Hacker News Reader

Comment by luxuryballs | Hacker News Reader

not to diss the science and the work involved around it but this kind of alarmist stuff makes me wonder how many similar things have happened in the past but nobody noticed because nobody was looking or even knew how to track such a thing, the environment is so complex, seems unlikely that we can make heads or tails of this, and in 50 years some new understanding will flip all of our current models (no pun intended!), so what’s really the value of such “warnings”? money went into this, where does it ultimately go?

View on HN

> how many similar things have happened in the past but nobody noticed because nobody was looking or even knew how to track such a thing

We can actually make petty good estimates because of things like carbon layers in the ice. It's happened in the past, you're right, and usually it precedes large scale extinction events.

so because a current in the ocean is changing we should tell everyone they might be about to die or what’s the goal here

The "goal" of science is understanding. I'm not sure what your issue with it is.

There are a couple of things wrong here. First off, there is a historic climate record that goes back centuries and is fairly accurate. Second, the climate prediction models are tested against this historic record. They reproduce the historic climates quite well. The error margins are generally shrinking due to model improvements.

But when making actual predictions, the models need to make assumption about anthropogenic parameters like CO2 and methane emissions. That's the largest remaining uncertainty at this point. Given the same assumptions, climate models generally agree on the outcome.

I agree with your sentiment, but I have a hard time imagining any alternative action scientists could take besides publishing and warning.

Science is best when it’s purely that, I’ve seen plenty of living examples and read about past ones where science mixed with politics or overt profit motives don’t end well. Surely there must be examples where the contrary has been the case, but I am biased, and I would wager that it ended poorly more often than well.

I would much rather have politicians that heed scientific results than scientists springboarding into politics.

it’s opportunity cost at least

De be sure to let us know when you've completed your research into this topic.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com