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Comment by mikrl | Hacker News Reader

It impresses me how many global warming skeptics are in this forum as opposed to, say, the scientific community.

Is this due to the level of deluded optimism that I always hear is a prerequisite for one’s startup succeeding?

HN is heavily male, and many men listen to media that promotes a kind of package deal of beliefs. In comparison, the scientific community is just relatively small.

Why this is gender specific: https://www.americansurveycenter.org/featured_data/the-growi...

What part of that source supports the claim that "men listen to media that promotes a kind of package deal of beliefs"?

Not all startup bros are primarily scientifically curious, some are just driven by profit. Or, as a wise man once said: "nature decays! But Latinum lasts forever."

Is it mostly Americans that are skeptic? I don't hear of global warming skepticism from forums elsewhere.

Global warming skepticism is everywhere but since we are on US site bias is natural.

In every topic here about energy in Europe there are always comments how Germany is pro-coal etc etc. In every topic about US car-culture there is critical mass of comments explaining how it is necessary.

Per capita CO₂ emissions, 2022 [0]

- France: 4.6t

- 'coal-driven' Germany: 8t

- USA: 14.9t

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...

In the 1800s it was widely believed that humans could not cause animals to become extinct. As the thinking went, God created the world, and man is less than God, so to believe that man could destroy God's creation was heresy.

Oops! That sure was wrong, huh? But the same underlying beliefs persist to this day, with resolve tempered by the knowledge that actually doing something about the current situation would require a meagre amount of discomfort, and is thus unimaginable to the relatively wealthy people you'll find here.

There's a bunch of reasons. To throw one onto the pile: because carbon emissions are an externality that the Invisible Hand seems to be having a real hard time suppressing, it sure seems like - and this is how it's gone so far, and there's a kind of cultural consensus around this - that the only way out of this could be be pretty heavy-handed government intervention.

For, similarly, a bunch of reasons (see "The Californian Ideology" for a start) there's a strong inclination in tech circles towards anti-regulation, anti-government, neoliberalism and/or libertarianism. So those two things are colliding head-on: when their ideology encounters a problem it can't solve, people often care more about their ideology than solving the problem. It's easier to deny the problem exists than to restructure their views.

Because it's nonsense. All based on models with no history of being accurate. It's pseudo science as the Nobel Laurette for physics pointed out last year.

I think there are so many cultural pathways that lead to anti climate science today (and anti-vaxx, etc.) that it's impossible to list them all.

Generally they feed narcissism, and they must: in order to believe the anti-climate change rhetoric, you must first believe that you have hidden knowledge that makes you smarter than climate scientists (and more knowledgeable than them in something they have been studying for decades), or have some hidden knowledge that they are all lying, basically mind reading. You have to avoid the empathy and reflection that might make you understand their position, or cause you too question your own. Nowadays you even have to commit "doctrine over person" and deny the warming you see out your own window.

I think that is a bit common in programmer circles, and I have guesses as to why, but I would love to see a study in the space as to why.

The Galileo Fallacy...

Maybe you should read your message first before talking about narcissism. God forbid someone question something these days or even have the slightest need for a conversation, that you automatically become a whatever denier and a non believer in science. Comments like yours and others similar attitude turned all of this into a new cult or religion in which anyone who doesn’t 100% align with whatever views you have is dismissed and considered an idiot and the enemy. What do you want people to do, should we all live whatever lives we have in doom and gloom waiting for the apocalypse. Read the comments here, it reads like some doomsday cult of people proclaiming their superiority to the filthy peasants that don’t believe in science. Yeah, I’ll ride my bike and be a vegan so that half the people on this forum that work in companies that pollute and destroy this planet in one day more than I would do in 100 lifetimes can feel good about themselves living in their condescending bubbles.

Smart people tend to always think they are correct even on things they know literally nothing about.

Climate change is one of those things. You will hear the "just asking questions" or "skeptical" but climate change is finished science though tech bros tend to think it is not because of the TV they watch.

Understanding something often means asking basic questions. This forum has many folks who value questioning like a skeptic, something like a Socratic dialog. Kind of unfair to call people deluded just because you and many others have reached a conclusion long ago.

I'm exercising skepticism to be skeptical of the people who exercise skepticism over this topic given the preponderance of evidence. If one were being skeptical, one might wonder if skepticism over climate change was irrational and emotional rather than rooted in the pursuit of truth.

Absolutely man!! I've been trying to tell my neighbor this for ages. I keep taking shits on his lawn and he's getting all upset about it saying that it's ruining his lawn. I tell him I value questioning like a skeptic, something like a Socratic dialog. Kind of unfair to call me deluded just because he and many others have reached a conclusion long ago.

