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Comment by mturmon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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."

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