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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

> There’s something else going on, too: Scientists are shielding the public. They say: “We don’t want people to give up,” or “We don’t want the island nations to feel abandoned,” or “We don’t want people to lose hope.”

This is called out by the author, but in my opinion as soon as you start changing the truth to fit a narrative you are not being scientific. If their model says we are missing the mark and we will get warming of 4C then this is what should be reported.

What would we say if a scientist doing Alzheimer research said that their new medecine could reduce symptoms by 50% even though their data shows that the reduction is only 10%? Even if it's not for money and purely so that patients treated with the medecine would "keep hope" we would call that person a liar.

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I feel like this is the same error that Fauci and the CDC kept making in communicating Covid risks: rather than frankly stating the facts, they were continually worried about the impact that their messaging might have, and tailoring their statements based on what they’d guess the reaction would be.

This backfired, repeatedly, and ultimately led to distrust of their statements when complete trust was necessary.

It wasn't an error. It was a deliberate strategy, they still do it, they sometimes admit that they do it (without consequence) and it was more than just Fauci/CDC. A few other examples:

1. The recent Nobel Prize for the mRNA vaccines was awarded not on scientific merit but to encourage people to take the vaccines, and to reinforce the "safe and effective" message, according to a member of the Nobel committee. Yet the prize is presented as being for scientific achievement.

2. The population was told the plan for the first lockdown was for only two weeks. Off the record, health officials were briefing top executives of large local businesses to expect much longer lockdowns. Also, one of the senior public health officials in the Trump administration admitted in a book that she told Trump two weeks whilst knowing they were going to do it for much longer. The reason for the lie about the duration was because they thought people wouldn't accept it if they told the truth.

3. The virologists writing the Proximal Origin paper knew what they were writing probably wasn't true, but feared a "shitstorm", the impact on politics and the growth of "conspiracy theories" if they said they thought it came from a lab. So they deliberately misled the public.

Climatologists are the same way. In the ClimateGate emails there are parts where they agree to suppress contradictory evidence in order to avoid "diluting the message".

The Nobel Prize is explicitly for those scientists that "have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind". It's easy to make the case that this is true for mRNA vaccines, whether or not a committee member thought it would encourage vaccine uptake.

We have not yet received the evidence that this is true in the long term, and have actually received quite a bit of evidence against. For example, the usage of pseudouridine and its unknown long term effects, along with the fact that it’s a commonly tested for cancer marker.

The problem is the media landscape we are in -- anything they did would have backfired because of how many bad-faith actors and angry people litter our society.

Agree. There isn’t an alternate reality where the message was received well.

Exactly right! Even though a mandated lockdown would have been received badly everywhere self-absorbed individuals reside, and whiny business owners would cry about their profits during lockdown, and bad actors would exploit Americans' lack of discipline and interest in the public good, Fauci made the situation infinitely worse by not giving America the tough love it needed and by failing to stand up the POTUS when it mattered. The was so full of double talk that he utterly destroyed public confidence in the efforts of his office. If America had locked down long enough at the beginning, likely through the end of the summer 2020, the pandemic would have resolved quickly in the United States, and hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. Students of history and communications will look at this period for what not to do.

I can sympathize with the sentiment that scientists should just report the objective facts and not inject their own opinions into what they tell the public. Another comment suggested that this can lead to distrust like with COVID-19.

That said, I think science communication is an art form which takes skill and practice. If you are a scientist doing research on aspartame in mice or whatever, then what the media and laypeople are interested in is what the results mean for their lives. At some point you have to give your informed opinion or else others will interpret the results for you, probably incorrectly.

I think that the scientists are trying their best to communicate their professional interpretations of the data, but it's difficult to do so in a way that will please everyone. Especially when some parties are actively hostile to the message you are trying to communicate, and will nitpick whatever you say using the least charitable understanding.

The point of the article is that they don't communicate their professional interpretations of the data. They pick how they want people to act, and then say whatever sounds scientific that will yield that outcome. This seems to be a common pathology amongst academics. Put another way, they manipulate the public and then get upset when people stop trusting them, apparently unable to see the link between those two things.

From my conversations with climate scientists my understanding is that around 2005-2015 (rough estimate) the opposite was the case: A few people said "we are going straight to hell", and the majority publicly called them "alarmist" and "counterproductive", while (in private conversation, with multiple people) admitting that the "alarmists" might well be correct.

I still get called "alarmist" and "doomer" when I bring up what the realistic impacts of climate change 10 years out, based just on current emissions is.

Just look here: https://climateactiontracker.org/global/temperatures/

You can plainly see that if we just do as we've been doing, by 2100, we're looking at 2.6-2.9 degrees of warming over pre-industrial levels. If we actually managed to hit the 2030 targets that have been set (and, that's a huge long shot, to be clear), then we're in for about 2.4 degrees.

If we literally just do what the fuck we've said we were going to do, then the prediction is still about 2 degrees of warming. The "optimistic scenario" (lol) is labeled 1.8 degrees.

Even if we got the help of a magical genie to stop emitting all greenhouse gasses today, we're still looking at at least 1.2-1.6 degrees of warming, according to NASA: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/climateqa/would-gw-s...

In the past year, we've seen mass die offs of salmon and snow crabs. Insects, as a group, are on the decline. Climate migration is starting to happen, and the countries that are receiving these refugees are not welcoming them with open arms.

This is barely the beginning. It only gets worse from here over the next decade. I honestly would not be surprised to see global civilization collapse in my lifetime, and my actuarial lifespan is up in about 45 years.

Please keep in mind that most (nearly all?) of our climate models only include rising carbon emissions from human sources. Thawing permafrost and warming swamps and burning forests and such will (very likely) produce additional carbon(-equivalent greenhouse gases).

They use the beautiful term "Unrepresented Earth system feedback mechanisms" in this 2019 paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1368-z.pdf

Keep on alarming, doomer!

Hah. Yeah. The whole bit about climate tipping points, and how we've tripped (IIRC) 5 of them, and are in danger of tripping (IIRC again, sorry) another 8 or 9.... that's a whole other comment.

I was literally telling my therapist about a week and a half ago that it's so frustrating that I'm probably one of the most "doom and gloom" people I know on these subjects, yet every time I've been proven wrong, it's because I haven't been pessimistic enough. I'm about ready to start cross dressing and change my name to Cassandra, lol.

One of my best friends when she transitioned literally did change her name to Cassandra because of this

Outside of therapy which you just mentioned, how are you coping with all of this "doom and gloom" ?

How are you preparing for the worsening effects of climate change?

Another assertion I've read in the discussions is that the so-called alarmists were being extremely conservative with their assertions to prevent being taken as alarmist, and even those tempered conservative predictions were ridiculed by those with a vested interest in denying climate change.

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