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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

Good luck finding few enough sides. There are easily about eight sides in the global warming argument.

Is global warming even happening?

Is man-made CO2 causing it?

Will reducing man-made CO2 help?

Is the best way to mitigate this to stop emitting CO2, to research green tech, nuclear or to look into measures allowing us to live in a hotter world? And why? How is "best" defined?

Then you'll need impartical referees. When side D claims that no recent study shows that X is true, and side G says there is, who's right? What exhibits are allowed, and how?

But never the less, this form of debate exists and thrives, it's called peer-reviewed journals. Too bad that the climate debate is too much in a hurry to use them.

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Here's another argument for you -- what makes people think that the temperature as it is today is the best one for the planet? Isn't that in itself playing God? It's been warmer and colder before on earth, what kind of selfish and anthropocentric mindset thinks we get to pick what temperature we want anyway?

Okay, I'll bite: people think that the temperature as it is today is the best one for the people. It's not playing God -- it's just maintaining our race. Granted, at the disadvantage of other races but that's just how nature works, isn't it?

"Looking after yourself means everyone is looked after." Now beat me.

I was just bringing up another argument, but let's play it out a bit.

Why would the temperature today be the best for the people? Is there something about the current temperature, or is it just any kind of change from the current temp would cause so much chaos as to outweigh any benefits?

I guess if you wanted what was best for people, you'd want the temp that had the most arable land, right?

The main point about global warming is that it is rapid. Rapid climate change (in either direction) is bad for the obvious reason that we don't have much time to adjust.

In general, a warmer climate is good for us. We're at a geological-historical climate high right now, and it comes with lots of available farm land and pleasant temperatures. Raising it yet further, beyond anything human beings have experienced previously, is projected to bring some good things (Canada will be a huge farm!) and some bad things (malaria will spread its range massively, large increase in hurricanes). Raising it rapidly, however, gets us lots of the latter immediately, and the benefits if any emerge much more slowly.

So should we really be afraid of global warming? On the balance, I think a controlled, intentional warming might be a good idea, although I have no idea who would have the authority to say so or execute on it. Is the current out-of-control, unintended warming dangerous? Almost certainly.

I understand the gist of what you are saying but I'm getting a little lost in the details.

So there is this number, concept, or metric, called "climate". What is it? Debatable. Let's say it's average overall global temperature -- just for simplicity's sake. It's okay now, and it's always changing and that's okay too. We just need it to change at a slower rate than it is now.

How can we measure the change in an unknown/non-standard metric? Sure -- anecdotally, we can observe things like less sea ice in the Arctic, or the decrease in ice coverage around Antarctica, but correlation and causality are completely different things. We just kind of "connect the dots" to join up global climate change and observations. So there's a number out there, in the void, and it's bad enough now, but at the current rate it is changing it's going to be awful soon unless we act now.

Ignoring the details (which are murky, at least to me), we're still left with a version of the argument which says that "who are we to determine (or heck, measure for that matter) how fast the climate should change?" People in Canada and Russia have a lot of new farmland that could be put to use, the sooner the better.

I'm still not sure global warming beats the coming ice age. I am sure that the global climate is not something that we have anywhere near understanding or mastery over. But its an interesting discussion anyway.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but your argument seems to be:

- I don't really understand this whole "global warming" thing.

- Even climatologists, who do claim to at least understand global warming, don't have complete understanding of or mastery over the global environment.

- So despite the fact we are probably causing extremely rapid, geologically exceptional warming to levels not seen since before the dawn of mankind, we should do nothing. Climatologists who believe this warming will have large negative effects far outweighing the positive are wrong, or at least not certain enough to be right that we should act.

Implicitly this seems to be saying "One should only act with complete mastery, after achieving total understanding of the situation". That seems like it an overly heavy burden of proof to me, much heavier than you'd normally require of a claim. In fact, it would be completely paralyzing to require this level of proof in the general case, because almost never do we achieve either mastery or true understanding.

Yep -- I confused you. Sorry about that. I should have stuck to the initial argument instead of providing commentary.

The argument I was examining was "who are we to decide?" I think it was answered nicely.

