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Comment by rtoway | Hacker News Reader

> It is a statement of fact, we cannot be any more certain; it is unequivocal and indisputable that humans are warming the planet.

How do you convince the deniers of this? It seems that more graphs and facts only make them deny harder

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As COVID has shown, you can't convince the deniers, you have to make politics despite there being people who refuse to share the same reality with you.

Maybe proper productive conversation would be easier if you didn't label the entire population with differing opinion as "deniers ... refusing to share the same reality".

In other words, why would anyone get to "make politics" despite of anyone.

People make politics despite of other people all the time.

What else can we do? They have a fundamental right to deny all your science by putting fingers in their ears and screaming lalala. And they exercise it. And they have as much voting power as you do. And it's not some abstract bogeymen we're talking about here, these are our uncles, cousins, parents, ...

Proper productive conversation has been tried. People are labeled as deniers not just because "different opinions" but because they don't even share the same sets of facts from which to start. You can't have a productive conversation on COVID mitigation measures with someone that thinks that COVID is "just the flu", for example.

You're right that people don't share the same sets of facts - for example, at least in the US Covid "non-denialists" substantially and consistently overestimate the risk, especially the risk to young people: https://www.brookings.edu/research/how-misinformation-is-dis...

Oh, you, plague-rat and Surtur apologist, why bring in reason, objective observations and doubt into this scientism Jihad ?

It's far easier to educate someone on correct hospitalization rates and death risks than it is to convince someone that covid is real when they think it's a conspiracy and that vaccines contain poison or something. I don't know why would you want to equate those two things, honestly.

> with someone that thinks that COVID is "just the flu"

For bonus points play on hard level and try to have a productive conversation on COVID with someone who rejects germ theory:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/deep-dive-into-stupi...

Everyone engages in motivated reasoning. Deniers underestimate risk, and their opponents often overestimate the risks.

Getting people on the same page means understanding their motives and framing the facts appropriately. Unfortunately, people just want to take sledgehammers to "the other side", as if that's ever really fixed anything.

I would say what should be done is to move on from that and move discussion and consensus-building on how the problem should be addressed.

Most voters are not actually "deniers", it seems outlandish to me that so much handwringing is made over these people. Every article, time after time, it's so tiresome. Deniers are a few % of the population globally, and even in high denier country like USA it's somewhere under 15%. The deniers aren't preventing improvements from happening.

The problem is corporate, political, and international corruption and collusion that inhibits radical change and shuts down even any serious discussion of alternatives. The denier is a wonderful scapegoat for them to blame though.

I'm not a denier in the slightest, actually the opposite. However I disagree with the direction of some of the proposed "solutions" and I've never seen any serious discussion and analysis and alternatives put to the public to vote on. It's always framed as an us vs them issue, you're with us or against us, a disciple of the denier cult or the science cult. The problem is they say you must trust the science, and from there they draw the line a little further for you and tell you you have to trust their global economic plans.

Sure I trust the science and the scientists completely. I don't trust politicians or their lobbyists to actually turn that science into fair, equitable, effective policy. I think they quite like providing two bad options because that pleases their owners and allows them to put on a big show of fighting those evil leftists/rightists while not actually doing very much.

For example, I don't agree that a country with high emissions intensity of production should be given concessions that give them any relative advantage in production over countries that have far better emissions intensity of production. That will create incentives to move production to higher emissions countries, so I think it should actually be the opposite. I also don't agree per-capita quotas or concessions are a good idea because that creates perverse incentives to increase population growths and restrict living standards.

Stating opinions like this has resulted in some pretty astounding vitriol and hatred spewed at me (not on this forum but other parts of the internet and the real world) from people who have been extremely vocal in proclaiming how much they want solutions, and how much they value diversity of opinion, open discussion, etc. And never has it ever resulted in open minded discussion or genuine attempts to understand other points of view.

Direct experience. I guess there always be deniers in the curve of beliefs (deniers of thermodynamics, for instance), but what worries me is the difference between knowing and knowing. Knowing enough to completely switch priorities.

You can't personally experience large trends that happen over decades and centuries and all over the globe. And each individual data point can be dismissed as "this is just weather" or "extreme events like this have happened in the past".

Sure, I know that :)

Today, many people are experiencing very unlikely events, unknown to them and to previous generations. While you cannot experience a trend, you do modulate your perception about what an improbable likelihood feels like. That, I feel, is very powerful to nuance certain varieties of skepticism.

I think people don't vote (or buy, or move) based on documented trends, standard deviations or moving averages, but on subjective perception of what future will be like. That is, inter-subjective bets, updated from day to day.

I guess very few people in certain countries would have bet that they would lose their homes to a summer flood or fire.

Even if you could personally witness trends over a longer amount of time, it is still easy to attribute that to something else. The process from eg. driving a car via a gas you cannot see to solar radiation being captured warming up the planet and all the effects from that is relatively abstract, I guess. It's still easy to not see the links between these things, if you do not want to see them.

But regardless, people who can see the curvature of the earth (and could perform other experiments) can still manage to be flat-earthers, so hard-core idiots cannot be convinced of whatever obvious things they choose to not believe in.

Governments will have to set the right incentives for these people to still do the right thing for society in general. Eg. a carbon tax. It's much easier to know which item is cheaper and then choose that.

There are several stories of parents refusing medical care for their children, ultimately leading to them dying, and they never waivered from their belief that a benevolent god would save them.

