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Comment by lanstin | Hacker News Reader

If you look at the progression of science predictions, they don't have a track record of being alarmist. They have a track record of predicting troubling as heck issues for 2100 or 2050 and now they are already happening.

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In the late 90s, my science teacher told me that we would run out of oil and the world economy would collapse by 2010. In the 70s, my parents were told that we would run out of ozone, kill all the plants, and die from oxygen cycle collapse by 2000. A century earlier, respectable scientists were making predictions that we would run out of food within a few decades and starve to death. The history of science predictions is a history of high-profile respectable figures making doomsday predictions that never come to pass.

If you deny the failures, climate change deniers will have the luxury of being able to easily prove you factually wrong. Don't give them that luxury.

Instead, use the history to argue for action. Why didn't we run out of food? Green revolution. Why didn't the ozone cook us? Montreal protocol -- we switched halocarbons in our air conditioners and now the ozone layer is recovering. Why didn't we run out of oil? Fracking. CO2 is the biggest challenge yet, how do we fight it? Solar, wind, lithium, nuclear. Let's spend the money and make it happen.

> In the 70s, my parents were told that we would run out of ozone

Did you factor in the world-wide efforts to eliminate CFC gasses?

Here is an easier one: 'meteorologists predict you will get sunburnt today if you expose your skin to the sun'. So, based on this, you stay indoors most of the day, wear sunscreen, a long shirt, and a hat.

You don't get sunburnt and your rational conclusion is the science is wrong?

SMH

> my science teacher told me that we would run out of oil and the world economy would collapse by 2010

Well, he was "right", the WEO (not an anti-capitalist/leftist/ecologist organism by any mean, au contraire) now admit that conventional oil peaked in 2008 in the world. The north sea gas extraction peaked in 2004.

When I was in seventh grade, I kept a running list of all the wrong things that my science teacher said. I was more thinking of the actual scientists and IPCC and you know more vetted types of predictions.

And Ozone depletion we actually came together as a civilization and fixed the issue. That was a good model for what we need to do with respect to carbon burn. Any of these predictions about the future are obviously conditional on "people do X" or "people do Y" or something equally involving predicting what people will do in the future.

I don't think that's right. There have been predictions saying ridiculous things that never came to pass since the 80s.

Why do some incorrect predictions completely invalidate the devastatingly correct ones?

Do we really need to revisit the "crying wolf" parable?

If he was attacked by the wolf a few times among the false alarms, your comparison would be valid.

Most predictions were inaccurate. In fact I'm having trouble recalling any that turned out to be true. You can deny this all you want, but alarmist propaganda like this is why people don't take such reports seriously nowadays.

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