to un-turned. To the laymen it turns off a switch in their mind and they don't really want to process anymore information. I experience it all the time when I talk about the reefs dying, those that have settled on climate change is the reason will not listen to the fact that it is Nitrogen not ocean temperatures killing the reefs. Saying it is settled flips the off switch and people decide one way or the other, not processing new information.

So would you say that if a physicist said that gravity is a settled matter and absolutely exists, you would similarly call them an authoritarian abusing their position?

Do we have an obligation to engage non-experts in debate when they claim that gravity isn't actually real?

I believe when the proposition is socio-economic changes being proposed based on research there is a high bar and a high standard for that science and for the researchers conducting that science. I am not sure if I am there on climate change, I would be there on gravity if we needed some tax to offset it's effects. But gravity is physics a far more solid and predictive science than climatology is, so I expect the climate researchers to not proclaim it is as solidly settled as physics.

> I mean they are laws after all,

You may want to do a little reading about what scientists mean by the words "law" versus "theory". It's more of a historical accident / the way scientists used to talk about things than a statement that we believe some things "a lot" and some things "may be wrong".

> I don't think science is ever settled

I mean, do you believe it's settled science that the world is round? Or that germs cause some diseases? Or that gravity exists and is the cause of the planet's orbits around the sun? Or that the sun is powered by nuclear fusion? "Science is never settled" is kind of a strong statement...

On this meta-point that science is never "more or less settled", scientists might disagree with you. What rule elevates your opinion over theirs, such that you're allowed to say it but they aren't? Other than, you believe they're wrong, which surely isn't the right rule?

I understand the historical context of laws, my point was they are fundamental and we can believe them as fundamental truths. But those truths are layered, for example the world is round to a point but if holographic projection hold true, then it's true nature is not round at all. That being said there is enough foundational evidence to say that the earth is round is true, but I would not say the science is settled. Not until we answer the question of holographic projection. Some germs cause disease, some are actually extremely beneficial to us, so I would not say germs cause disease is settled. I believe that the science is settled is as strong of a statement as it conveys no more research or discovery is needed.

No rules elevate my opinion over theirs, if anything mine should be regarded as less I don't hold my credentials out there as an authority.

> I understand the historical context of laws, my point was they are fundamental and we can believe them as fundamental truths.

I...don't think so? Newton's laws are not fundamental; they are consequences of deeper ideas like conservation of momentum, and they're just rough observations elaborated on by relativity. Newton's law of gravity is not fundamental, see general relativity. Ohm's law is not fundamental, it's a consequence of Maxwell's laws, which themselves are not fundamental. And so on.

> But those truths are layered

That's true! But the existence of ever-deeper layers doesn't mean that the higher-level layers aren't "more or less settled". The possible existence of a deeper truth about roundness doesn't mean that we can't tell flat-earthers they're wrong.

So too about climate science. It seems you are misinformed about science in general and climate science specifically and angry that someone with authority is telling you that you're wrong. That's a shitty feeling.

The problem is that global warming is too large a subject to be distilled down for debate. It's like cancer. Can one cure cancer? Maybe, but not in one blow. Even discussing something like breast cancer versus colon cancer is practically discussing apples versus oranges. The same for global warming: discussing the hole in the ozone layer versus acid rain versus rising temperatures versus melting polar ice caps doesn't feel like you're talking about anything that fits comfortably under the umbrella of "global warming" or even "climate change". That is to say, the concept of "climate change" is a PR disaster that desparately needs its conversation redefined.

> It seems like we have lost all rational and respect for skepticism and correlating verification in science.

I think many non-scientific people are weighing in on "science" like they have any understanding on the subject.

The fact that almost every climate scientist agrees with each other about climate change is pretty telling.

Most of the "skeptics" are uneducated people who do not understand basics of science, even less complex climate systems. Others are malicious actors who are on the pay of corporate interests, as this article points out. I have yet to see a truly skeptical point come from an actual scientist (that isn't on a corporate payroll).

Wait for the response to your statement from a seemingly naive person. It will be something about how a majority of scientists once believed in [insert disproven theory here]. It will be made in seeming naivete, but will 100% be from a bad actor.

Across all websites, across all platforms, whenever someone says "well almost every climate scientist agrees with this", somebody crawls out to make that statement.

A theory is like a library full of books and papers. You can pull down any book and probably find something to argue about in it, but the overall story told by all the books all clearly point to the same conclusion.

