Hacker News Reader

Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

It's not really a binary question though, is it? There are a bunch of questions you need to unpack:

- Is the global climate warming?

- Is this due to man-made causes, rather than some other global cycle?

- Will the impact of this change be as serious as modelling (and hockey stick graphs) predict? What is your level of certainty?

- Is it the biggest risk facing mankind today? Could we save more lives using the money for something else?

- Are the proposed solutions worse than what you believe the likely impact of climate change to be?

View on HN

The obvious, clear, indisputable answers are:

- yes

- yes (>99%, at least if we allow that the outcomes may be more serious than the predictions)

- yes

- no (they can't be: the impact will be civilization-ending)

It's really very simple, you have to willfully ignore or misrepresent the data to come to any other conclusion.

Nobody of any reputation would claim global warming is going to end civilization.

If we're only talking about 2100, you're right. But the path of global warming doesn't stop in 2100, and if we continue at more or less the current pace, sometime after we will reach civilization-ending consequences (think +5 or +7 degrees warming, which will eventually happen in the following centuries if CO2 emissions continue like today). Mind you: not species-ending; humanity will survive even the worse possible effects of global warming, even adding in global nuclear war; it's just our current civilization's order that will stop, and a brave new world of some kind will take its place.

I dunno, man. Smart people seem to disagree with you: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0827TL851

Read the IPCC report if you want to see the real status - just because someone wrote a book doesn't mean they have no idea what they're talking about.

I think we have seen where "Trust the Science" gets us.

So let's trust some random author instead, they've paid to have a book published, they must know what they're talking about better than the IPCC.

Well in terms of incentives, they both make money from climate change.

I would suggest when people hear competing claims, they use their own experience and knowledge to see which one they place more creedence in.

People have heard the competing claims. The idea that deniers haven’t been able to make their case is just nonsense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com