Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

Comment by macspoofing | Hacker News Reader

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>Many of us are more concerned than we can publish.

Maybe you should be a little braver? As in, let your work be actually scrutinized by your peers (isn't that what tenure is for?) instead of scaremongering anonymously and accosting others for not understanding the science you are not willing publish? Seriously, what is the public supposed to take away from that kind of statement? Especially given that the public cannot ascertain the truth value of your Earth-will-turn-to-Venus theory. Are you trying to convince the public (on this forum no less) that this is a reasonable hypothetical situation to worry about? Come on. Put it to your peers and if they agree, then sure, let's talk policy.

>Will the Earth definitely turn into an out of control hothouse with a Venus - like climate? Very probably not there are many differences between Earth and Venus.

Didn't OP say that? Didn't I say that? What is it that you're arguing? Saying that we don't understand fully how our climate works and how many of the systems that drive it works is reasonable and nobody will dispute that. But you can't just use a lack of knowledge around an low probability event to drive global policy that could potentially be disastrous in all kinds of other ways. That's all I'm saying. We have a well-defined problem of ecosystem collapse and climate change, such as it is, don't muddle the water by coming up with new hypothetical problems.

Did you ever read this https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html?

I think I get what you are saying but maybe you could reformat it in a civil way rather than berating me.

I listed some very simple examples of places where we don't understand the Earth's carbon cycle fully. No one will publish a study saying, 'Hey guys we don't understand this yet'. We know we don't! That's why we do research to chip away at the problems.

> But you can't just use a lack of knowledge around an low probability event to drive global policy that could potentially be disastrous in all kinds of other ways.

The way I think about it like this. When I do an experiment I (am supposed to) do a risk assessment. If a proceedure has a low probability of causing a huge hazard like death I should take steps to reduce the risk of that hazard occurring as much as possible. Similarly climate change has a none zero possibility of causing humans to become extinct (and a much more than none zero chance of cause society as we know it to breakdown). Shouldn't we lower that probability?

I don't want to defend the original commenter's tone, but you must understand how frustrating it is to ask for evidence and get only a confident declaration that there's secret evidence hidden where it can't be checked. We can't drive global policy based on unverifiable insinuations about what the worst case is.

Sorry I must be communicating really badly.

I'll try to put it more clearly.

1. We don't really understand how these systems work. (The evidence for that is basically a lack of evidence and the type of thing we are still working on...) 2. Certain outcomes in the system could be very very very bad. 3. We are changing part of the system massively. 4. Because of (1) we don't know what (3) will do.

I'm not alluding to any hiden knowledge here. I'm not a climate scientist. My published work is related to other parts of the Earth's carbon cycle.

I'm sure you can see why "many of us are more concerned than we can publish" could be read as alluding to secret knowledge.

The problem with the argument is, well, why doesn't this apply to everything? Massive changes happen all the time in the world, and anything could be a disaster if our only standard for "could" is lack of knowledge that it won't be. If someone said "we need to focus our global efforts on stone-faced office buildings, because humanity might go extinct if we keep building so many all-glass ones", we'd demand more than a lack of evidence.

Luckily we were able to discuss it further and clear up some of the confusion.

> The problem with the argument is, well, why doesn't this apply to everything? Massive changes happen all the time in the world, and anything could be a disaster if our only standard for "could" is lack of knowledge that it won't be. If someone said "we need to focus our global efforts on stone-faced office buildings, because humanity might go extinct if we keep building so many all-glass ones", we'd demand more than a lack of evidence.

I can't think of any comparible examples where human activity is known to be causing massive problems... Various forms of pollution maybe? But I would argue for action there too.

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