Hacker News Reader

Comment by rocmcd | Hacker News Reader

I mostly agree, but I think your response misses the point that tons of people _believe_ that climate change is an existential threat - regardless of what the truth is.

I think a lot of people (myself included) would feel more at ease if we as a society were doing _anything_ to combat the projected worst case scenarios or at least give the illusion that we have things under control. It feels like every week there is a new story about some concerning weather event (fires, heat waves, droughts) giving more evidence to the doomer perspective.

View on HN

News stories aren't evidence. They are written to make you click and then subscribe. The doomer perspective is simply wrong. There is no increase in extreme weather, just reporting of it.

This document goes through all the data for the UK and shows this to be true using the government's own numbers and charts:

https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2023/06/UK-weather-2...

e.g. "Since the naming of storms began in 2015, they have gained more attention in the media and amongst the public, with the consequent misapprehension that they are becoming more common. In reality, wind storms have been declining in both frequency and intensity since the 1990s"

This page presents charts for number of heatwaves, forest burn area, hurricane frequency and energy and tornados in the USA over time. They all show no problems and in some cases declines in extreme weather.

https://realclimatescience.com/extreme-weather/

But reporting this sort of thing is left to non-profit bloggers because the news industry wants you to be scared, all the time, because scared people read the news a lot. This can result in insane outcomes, like the Washington Post telling you that a lack of hurricanes is "terrifying"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

Weather events: terrifying when they're there, terrifying when they aren't. There's a theme here.

Note that realclimatescience.com is nothing to do with realclimate.org (run by actual climatologists), but run by Tony Heller, an electrical engineer who calls himself Steven Goddard (see https://www.desmog.com/steven-goddard/)

You packed two bits of ad hominem misinformation into one sentence there, bravo! He once used a pseudonym like so many of us on this forum still do, but has gone by Tony Heller for many years now. And he wasn't an electrical engineer, he was a microchip verification engineer who worked at IBM.

Now do you have anything to say about the actual data, which is what's interesting here?

Describing somebody as an electrical engineer and noting that he goes by a second name that readers may be more familiar with is an ad hominem? If the "data" is genuinely interesting then I'm happy to leave it to the experts to analyse it.

Neither claim is correct, both are intended to denigrate him (an electrical engineer is someone who does electrics for buildings or grids, not someone who works on CPU design and you know it). And they're both about the author of one of the links, not about the actual subject in question, which is pretty much the definition of ad hominem.

> If the "data" is genuinely interesting then I'm happy to leave it to the experts to analyse it.

The "data" is the government's own data and if you delegate to people who have a clear profit motive to exaggerate/lie about what it says, and a track record of doing so, then you're going to continue to believe things that aren't true. In which case you should let the rest of us get on with actual analysis and debate instead of trying to kick up mud about the people doing it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com