Americans underestime climate policy popularity by nearly half | Hacker News Reader

Americans underestime climate policy popularity by nearly half

nature.com

21 pointsmontalbano23 comments

This is not necessarily a contradiction. The vast majority of people support “doing something to save the planet,” and a vast majority also support not being personally affected by that something. It leads to cognitive dissonance which shows up in surveys like these.

You missed the whole point. The purpose of that scientific looking article was to convince you that climate change is caused by human activity, which in reality is not.

Wow! That's news! Does climate change exist? If so, what's causing it!?!?

The climate is, has always, and will always change. The debate is not about what's causing it as much as the relative effect of contributions and remedies. Did humans turn the Sahara from a grassland to a desert? Was the fear mongering about global cooling in the 70's correct?

Yeah, but we're always learning new things. You didn't say what we've learned is causing climate change

Do you know?

It's a chaotic system so I think no one can really understand or predict with high confidence. That's what the math around chaos theory says anyhow. Humans tend to overestimate their abilities and impact, that's what psychology says

There are long-term, short-term natural processes as well as human processes impacting it. Even the sun has cycles which impact Earth's climate on scales we don't fully understand.

I definitely think we are not approaching ways to keep our current (preferred) climate intact the best we can. The focus seems to be more on low-impact, feel-good solutions rather than the difficult, high-impact solutions. I for one would like to see a lot more money going into R&D for H2O desalination and CO2 sequestration.

have our elites shown that they are competent and trustworthy enuf to be trusted with handling global warming, oops, I mean climate change? clearly they have not shown that...

Humans have been predicting this since the Industrial Revolution. Global cooling wasn't much of a thing in the 1970's, that was a look at cycles of ice ages without much modeling behind it.

Our preferred climate is over, we're into new territory now.

The climate changes daily and yearly because the sun's got daily and yearly cycles. But the sun's got 100 or so years cycles, too. So the climate changes slightly over those periods, too. Period.

"Climate" typically refers to mean weather over decadal periods .. weather cycles such as El Niño | La Niña collectively make up a longer term climate condition that's been stable on average for thousands of years.

>> The climate changes daily . . .

Perhaps you're thinking of "weather".

About global cooling: the French green party was born in the 70s over water availability and global warming. Idk where this global cooling myth came from, i tracked it down to an American weekly newspaper, but couldn't find published research about it. I've found articles about nuclear winter and on the cyclical nature of historical climate (and explanation on how we average the temperature of a century studying Antarctica ice), but nothing on a global cooling fear.

Until someone point me to a peer reviewed research paper of the 70s, i will consider anybody using this argument a grifter. Sorry, it's like the third time on this website i ask for sources and i guess I will be ignored for the third time.

For people who don't have time to research: it seems to be a newspaper hoax used by grifters.

Which paper was that? I'm also interested in other early sources, even if not serious.

I think it originated from Newsweek. I found others in US journals, and it didn't catch up at all in other developed countries, as it was not a scientific article (hence why i never heard of it at all growing up). I don't understand why this myth seems to be present also in the UK, my guess is that's a tabloid who dug that 70s Newsweek story and sold it to 'uninformed' (or gullible, depending on how charitable you want to be) public.

The weird thing to me is that it seems nobody's disputing the claim, as this was a "science evolve everyday" proof. Yes, everyday some new evidence are found that shake/modify our understanding of the world, but this particular story? A lie. Or at least a really controversial take. It basically said that some climate scientists believed that the earth wouldn't warm due to human activities like other believed. The consensus was still building.

But even then, no climate scientists thought human activities had no impact.

And anybody who propagate this story either is part of this group of people who 'share' without thinking (but on hacker news it's quite hard to publish without writing, thus thinking), or is a liar with an agenda. That's why I ask for scientific article every time, i know none exist because this is a hoax, and usually the liar leave the discussion.

It's better to ask than to accuse. To act as if the other party is honest and well-intentioned saves your own sanity, if nothing else.

My dim recollection (I was young at the time) is that based on known times for ice ages, it seemed to someone like we were becoming due for another one. Just based on the clock, no understanding of mechanics. More Newsweek-like.

I called it fear mongering for a reason...

https://www.climate.gov/teaching/resources/70s-they-said-the...

Cite something about the fear?

https://www.google.com/search?q=global+cooling+in+the+1970s

click on image results, it was a Time cover at one point

Yeah, just not long term actual traction. The impact of CO2 emissions was recognized in the 1800s and has been of increasing concern since then. It was treated as a good tbing by people who feared ice ages (and read a lot of Time).

Correct, when told some catastrophe is happening, most will want to do something. However, disagreeing what that "something" should be hardly sounds like congnative dissonance.

I don't know. I see often here on HN people complaining that governments are doing nothing about climate change. Yet, almost every day you can read in the news about one government or another banning the sale of gasoline cars after 2035 or mandating x% of electricity come from renewables, or something similar. And generally these measures are received with popular support. The cognitive dissonance is there.

Sure, but that's again due to 2035 being such a far away time. Or that x% of electricity coming from renewables being on some timeframe. The negatives effects of these plans are rarely highlighted by governments in the here and now. Likewise those effects are often not felt for a while.

Also the difficulty is not that a majority of people don’t want to do something about it but instead that well-organized minorities can block a solution.

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