Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

Great read, and I’m happy to be introduced to the phrase “advocacy journalists” (and “advocacy-focused studies” and “advocacy-focused scientists”). Speaking for myself, I definitely fell for the insect apocalypse news cycle and I can’t recall ever seeing any updates that redacted prior claims or attempted to correct the public’s knowledge. I feel like news media needs to ensure equal exposure (like on the front page) for corrections to past mistakes.

It’s also eerie reading this so soon after the recent heatwave in the Pacific Northwest, which was falsely attributed to climate change in a very similar collaboration between advocacy journalists and advocacy researchers. A Professor of Atmospheric Science recently analyzed how news covered this story and laid bare the immense failure of researchers and journalists to properly inform the public of the nuances involved:

https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/flawed-heatwave-repor...

https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/miscommunication-of-r...

Cliff is the same thing going the other way. He spends nearly 100% of his energy downplaying the role of global warming in current events. He isn't some centrist scientist driving nuance into the conversation.

I have a hard time understanding your perspective but would be happy to listen and learn more about why you feel that way. Here are my thoughts:

Looking at his blog’s home page, most of the posts aren’t about downplaying the role of global warming in current events. In fact, the most recent post is about a new investigation he’s working on to see if wildfires sparked by thunderstorms will change with global warming.

I feel he is approximately a centrist scientist driving nuance, because these posts are just raw scientific analyses that support his very precisely stated claims and conclusions. For example with the recent PNW heatwave, he explicitly stated that global warming contributed to the heatwave (a few degrees to peak temperatures) but that it would have been a record breaking event even without global warming. That feels very nuanced to me, but he has been criticized for it nevertheless. The advocacy study he is critiquing actually determined the same thing (read the full study not their blog post) but they published a misleading and sensationalist headline on their blog that implied climate change played a major role in the heatwave, which then got recycled blindly by advocacy journalists. It is especially odd because their deeper findings actually agree almost fully with what Cliff Mass had been saying about this weather event all along (the nuance I mentioned above).

I’m certainly not claiming that Cliff Mass is some kind of perfect being, but it seems to me that in the face of very common biased/unsupported/hyperbolic climate news stories, an expert who is trying to seek the truth would naturally seem to be “downplaying” things regularly when they are simply stating an unbiased case the whole time. It seems like a purposeful downplaying just because there is so much bad pop science journalism/activism out there that disagrees with the actual science. At least that’s my take.

Did you just claim that this recent pacific heatwave is not linked to climate change? That puts you in scientific fringe territory as an outlier. Such an event is statistically highly highly unlikely as a singular event. When you tie it into all the other One in a Million events such as extreme flooding in summertime Central Europe and China you start to really have to do a lot of handwaving to pretend that it’s not climate change caused by humans burning hundreds of millions of years of sequestered carbon.

Frankly, such radical statements as you made right here undermine this piece that we should be discussing here. It means that you are one of “those” people (climate change denialism in 2021 is an anachronism not supported by any substantive evidence) and it suggest that perhaps we shouldn’t take this piece here seriously, which is not what I grokked from reading it. You do this piece above an associative disservice if you truly hope it to be taken seriously you should refrain from attaching frivolous false commentary. The recent pacific heatwave would likely not have happened if we didn’t burn petroleum like there is no tomorrow.

This piece above, meanwhile, purports to debunk two studies that are claimed to be methodologically flawed. The author does not claim that neonicotinoids don’t harm insects, but rather targets the work of specific individuals. I only gave a cursory read, nor do I have access to the materials to evaluate, nor the domain knowledge.

> The author does not claim that neonicotinoids don’t harm insects.

I hope so. Claiming that one of the main insecticides used in the planet can't kill insects, would be like claiming that automobiles can't move.

I suggest reading the links I provided for an analysis. The summary is that the heatwave was highly unlikely both with or without climate change. It requires a number of weather factors to come together at the same time in a very unlikely way. The contribution of global warming to the heatwave was only 2 degrees at peak even per the study that was critiqued for using hyperbolic headlines - meaning that it would be a record breaking heatwave even without global warming. The problem with how news and social media covered this event is that there was a readiness to blame it primarily on climate change, when the role it played was very minor.

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