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Comment by teawrecks | Hacker News Reader

Today I learned that up until the 90s, the general populous accepted global warming as scientific fact. At that point, numerous studies dating back to the 50s had confirmed the effect, and there was mostly bipartisan support for environment preserving legislation.

So oil companies started media propaganda efforts specifically trying to change the public opinion on the matter, calling it "just a theory": https://www.climatefiles.com/denial-groups/ice-ad-campaign/

And now we live in a world where you simply can't talk about climate science without running into spin and having to sink to that level to counter it.

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> Today I learned that up until the 90s, the general populous accepted global warming as scientific fact.

No, they didn't. In the 1970s, global cooling was the "scientific fact". The "global warming" narrative wasn't really being pushed until the late 1980s, and it wasn't until well into the 90s that discussion of the overall issue of what the climate might be like in the future was widespread.

> oil companies started media propaganda efforts specifically trying to change the public opinion on the matter,

So did global warming activists--in fact they did it sooner (what started the "global warming" debate in the late 1980s was a Congressional hearing purposely staged by activists to occur during a summer heat wave--and the A/C for the hearing room just "happened" to not be working that day). We are awash in propaganda on all sides of this issue.

> In the 1970s, global cooling was the "scientific fact".

No, there was much more uncertainty in the 70s, but the idea that global cooling was even a moderately dominant idea was a narrative constructed largely in the 2000s.

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bam...

> there was much more uncertainty in the 70s

Tell that to all the people that were talking about the next Ice Age coming. They seemed pretty confident.

However, even if we accept "much more uncertainty in the 70s", you're agreeing with me that the post I was responding to, which said that global warming was accepted as "scientific fact" back then, was wrong.

You're falling prey to yet another disinformation tactic: "Is it warming or is it cooling? Make up your mind science!"

The consensus was/is/always has been that humans are impacting the climate by burning fossil fuels. What has always been uncertain is what impact this would have on the environment/animals/humans long term. Will it heat everyone up? Will it trigger an ice age? Didn't matter, everyone agreed that more information was needed and we had to take action UNTIL a lot of money went into dovetailing that uncertainty into doubt about the whole thing. And here we are still arguing at square one 30 years later.

> The consensus was/is/always has been that humans are impacting the climate

Yes, to the extent there has been a consensus about human activities in general, it is that those activities do have significant effects on the climate.

> by burning fossil fuels

No, that hasn't always been a consensus. The human activity with the largest impact on the climate is land use: in the past 10,000 years or so we have significantly changed the surface reflectivity properties of the planet by converting land from forest to farms and cities (and now paved roads and skyscrapers and many other things). It's still not clear that the impact of fossil fuel burning is of comparable magnitude. But it's a lot easier politically to demonize people for burning fossil fuels than for farming and building cities. So that's what gets all the attention.

> everyone agreed that more information was needed

Yes, there has always been broad agreement on that.

> and we had to take action

No, there has not been broad agreement on that. There is certainly not broad agreement that, if we are going to spend trillions of dollars to do something, it should be on browbeating people into not burning fossil fuels. It would make much more sense to spend that money on (a) bringing more people out of poverty, and (b) beefing up our infrastructure. Those things will benefit everyone no matter what happens with the climate--and will also put us in a much better position to adapt to whatever climate change does happen. And in a situation where our information is incomplete and we don't have a good understanding of the overall system (the climate), it's much better to take an action that will benefit you whatever happens, than to place a huge bet on an action that will only be beneficial if one particular theory about what is happening turns out to be right.

It is just a theory. There's no such thing as "scientific fact". That's simply not what science is capable of, and you're showing you're anti-science by promoting those ideas.

You're being pedantic about terminology which I've already demonstrated my understanding of in this thread. In the context of the general populous, "scientific fact" means that a random lay person on the street, despite not doing any of the research themselves or reading any of the literature on the matter, accepts the conclusions of the scientific community as the truth. It's a scientific fact that the world is round even though most of us have not taken any measurements to verify this, and almost none of us have been to space. We just trust the wealth of data produced by professionals in several different domains which all point to the same conclusion.