People can be extraordinary thick-headed, even in the face of direct experience (like people you know dying of covid).

Here’s a maybe unpopular opinion: do we need to convince everyone? We just need to take action. This is about the survival of the civilization, not about pampering every lunatic.

I would say there's a big problem when some of those lunatics are at the steering wheel of big nation states.

So yeah, maybe not everyone, but the reward matrix in this game makes very difficult to ignore all of them.

What if they are actually a democratic majority?

The problem is not necessarily lunatics who deny the reality of AGW, but energy companies, industry, and their political agents who have known the reality for over half a century. Lunacy was purposefully propagandized and indoctrinated to protect their power.

We are past the window for incentives -- we have sufficient observation of how individual incentive-guided action plays out in a finite world built of externalities. We are in the window for action: nationalization/collectivization of the offenders, forfeiture of their assets, and redirection into massive creation of renewables, sustainable industry, carbon capture/mitigation, and global relief for the people displaced and impoverished by climate and food disruption.

Not everyone, but it's probably a good strategy to convince as many people as practically possible. Because all measures with material impact will involve large reductions in the quality and confort of life for most people, so will almost certainly be quite unpopular.

The big fights might be more over how to tackle it, not with the deniers. There is the carbon reduction faction that is mostly focused on that and there will be a quickly rising mitigation and (geo-)engineering faction, because the changes baked in now will take centuries/millennia to reverse. Both often also come with very different political views attached. From my perspective, a strong focus on reduction only feels like a tough sell based on that.

I don’t think the deniers have anywhere enough political or economical power to be relevant anymore. The big battles are only about how fast we have to act and how much we have to do. Of course it would’ve been vastly preferable to have woken up already thirty or forty years ago…

The deniers are largely a product of propaganda and shouldn't be overestimated. The ones spreading the propaganda however, are neither deniers nor disempowered, but they would rather go down with the ship than possibly let go of their current privileges. Their phases "It's not happening", "It's not human made", "Don't be too alarmist, it's not that bad", "Ah, well it's over now", all serve the purpose of doing absolutely nothing.

News media being too alarmist (more than what the science says) could be one reason for rise of climate denialism. Can be fixed by more accurate reporting.

I guess you're referring to media jumping too quickly to "bad science" for every single event of floods, drought, fires etc, therefore using fear and producing saturation in fellow citizens.

that said, I honestly have a bad time trying to figure out if there's such a thing as "too alarmist" re. claims like "one third of projected population by 2070 will live in a nearly unlivable earth" https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11350

In my country, newspapers publish alarmist articles every day, they find anywhere in the world, anything climate related, a flood, a fire, a hot or cold temperature somewhere, they put a stupid photo such as a cute polar bear on a small iceberg, and they publish an article that looks like plain propaganda, it's sickening because it's politics instead of science. Perhaps that's what they are referring to.

Or, they are referring to the IPCC reports themselves, for sure, the third and last working group who has the final words are not scientists indeed, which leads to all these "mistakes" in every final report that our politicians use (or try to) to create new taxes on the poor.

the third and last working group who has the final words are not scientists

I did a cursory check, and working group III seems to be headed by two academics (one of them a physicist), so not sure what you base that claim on...

Well, our global society is going to collapse very soon. What possible reason to not be alarmist could one have?

Seriously; our global civilization is in real danger of collapse in the next fifty years. I do see no reason not to panic or be alarmist?

I find it strange however that people are still able to actually ignore and deny the slew of icebergs we will be hitting in the next years; how can one be so delusional? Is it willful?

I think to a point it is. The idea that all of our oh-so-normal lives with hot showers that every human since the beginning of time enjoyed is coming to an end. And emotionally we just cannot deal with it; it's too big for us to grasp. And so we shut down that part of the brain and just suppress thinking about it.

> I find it strange however that people are still able to actually ignore and deny the slew of icebergs we will be hitting in the next years

Wasn't that due to happen back in 2000?

I mean yeah, what else is there to do? The problem is far too big for any one person to make a difference.

I could collapse in fear daily but it wouldn’t do any good. The only thing to do is enjoy the time you have.

This is unfortunately the right personal approach. Do as green as you can if you feel comfortable with it. But the ship has sailed.

The IPCC reports are a good contemporary equivalent of memento mori.

I for one try to convey how concerned I am about this to everyone in my vicinity.

One of my recent successes was to be able to get my grandparents to accept that there's a problem. We're still having our extinction booth at the local grocery store, once a month. There we present damages done to the eco system, current information about climate change.

Still; many people are not really getting the message.

You sound just like the hero of this story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nongqawuse

We know of many false prophets with huge charisma gathering crowds to commit senseless acts.

Here we're talking about unglamourous people gathering data, making projections, being wrong, gathering more data, updating their projections, being less wrong, gathering more data, making more updated projections, being less and less wrong, observing the reality becoming closer to their worst-case scenario, and being mocked by masses doing basically nothing.

Clearly, it's the same story.

> Nongqawuse was the Xhosa prophet whose prophecies led to a millenarian movement that culminated in the Xhosa cattle-killing movement and famine of 1856-7, in what is now Eastern Cape, South Africa.

Cool story. I don't see the parallel here though. Is anyone seriously suggesting that we destroy our civilisation to save the environment?

Define "very soon".

Next thirty to sixty years?

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