To respond:

Science is not about "a good feeling" about something. It is about mastery. Constructing a model that can be tested. I mean, just think about it -- when I drop a hammer, I can tell you each second how far away it is going to be, its velocity, and its momentum. It's complete mastery to our degree to measure. That's science.

I object to scientists becoming social activists, no matter what the cause. Social activism involves fear mongering, public opinion manipulation, politics, and "messages" instead of information. Science involves none of this, and if scientists continue to confuse their jobs and their art with others, then science will become cheap and politicized even more than it is today. We'll have "conservative" scientists and "liberal" scientists and each group will have the usual internet echo chambers to talk into. It's already heading that way.

As far as the chicken little, "why risk it?" argument, I'd refer you to Occam. We can either believe that the climate will continue along some course and the associated ecosystems will adapt as they always have or we can start adding all of these variable like sea level or ice cover and then draw some alarming conclusions. I like to KISS.

Good thread. I like the "what is a good climate?" angle.

BS. Each of the 10 chapters in the IPCC 2007 report on the science basis for climate change contains something like 15 pages of references. If you bothered to check actually those peer-reviewed journals you might discover quite a few papers.

In “Peer Review? What Peer Review?” McLean writes, “The IPCC would have us believe that its reports are diligently reviewed by many hundreds of scientists and that these reviewers endorse the contents of the report. Analyses of reviewer comments show a very different and disturbing story.”

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/ipccprocessillusion....

Also, the 20-page "executive summary" is voted on, line by line, by politicians, who (as politicians do) have every other motive than actually objectively figuring out the truth. We have politicians deciding which science is right. If that's not BS, I don't know what is.

I never said the IPCC reports were peer reviewed, I said that report 1 on the science basis of climate change contains about 150 pages of references to peer-reviewed articles where the science is done, as a response to the comment about climate change researchers being in too much of a hurry to publish in peer-reviewed journals.

While we can argue about the process behind the IPCC reports, your link smells of paranoia to me. For one, those politicians voting include reps from the oil-producing Gulf states and to think that they would be predisposed to wanting the finding to be that oil is bad seems far-fetched to me. I'm sure the representatives for the U.S. government wasn't exactly pushing to acknowledge global warming either.

Besides, I must argue with the basic premise of your comment. The politicians are the ones who get things done, and in the end they, just like everyone else, will have to choose what conclusions to draw from the science. Given that the IPCC is at least made up by an assembly of scientists who are trying to synthesize and summarize a whole body of research for those politicians, I think that's about as good a process as one can imagine. It's certainly better than deciding, apparently on their own, that the science on global warming is inconclusive like a certain outgoing US administration appears to have done.

The link he posted also talks about the referenced articles. McLean maintains that these peer-reviewed articles are primarily generated on the basis of funding from previous IPCC reports, and the majority of research referenced is done from the presupposition of human caused global warming. Both factors mean that dissenting voices are unlikely to be heard.

True, but does the public generally have access to these journals? Maybe issues like this would be alleviated some if the journals were opened up.

As lutorm said.. also, if this is condensed into a 45-minute townhall format, you get "My friend Joe the Eskimo thinks icebears are cute" and while it's great TV, no-one is more clever for it.

I'd say people are better informed if they get to hear the best of both sides instead of only one. Have the global warming skeptics been able to put something out that gets the publicity of "An Inconvenient Truth?"

Even in the case where one side is clearly correct, I think its position can only be strengthened in the public eye if its arguments are compared to the best opposing arguments. Only if people assume the opposite can I see a good case for one sided propaganda, but I don't know of a good reason to assume this.

In an ideal world, yes.

But we've just seen a couple of guys debate the next four year of one country in a very public way. It took them a year, not to reach any kind of common ground, much less agreement, but to get to the point where a few pct.pts. likes one guy better than the other. This was even made easy by pre-defining that there will only be two sides to the debate.

The climate debate discusses the future, not of one country, but of the entire earth, and if we end up on the side of the "alarmists", we're not trying again in 4 years - this is a 20-50 year plan.

So, yes, I agree with you, but my pragmatic practical side (the one that will not be allowed in a brainstorm session) argues that it's just not practical.

Sure they do, it's not like they are secret. But most people don't want to take the time to understand scientific articles that aren't written for the general public, if even those.

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