I don't disagree which is why I mentioned that I felt the data does show an arrow towards the world warming, but that is a personal feeling based on a personal assumptive conclusion based on the research I have seen. There are still serious questions about how much of that is natural cycle and how much we are doing. We know we are doing some, we don't know how much, but we keep saying that this is settled science when more valid questions need to be asked.

>serious questions about how much of that is natural cycle and how much we are doing. We know we are doing some, we don't know how much, but we keep saying that this is settled science when more valid questions need to be asked

your statement is false, and it's a climate denialist talking point which was important enough such that climate scientists systematically examined and refuted it in the context of numerous pieces of peer-reviewed literature:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/4/044...

""Despite a high degree of consensus amongst publishing climate researchers that global warming is occurring and that it is anthropogenic, this discourse [that humans may not be responsible for some degree of climate change], promoted largely by non-scientists, has had a significant impact on public perceptions of the issue, fostering the impression that elite opinion is divided as to the nature and extent of the threat [when it is not]."

It's not false, the article you link to provide no data, nor does any of it's references that I checked and basically just states a lot of scientist agree. Which I don't deny, I have my skepticism as to how accurate climatology and climate physics disciplines are but that is a personal view, i don't view it as a pseudoscience but I put a lot less faith in it than I do mathmatics.

The article sited provides no data that would break down CO2 contributions based on natural phenomenon vs emissions. The only study I know of that does is the tree ring data paper and it has since been found to have significant mathematical errors and in need of revision based on the findings. This article is a sociology piece at best describing the natures of how denialist and right wing fanatics operate and how climate scientist tend to agree, but even with that there are social implications of funding, group think etc.

> There are still serious questions about how much of that is natural cycle and how much we are doing.

People have looked everywhere for alternative explanations and failed.

I don't know what libraries you frequent, but most of the ones I go to have books with wildly varying conclusions...

Even if going gonzo with carbon emissions was fine for the planet, a carbon tax plus basic income would be better than the status quo, for a multitude of reasons.

I've long been supportive of a carbon tax, but why would that be a good thing in your hypothetical world where carbon emissions don't affect global climate? The public health costs of local air pollution are criminally underrated, but CO2 is far from the most relevant emission there.

> Personally I think warming is real (I am skeptical about all the doomsday predictions, as all of them have been flat out wrong.)

You aren't nearly as informed as you think you are, and you are badly misinformed.

I strongly recommend a dose of youtube channel potholer54. "Youtube!" I can hear you scream. Just a second. The channel is run by an actual science journalist with a degree in geology. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Hadfield_(journalist)) However, what makes his channel unique is that he repeatedly says things like, "I'm just a dummy, so don't trust me. However, I'm experienced in researching primary sources and I can read, and you can too."

Typically his climate videos are debunking the denier videos, and he does in a calm, humorous manner. He cites all of his sources, unlike the vast majority of the denier sites. Also, he collects no money for his efforts and has a low key suggestion if you care to donate to a charity. He doesn't post frequently because most of his videos are well researched (sometimes he puts out quick responses to counter claims made to his videos).

Watch a few of his videos and you will realize that there is a ton of BS out there, not only from the deniers, but from the popular press doing a crappy job in science communication.

For example, some prominent denier, like Anthony Watts, will say, hey, it is 2020 and the scientists said such and such island would be underwater by now. The speaker is very self confident and mocking, and scores multiple hits simultaneously: (a) the scientists are wrong, (b) the media is lying to you, (c) we are superior to all those clucking hens. Potholer will find the actual research being talked about (which Watt doesn't give the attribution for) and points out all the ways Watts is wrong. For instance, he picks one paper which had the most aggressive timeline and cites that as "climate scientists" making the claim. Second, the original paper gave a range of 2030-2060, and again the blogger cites the lower end and never mentions that it was part of a range. Third, the paper never said the island would be under water. It said that the island would become uninhabitable because of sea water rising enough to creep into the freshwater storage on the island.

But it gets worse, because not is the one blogger wrong, every other climate denier will refer to that blogger in their own writings, and again, none of them actually read the original paper.

OK, I just did a quick scan of recent videos and start with this one, since it is exactly on the subject of your claim. "How accurate are predictions about climate?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugwqXKHLrGk

I don't think it's scientists so much as it is redditors and "I fucking love science!!!" people

Baseline: 4% of people believe lizard people run govt.

A mere 3% of scientists doubt climate crisis. Given how lucrative skepticism is, I'd expect many more defectors.

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