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Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

How on earth do you come to that conclusion? Personally the physics of climate change is kind of a basic back of the envelope calculation that should be obvious to most educated people.

So I genuinely wonder how people can look into it and not look at the absorption spectra of CO2 go ahh I see and then move on. I mean such a calculation isn’t enough for policy changes or anything, but it’s putting a high hurdle on the other side.

Is it some disagreement about the physics involved, or just a bunch of people you believe saying something different, or what?

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It seems obvious. Just tell the facts!

You may have great social circles with intelligent and curious people, but in my life the facts don’t work because the facts don’t matter. The number of people actually interested in the science and not just the science (tm) is dismally low, we’re talking less than 10% in my experience. This includes people who have degrees in physics and engineering and a university engineering professor I knew.

People are hungry, vulnerable, emotional, scared, and prideful creatures. That’s what we are; and we like stories. We like stories where we’re hero’s on an epic journey with villains to defeat.

If you tell someone a fact that breaks their story, makes them scared, and makes them less prideful, you’re not having a conversation for very long, doesn’t matter if you can support it with evidence and reasoning. What PR added on top of this human tendency is people think about climate way more than they otherwise would, they think about it in terms of a story, in us vs. them terms (PRs narrative), and if you say something counter to that narrative, now you’re the villain.

I’ve had people I respect flat out tell me that climate change is a hoax and if we reduced carbon emissions it would just be virtue signaling. They are not joking, they are serious and they’ve been told this by talking heads for over 20 years.

You’ll never get to the back of the envelope calculation.

Did you have a typo in your earlier message "I don’t believe in climate change", or is there some angle or point in that I'm missing?

I suspect it was meant to be read as “I don’t [just] believe in climate change, I’ve researched it, it’s something I’m concerned about.”

There are 2 types of people. Those who think in statics and those who think in dynamics. Climate change is not basic back of the envelope calculation specifically because we're dealing with a dynamic system. The more complex the world, the less you can grasp it from academic studies.

In what way is that complexity meaningful? If I put a pot of water on the stove the specific way the water swirls around is a chaotic non linear system, but it’s not going to keep the water from warming up.

Similarly, if hypothetically increased global temperature results in increased cloud formation that reduces the impact of climate change that presupposes some increase in temperature otherwise the change in cloud formation doesn’t happen. As such it’s reasonable to argue about the magnitude of change but not the direction of change.

I can clearly see arguing about a specific location bucking global trends because there complexity actually plays a direct role, thus the term climate change. But, globally I can’t see how everywhere on average would buck these trends.

That complexity is meaningful as it precludes precise modelling. Now that does not mean we should not curb CO2 emissions, rather it is the degree of opacity and uncertainty in a system, as well as asymmetry in effect, rather than specific model predictions, that should drive the precautionary measures.

Push a complex system too far and it will not come back. The popular belief that uncertainty undermines the case for taking seriously the "climate crisis" that scientists tell us we face is the opposite of the truth. Properly understood, as driving the case for precaution, uncertainty radically underscores that case, and may even constitute it.

The dispute is typically over the practical implications of it, not the pure physics of "the average global temperature will rise as long as this trend continues". And this is a topic where disinformation comes from both sides - I pretty regularly run into people who've been convinced that climate change means the planet will become uninhabitable.

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