Hacker News Reader

Comment by wyre | Hacker News Reader

The climate denialism on this site is ridiculous, considering the average education and pay rates of the users on this site.

View on HN

average education and pay have nothing to do with it. a lot of hn users are bazingapilled techno-opportunists.

climate breakdown confronts two axioms for what is probably a sizable userbase of this site:

- nothing (bad) ever (really) happens

- advancement of technology and industry solves all problems

they have no incentive to be any other way. because of the high pay and education, most of these people will be able to live comfortably within the confines of the global north and presumably wealthy nation-state for the rest of their lives.

Calling into question optimism and entrepreneurship can be a very existential question, I admit that believing the phenomenon is overblown and of the data dubious is very tempting given the mental weight it clears. But the irony for this population (me included) is that it’s the same as believing in afterlife to alleviate the existential dread of death, it’s religious thinking. People do great things without being death denialists, it should be the same without climate denialism.

You should also consider the field and expertise of the users. Also, I am not specialized in data science but even I know that at some point, it is just so easy to cook up whatever conclusions you want if you have a big enough dataset. So I imagine that those who works with data analysis all the time eventually get jaded whenever they heard someone demanding drastic, even unreasonable, changes based on data they found.

The idea that the data in this case is ambiguous is laughable and has been for 20 plus years.

It isn't data science. It is earth science.

Someone once commented "HN is a reactionary site" and (while I don't 100% agree with that) I keep thinking about it from time to time.

Most people on here (generalisation) spend more time on a computer than in nature. If you spend time in Nature it is very obvious what is happening. Look at the world from whence it came and where it is going.

Heating of our climate is but one thing.

I don't think its outright denial as much as a general question on whether or not humans are contributing to it as much as "authorities" say (especially when the climate change conventions are traveled to by jets that contribute more to global warming in one flight that a person can reduce in a year, iirc the stats), and the resistance to all the restrictions placed on middle class when upper class and government gets a pass.

The other thing is that there were predictions made about some things like Miami being underwater in early 2020s that never came true, and the same type of predictions that are being made.

So tbf, its not really that unwarranted to be skeptical.

Who made those predictions?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com