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Comment by askin4it | Hacker News Reader

Please stop "making sure" when it comes to MY thinking. Also on behalf of everyone who doesn't like being told what or how to think, please stop "making sure".

If you really need to "make" something "sure" please pick something real and not a political football.

In the early 70's alarmists were "making sure" everyone was panicking about an ice age.

See..no ice...

Wait a while....I predict the alarmists will change to something else when people no longer buy the current looming disaster.

Please stop participating in the most recent fashionable doomsday fantasy.

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In the 70s the gradually forming consensus was still that global warming was real. The popular press just ran with cooling more, so the lay person believed it. The modern "the 70s predicted cooling so can we believe anything these 'scientists' say?" talking point is based upon a false premise.

https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.ht...

NY Times, 1976:

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/07/18/archives/the-genesis-stra...

But there is considerable evidence that this warm period is passing and that temperatures on the whole will get colder. For example, in the last 100 years mid‐latitude air temperatures peaked at an all‐time warm point in the 1940's and‐have been cooling ever since.

[Climatologists] are predicting greater fluctuations, and a cooling trend for the northern hemisphere.

The most imminent and far reaching [danger] is the possibility of a food‐climate crisis that would burden the well to do countries with unprecedented hikes in food prices, but could mean famine and political instability for many parts of the non-industrialized world.”

So writes Stephen Schneider, a young climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., reflecting the consensus of the climatological community in his new book, “The Genesis Strategy.”

If you're using that as evidence that media over-represented bad science, then I think that's a great example. Even before 1976 Schneider had already apologized and said that his assumptions regarding global cooling were overestimated and heating underestimate. Wikipedia also mentions that the book considers both global warming and cooling, it seems like the review was aiming at a particular popular angle. I don't know if I'd use a book review as an indicator of the actual scientific consensus of the time, but rather the media's understanding of the scientific consensus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Schneider_(scientist)

Every time I post that story here someone quickly reads Wikipedia, doesn't think about what they just read and then immediately attempts an AI-quality refutation.

Yes Wikipedia claims that "Having found that recalculation showed that global warming was the more likely outcome, he published a retraction of his earlier findings in 1974". Yet there he is in 1976 - two years after this supposed retraction - telling the NY Times that there's an absolute scientific consensus on global cooling.

Wikipedia isn't reliable for anything climate related or on many other topics. Their citation for this claim of a retraction doesn't go to any retraction, but rather a book written by a Guardian journalist.

It's really depressing how systematic this problem is. I'd try to fix Wikipedia with a link to the 1976 interview but there's no point, it'd get reverted quickly for sure.

For the wider point here see my other comment. According to present day understanding not only the media but also scientists were massively misleading the public about the climate and what other scientists believed. So how do you know it's not still happening?

> AI-quality refutation

Cool, we're going to be like that. What's depressing is that I made the effort when you tried to pull things off into a rabbit trail of to a single book review.

To be clear you didn't refute my initial argument here which looked at the state of the scientific community, you threw out a (from the sounds of things favorite cherry picked) book review from the New York Times.

> So how do you know it's not still happening?

Because it's much easier for scientists to have their own independent voices and easier to hear from the scientific community directly. Our ability to communicate these points, much like the science itself, is greatly improved from the 70s.

There are two book reviews on the page I linked, both about global cooling. This is what I mean. You're trying to argue using sources but not reading those sources.

This point is relevant because you can't directly measure what the scientific community believes. It's not even a well defined group to begin with. So in practice everyone relies on summaries, articles, assertions by scientists about what other scientists believe and so on. If you read HN discussions on climate you'll see all kinds of things stated with 100% certainty that everyone believes those things, but it's easy to find research papers refuting them or providing contradictory evidence. Whilst communication abilities are indeed better than the 1970s this does not lead to more rational discussion because attempts to bring up the complexities and contradictions of the actual evidence base are invariably suppressed, along with people pointing out the unreliability of the climatological community. Many scientists today in climate will tell you point blank that their views are never brought to public attention and even actively suppressed.

I see you still didn't read MY SOURCE, which highlights it wasn't 100% consensus by looking at papers throughout the decade. As you're not trying to engage with my information in good faith, I'm going to have to say good day to you.

I did read it, but I mentioned it in a reply in a different sub-thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36079311#36087598

See the sentence starting "Even the attempted refutation"

It's not a "talking point." It's my point of view because the preponderance of evidence seems to indicate that the media, as a group, cannot be trusted.

It's not a debate. Wake up. Much (most?) of the info going into your brain is not just false, it's deliberately manipulative.

> the media, as a group Is a ridiculously false assumption. You are also consuming some media, who are you to decide which publications fall into the bad group and which into the good group? Feelings of trust? Feelings of familiarity? Feelings of reassurance of existing viewpoints?

> It's not a debate. I am glad you do realise that human-induced climate change is real and a threat.

> Much (most?) of the info going into your brain is not just false, it's deliberately manipulative. You might want to find better sources of information then.

I imagine one must spend most time running in particular self-confirming circles to expect to be taken seriously when retorting with "in the 70's 'they' said there would be a new ice age, yuk, yuk, yuk", especially around HN. It's been refuted repeatedly, and I see someone already got to it while I was typing this.

I mean, in the 70's people had leaded gasoline in cars, lead paint in the walls, washed their hands with DDT, blew a hole in the ozone layer and doused countries in unknown chemical blends, so relying on the things that were common ideas at that time as signs of good ideas may not be the right call.

I wonder what the future will say about the 2020's.

Future Person 1: "They did the best they could with PCBs in their bloodstreams, a credit card sized hunk of plastic in their brains, breathing 60% more carbon dioxide with every breath than their great grandparents, having their food so processed and imbalanced that it lead to a multitude of diseases while wildy disrupting their gut biomes, and random chemicals in every drop of water on the planet disrupting their hormones and causing all manner of endocrine disorders."

Future Person 2: "Wow! I'm glad they got all of that fixed! That must have sucked living through!"

You forgot...

Future Person 3: "I'm so glad they finally threw off the mental chains and ran the shills out of town on a rail so we could finally see what was really happening."

Future Person 2: "Yeah, some people were seriously deluded by conspiracy theories back then. I am glad we reached a scientific consensus where misguided hate and fascism are not a thing anymore."

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