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Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

If you had the data to show that climate change is not man-made you'd be a hero. Nobody wants to spend trillions to get rid of fossil fuels, people just want to prevent catastrophic warming. Unfortunately it looks like the data just doesn't point in that direction.

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First, let me say that I do believe that the current weight of evidence is on the side of the anthropogenic theory. I also think it is correct that the fossil fuels lobby would probably fund any research that could definitely shift the blame from them.

However, we should not ignore the fact that there are also major political and economic incentives for climate alarmism.

This USA Today cartoon is a good illustration of what I mean by political incentives: https://www.gocomics.com/joelpett/2009/12/13. Climate action tends to support a particular vision for what the future should look like.

As for the economic incentives, I think one of the most important ones is that green economy creates jobs and new markets. That might be quite tempting if you are a Keynesian economist (or a CEO [1]).

[1]: "There’s an enormous opportunity…whether you believe in global warming or not…If you’re in a company, you’d better be pushing those (green) products because the world wants these products." - Jack Welch, former CEO of GE (https://www.freshdialogues.com/2009/05/12/jack-welch-why-com...)

20,000 years ago the ocean level was 400 feet lower.

Climate changes with or without people. The question is how much does Human behavior effect it.

That's a good starting point for a paper. Now you just need to collect the necessary data that shows that current climate change can be explained by natural cycles. People have tried to do that, and, as the scientific consensus shows, did not succeed.

Natural climate changes at a very slow rate that to the people experiencing it, it barely changes at all. However man-made climate change indicates a rate that will be noticeable in a human lifetime.

It is fair to simply say "climate change" to mean "the rapid climate change that we are experiencing". There is no need to add the "man-made" distinction other than to please people being overly literal.

Natural climate changes are actually much faster and larger in magnitude. A recent example is the younger dryas, where temps went down about 5°C in decades and a thousand years later did the reverse.

Further back in time we don't have the resolution to see such small spikes like what we have now.

that is assuming that it's provable that climate change is/isn't man made. Just because a fact exist does not mean it's knowable

I'd dispute the idea that nobody wants to spend trillions to get rid of fossil fuels – it's built in planned obsolescence, turning the foundations our economy into a growth sector once again, providing new opportunities for infrastructural monopolies and disruption.

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