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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

That one always makes me sad – imagine how different our world would have been if, say, they’d gone to Carter and offered to go public with the data in exchange for help decarbonizing. He’d have gotten his French-style civilian nuclear power program, they’d probably have been able to successfully shift into emerging green industries with their enormous resources, and we wouldn’t have an expensively cultivated anti-science political movement causing problems in other areas.

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I spent half a decade working with climate data from institutions around the world. There are dragons in those datasets and it is really frustrating to watch denialism at large and have to deal with it personally.

I wish more people were aware of how damaging bad science is, even when it is well intentioned. Environmental studies are often littered with double counting and creative data framing. One faked study does more to convince people global warming is over blown than 100 rigorous studies showing that it isn't.

The reason people think climate change is overblown is because it challenges them to think about changing their way of life ie directly goes against their interests, not because some dataset has been poorly interpreted in a study they haven't read.

(Also because fossil fuel people kept financing fake science for decades and are actively participating in culture wars around it)

> The reason people think climate change is overblown is because it challenges them to think about changing their way of life ie directly goes against their interests…

I don’t think the vast, vast majority of people actually care that much. It’s a vocal minority on all sides. Most people just want to pay their bills, have food/clothing/shelter covered, and try to muddle through this life thing.

I would posit that the vast, vast majority of people have little say or impact as it pertains to climate change, they just don’t have the means or mental bandwidth to effect change.

Anecdata: I tell a relative that climate is going to get hotter and more variable and that said relative should be concerned that an unaffordable electricity bill may be in the cards (Houston anyone?). Relative's response: the governing authorities won't let that happen. Me: <internally sighing and filled with despair>

It was sitting around in the Texas blackout in February 2021 that really got me to think about the scale of the disaster on our hands. I realized that there was nothing the government could do other than wait for the state to thaw, and it was pretty unnerving to think about. I also remember how incredibly ironic I thought it would be if global warming meant I died of hypothermia in South Texas (a fate that a few sadly did succumb to; I really was a bit scared since I've never actually had to live at such low temperatures and never without heating). I'm generally much more worried about heatstroke.

I've lived here all my life, but I do wonder at what point I'll need to move. I actually had lunch with a couple old colleagues this week and interestingly, we're all lifelong Texans and talked about leaving the state. Currently it's more about politics, but we also talked about future climate as a concern. Once my parents and aunts/uncles are gone, I don't know that there will be much to hold me in place.

They will certainly care when you tell them they should stop driving their two tons trucks around in a city that's as friendly to pedestrian life as Afghanistan is to women.

Some environmental advocates' rhetoric focused on the lower probability but much higher damage outcomes, e.g. Gore's Inconvenient Truth. Language like "up to 20 feet" etc to focus on the higher range.

A doctor could say an infection has a chance of death if left untreated. If the person lives they'd say the doctor was "wrong", and "the doctor gave me a month to live."

At this point most probable estimates are so bad it's besides the point, but I'd think the lower odds yet especially cataclysmic projections are worth attention.

Ok let's go down the metaphor then : If the doctor tells you have one month to live because of lung cancer and it turns out you had actually two years ahead of you, I'd agree it's not the same but it seems that the information about the possibility for the end of it all for you should be the center of your attention and not whether you could have kept smoking another year, darn it.

The anti-science political movement was in effect long before Carter. He tried to switch to the metric system and was opposed on cultural grounds as one example. But look back to Darwin and Galileo and you’ll see a long standing pattern. Sadly, at this point it looks like it will doom us.

> Galileo

To be fair one of the reasons his ideas were rejected is because he wrote a book portraying the pope as an idiot. Heliocentrism/his books were banned earlier but a few years later one of his friends and supporters during the initial trial was elected pope. So there was a non insignificant chance that the Catholic church would have accepted heliocentrism a few hundred years sooner had he managed to be a bit more subtle and no alienate him.

Also I'm not trying to downplay the anti scientific attitude which was quite prevalent back in those days (when science couldn't be balanced with religious truths etc. otherwise I don't think it was that bad) but one of the main issues with his theory is that he couldn't really prove it conclusively (e.g. the issue with stellar parallax).

e.g. While the Roman inquisition did ban his theory and books but first they organized a public debate between Galileo and one of their lawyers which which was primarily based on scientific rather than religous arguments

I’m not saying it wasn’t there – Scopes, for example – but pumping many billions of dollars into it really amped it up, especially when it turned opposition to science into a Republican primary filter. While the southern realignment was unfolding, science denial was visible in both parties (e.g. William Proxmire, D-WI) but that was not as pronounced in the age of the space race and the science-dependent Cold War. That changed between the tobacco and fossil fuel companies’ enormous lobbying efforts, and you’ll recognize many of the same “experts” trotted out to explain why environmentalism, public health, or anything else which affects those companies’ bottom lines.

Well said; I was thinking of Scopes when I said Darwin. It’s hard to really get a feel for history that I didn’t live through and I’m talking about things a bit before my time which began in the Reagan era. I mostly look at the work of Carl Sagan and I get the feeling he really got going in the 70’s and 80’s. Agreed that it seems like tobacco companies wrote the original playbook for weaponizing disinformation for commercial purposes, but it’s fair to say that America’s issues with science denial preceded that as well.

I think the fight over the metric system is instructive - Im not aware of any huge lobbying effort to defeat it, but it became a culture war anyway, and now we have a strange mixed system in the US.

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