You're also being disingenuous if you think "just a theory" isn't a phrase constructed to mislead. Your comment implies that you understand that a theory is literally the strongest model that science can give us about a topic, but saying something is "just X" implies that there is something else beyond X. So which is it? Is a theory as strong as it gets, or can science do better? If it can't do better, then never use the phrase "just a theory".

I agree about the "just". You're right. It's about the same level of misleading as "scientific fact". People used to use "just a theory" to discredit relativity or evolution, exploiting the fact that the alternative terms like laws of physics or truth sounded stronger even though they weren't.

I still think it's harmful to general understanding to put any scientific knowledge on a pedestal of being unchallengeable fact. How can we know where we might be wrong? The earth is round, is it? What if that's just a slice of it in 3 dimensions and it's actually some other higher dimensional shape? Future people might laugh at our simplistic belief based on only seeing a little part of it - similar to ancients believing the Earth was flat because it was flat as far as they could see.

This is misleading. No one has to this day "confirmed" that anthropogenic global warming is a "scientific fact".

We have evidence which suggests that climate is changing and humans may be responsible. But the global climate system is complex, constantly oscillating on periods ranging from days to eons, and our data is sparse, especially going back 20+ years.

The certainty behind this consensus has been drastically overstated by ideologues who have taken it upon themselves to prioritize action over accurate reporting. There fundamentally is no proof that the changing climate will be catastrophic or result in runaway, especially when our historic temperature data is not fine grained enough to measure abrupt changes on the scale of 100 years. Though it is taboo to discuss, there is in fact evidence that such a rapid change is not unprecedented, that the earth has been hotter than it is now in the past, and that past sudden temperature swings clearly did not result in a venuslike earth.

The fact that virtually all major climate change model forecasts published in the last decade or two have significantly overpredicted temperature increases is telling of the bias in mainstream climate science.

I similarly take issue with this revisionist history wherein oil companies "knew" of climate change 60 years ago and deliberately ignored the danger. A claim of catastrophic anthropogenic terraforming requires evidence collection and modeling capability that simply did not exist 60 years ago, and given the periodic nature of climate, we simply will not know if this warming will indeed continue and/or become catastrophic without a lens into the future. Our current modeling capabilities are still inadequate.

Anthropogenic global warming is scientific orthodoxy at this stage. You vastly underestimate the amount of evidence there is for this.[1]

You're wrong about climate change models. The first 1990 one was based on a simplistic energy balance model and did overestimate warming. But all the later models have proven to have been uncannily accurate. [2]

[1] https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2949/why-milankovitch-orbital-...

[2] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-well-have-climate-m...

The fact that it is indeed an orthodoxy is why the research is blatantly one sided. There is far less interest in, for example, unlocking millions of square miles of fertile, arable land. Instead its all doomsday - and the issue is systemic, publish or perish and orthodoxy are a dangerous combination, for any field.

Ironic opening statement, there.

> No one has to this day "confirmed" that anthropogenic global warming is a "scientific fact".

You talk about "scientific fact" and "proof" like this is mathematics. The best empirical science can do is to gather as much data as possible and arrive at a probability that a conclusion is true given what is known. And what is known is that there is a greater than 99% chance that global warming is anthropogenic:

https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1QE1ZU (Actual paper is paywalled and if you cared you'd go find it)

You're right that our instruments and data have only gotten better over the last 70 years, but studies from the 50s conducted by oil companies already suspected that that global warming was happening and experimentally confirmed that CO2 released by fossils fuels were a likely contributing factor:

https://www.slideshare.net/SimoneBoccuccia/cabon-dioxide-ech...

So much for "revisionist history".

But all of that is beside my point about media propaganda, much of which you are simply reciting in your own comment. My point is that the propaganda works, so thank you for taking the time to illustrate that.

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