> Skepticism, also spelled scepticism in British English, is a questioning attitude or doubt toward knowledge claims that are seen as mere belief or dogma.

Questioning anthropogenic climate change is not skepticism.

deniers do believe climate acceptance is dogmatic, that our modern epistemology is a deviation and largely a political ideology.

They don’t have anything like that. Just like flat earth believers don’t have anything like that. They specifically don’t care what is reality. They pretend to care, but even if they themselves prove otherwise, even then they won’t change their mind, because it’s not about truth, or what is dogmatic. We just create these explanations, because we try to make it logical. The answer is probably way closer to “try to belong to a group”, and “being alone”, than anything like thinking about what is dogmatic, or whether the current concept of knowledge is all right or not.

Skepticism: Taking a look at the available evidence and following it to the result.

Denial: Taking a look at the available evidence and then arguing against the it ad nauseam because you don't like what you see.

If you've never heard anything about global warming before (no idea how that should have happened, but let's give you the benefit of the doubt here) you can be skeptical. Then you look at the available evidence and well, that's that. The conclusion is clear. From then on it's denial to run around "sorry, I haven't reached the conclusion yet, please convince me".

Hi, sorry I've got an effect on some folks. I'm not a climate change denier, and that climate change is real and that we've caused it are things I consider uncontroversial. I've not seen people like that in this thread nor on HN. They were likely flagged in this thread before I've seen it, and I can't see them.

I had the skeptics of imminent climate catastrophes in mind, or in general, folks who don't straight up deny climate change but still question some of the literature. It bothers me that these are lumped in with fringe deniers, and what's with the "deluded optimism" jab anyway? I don't agree with them either but cmon, that I'm sure have rubbed some the wrong way.

Also known as sealioning.

I mean, you have good heuristics, rereading what I wrote.

I ask dumb questions to tease out useful responses all the time, I don't think you're wrong in the general case, and an exhortation not to rush to judgement can only be good. But these guys have been at it at least twenty years. Every time they pop up with "what about the Mediaeval Warm Period/Little Ice Age/Roman Climatic Optimum?" someone explains that they're comparing local phenomena with a global phenomenon and they go quiet until the next time. There has to come a point where you are forced to assume bad faith.

I see Little Ice Age I assume bad faith and as much as possible politely reply to point out the irrelevance - not so much as to give them a response but to reply for the sake of young minds wandering by who might wonder about that sink hole.

I'd encourage all the genuinely curious to ponder all the angles, is it

* sun fluctuating,

* heat from below,

* can a gas in parts per million (PPM) really insulate enough to make a difference,

* biased data from urban heat islands,

* .. etc, etc, etc.

and for them to realise that all these things have been given honest consideration and found wanting .. decades ago in most cases.

I wasn't aware of the Little Ice Age being much of a denier talking point. It actually does seem fairly relevant to this story since these sponges lived through that time period. But I'm mostly just looking at the XKCD temperature timeline https://xkcd.com/1732/

It waxes and wanes I'm sure, but I've seen far too much raising of the Medieval Warm Period and the The Little Ice Age as "Aha, Gotcha!"'s over the past three decades to push it down the list of denier "but what abouts".

They're valid subjects in their own right, to be sure, but rarely raised in public forums for the interesting details in context, mostly for the "<something> <something> AGW must be wrong! ('cause climate has changed before fossil fuel usage!)"

The actual variation was small in comparison to what we are seeing now and the effect more localised than truly global - it tends to be lobbed in as a hand grenade along with "what about higher C02 levels many hundreds of thousands of years ago".

"Ice Age" itself is another awful phrase for generating confusion - there are multiple meanings and usages, for some professionals we are still in an Ice Age as we still have glaciers (free, not polar, ice) and this Ice Age experiences advances and retreats of large glaciers .. sometimes almost to the equator, othertimes back to the mountaintops. For most people "Ice Age" is when ice covers the UK and when it doesn't it's not.

Back to these sponges:

The surface waters above these sponges absolutely saw a small decrease in mean tempretures during the Little Ice Age.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

No argument there.

I freely admit I haven't read enough here nor dug into the details to find out whether these sponges that lived deeper than surface waters saw a small decrease in mean tempreture at that time or not.

Is that in the paper at all?

I didn’t read the paper but did read the article and one of the cool aspects of it was that they did go back in the timeline to find known historical temperature anomalies after calibrating the sponges against a modern period with good temperature measurements, so I would assume so.

I just wonder if this actually does change the “baseline” Earth temperature as the article implies rather than just adds a bit more detail to known historical temperatures.

As far as the temperature variation thing and deniers, I’ve always thought Munroe did an excellent job with the visualization I linked above in showing why the current change is so unprecedented when compared with previous ones.

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