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Comment by vanniv | Hacker News Reader

When your political power comes from the ability to regulate every aspect of life due to a supposed existential threat that comes from all economic activity, an educated, informed, and well-spoken critic of the supposed existential threat is dangerous.

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This works both ways. There is a very strong incentive to create plausible scientific models that show climate change is not a problem if that is in fact the case. Even Dyson says he doesn't know any informed people who disagree with the mainstream climate change theories. This interview shows that he accepts the key premise that there is likely to be significant warming.

Realistically, the bigger problem is that massive changes to society are required to mitigate the risks of climate change. However as Dyson says, some people will likely benefit from climate change, or at least will be in a position where their personal costs of doing something about it are much more than what they stand to gain.

This is the political problem: overall richer people are the greatest contributors to climate change, and they stand to lose the least from the bad effects of climate change.

Trump and Scott Morrison come closer to admitting this than most, and politically it seems to have worked in their favour.

If anybody were to produce such a model, they would be utterly destroyed.

If anybody were to even attempt to apply for grants to do that work, they would be expelled from the university community, and their professional reputation immediately destroyed.

There is no incentive to even look to see if you can find a flaw in the orthodoxy.

Paranoid drivel. Why on Earth would these brave maverick scientists of yours choose to remain part of scientific and university communities that are so corrupt? Surely if they’ve any principles they’d be first out the door!

It’s not like they need to fight for academic grant money when they can go tap Big Oil any time they like. Also plenty of governments who’d like to hear everything’s fine, nothing to see, business as usual.

Heck, even climate scientists, being purely pragmatic, would like to be wrong. After all, they live on this rock too, so it’s not like they want this for their kids.

Nobody wants climate change. Nobody likes climate change. But the best science says that’s what’s happening, so deal. Or ignore it; your choice. But don’t lie about it; because, honestly, you’re absolutely rubbish at it and fooling no-one but yourself.

Nobody wants climate change, it's true. But do you really believe that the scientists who have become public advocates for climate change mitigation, that have contributed building the international climate research organism that was awarded a Nobel prize, and whose research ends up regularly on the front page of international newspapers and shapes the decisions of world politicians in economic matters- do you really think these people are putting all their daily effort in proving themselves wrong? They're human beings like everyone else, they become invested in their own ideas. And the stronger the message, the harder it is to be completely dispassionate about it.

This is not to say they're wrong. But I strongly doubt that many of them would be looking for signs that climate change is not that bad after all.

> If anybody were to produce such a model, they would be utterly destroyed.

In the case of Exxon, it appears that they believed the opposite to be true:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...

> There is a very strong incentive to create plausible scientific models that show climate change is not a problem if that is in fact the case.

I guess that proving the absence of something is harder, and less rewarding in terms of recognition, than proving its presence. Many climate studies are interspersed with "may", "could", "likely"- but to prove an absence you need a higher degree of certainty. Also, there is of course a publication bias- research that doesn't produce significant results is less likely to be published. "We modeled the impact of global warming on this crop, and it didn't seem to change" is not as sexy as "the model for this staple crop failed spectacularly and at current temperature projections hundreds of million will die of hunger in 30 years".

We are in this mess exactly because the people who know the most about climate change have FUCK ALL political power compared to the absolutely massive industry that will do anything in their power to deny it.

You are absolutely delusional if you think anybody advocating for climate action has any meaningful power whatsoever. All the power and all the big money is solidly behind denying, delaying and avoiding any action on climate.

When your unfounded, conspiratorial thinking comes from AM talk radio, due to a supposed existential threat to freedom, an educated, informed, and well-spoken overwhelming consensus of independent scientists trumps a physicists off-the-cuff remarks.

I don't think of random nobodies talking climate change on reddit as being very politically powerful. Do you think you might be elevating them to some privileged position they do not possess in this description?

It isn't political nobodies, though. I mean, it's them too.

But, it is the entire media system, the university-political complex, and all of the largest and most powerful political parties across the West.

It's pretty much just this one dead guy, a few internet memers, and a few Republicans versus the entire entrenched political structure of the western world.

On one of those sides, you can have a career in academia. On the other, you're lucky if you don't end up dead in a ditch.

> But, it is the entire media system, the university-political complex, and all of the largest and most powerful political parties across the West.

So you’re saying that these organisations are conspiring to hide the truth?

>a well-spoken critic of the supposed existential threat is dangerous

This is also true when the threat is actually real and the people concerned about it are acting in good faith, which is the case here.

If your theory can't stand up to someone looking at it askance, you're probably being intellectually dishonest.

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