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Comment by creaghpatr | Hacker News Reader

That the 'expectations' are wildly off-base when predicting the extent and timing of climate change is a staple of the field.

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So much so that it is known for at least 10 years that this is the case. And also why: Fear of being accused of being an alarmist or sounding too extreme.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-science-p...

"Climate change prediction: Erring on the side of least drama?"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09593...

It was difficult enough to get the powers that be to believe even those very conservative predictions – even those were incessantly attacked and/or ignored for being propaganda, alarmist, unrealistic, bad science, a conspiracy by climate scientists just trying to secure grants…

> It was difficult enough to get the powers that be to believe even those very conservative predictions – even those were incessantly attacked and/or ignored for being propaganda, alarmist, unrealistic, bad science, a conspiracy by climate scientists just trying to secure grants…

It was a lost opportunity to shift the Overton window, which led to the moderate — rather than the extreme — projections being labelled as alarmist.

Yeah, but had there been a loud minority of climate scientists professing less moderate views, then the opponents would have simply retorted "see, they themselves can't even agree on what they think will happen!" And the scientific community was painfully aware that any internal disagreement would be used by the opponents to spread doubt, as seen in the leaked Climategate correspondence. Of course, this call for a united front was then used by the denialists as evidence for their climate conspiracy theory, so it's not like the humanity had any actual chance of winning against itself here. We really done fucked up this time.

Presumably, that scenario still includes figures advocating complacency, so you're really comparing a situation where opinion is presented as split between complacency and moderation vs complacency, moderation, and alarmism.

Both-sideism works in your favor in the latter case, and if someone digs into the numbers a bit more, they would find that the alarmists outnumber the complacents.

The only real risk is that the alarmists provoke an "it's already too late to fix anything" response, which I don't think is terribly likely, as there isn't an upper bound on how bad things get until you hit a tipping point of civilizational collapse.

It's a staple of the field because the official expectations are, by design, conservative.

Because, well, nobody wants to listen to 'alarmists' and 'extremists'.

Weird how the IPCC reports have consistently pushed their models' disaster and negative effect predictions further into the future every year for over a decade then.

every few or so year, IPCC picks the best model from hundred in the past few years that predicted the present the best, extrapolate the future, and call it the truth, and people online get flogged for suggesting that maybe the whole process reek of selection bias, since the model in exam are for the most part curve fitting and not derived from first principles, so in a changing environment their long term accuracy is questionable.

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