Tried to stir HN crowd but failed miserably (IPCC announcement) | Hacker News Reader

Tried to stir HN crowd but failed miserably (IPCC announcement)

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30 pointscouchnaut28 comments

Part of your problem is probably that it's not really news.

Pretty much everyone knows that climate change is happening and that we should be doing something about it (not that that translates to much action).

The IPCC keep publishing reports like this mainly in an effort win over 'skeptics'.

Its so predictable, futuretimeline.net published the story a few years ago:

http://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2014.htm#ipcc

I hadn't seen that site before. I think it's really cute how they update their past predictions [1] after the fact [2] to improve their apparent accuracy, but you'd think they would have the sense to stop short of having "predicted" the Chelyabinsk meteor explosion last year.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20121227101314/http://www.futuret...

[2] http://www.futuretimeline.net/21stcentury/2013.htm

That's exactly the point (which I obviously failed to get through). The news (at least to me) is that we're past the tipping points - it is irreversible now. Plus it is not (probably) just about droughts, weird weather and rising sea levels but rather about Earth becoming like Venus.

>The news (at least to me) is that we're past the tipping points - it is irreversible now.

To say "it's irreversible now" is to imply there was ever a point that it wasn't, a point at which there was something we could have done to change trends at this scale. The links you gave don't really suggest this to be the case.

BTW, David Suzuki is a fearmonger with a long history of making ridiculous unscientific doomsday claims. For instance, he claimed that a second Fukushima disaster would force evacuation of the west coast of America:

http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/01/20/david-suzuki-regrets...

So if you really want to claim the earth is likely to be "uninhabitable in only some decades" you probably want to use somebody else as a source.

Of course there was a point that this was not irreversible. That's what the notion of "tipping point" implies.

The links were selected somewhat in a haste but nevertheless you can come up with your own sources easily. Most of the "alarmists" have been warning and calling to action for decades now. For various reasons I had not read any of them for the past years which is why the irreversibility was news to me.

Reading the first link you posted, its only mention of "tipping point" is to say:

> Although the summary of the report doesn’t expressly use the term “tipping point” to described the changes in climate, it acknowledges that in many cases they are irreversible

So: (1) The IPCC doesn't say there's a tipping point.

(2) The source you give mentions "irreversible" but doesn't say "now irreversible".

The fact that the climate is changing in some direction or other does not mean we can reverse that change, much less that it's worth doing so. Even if we're causing it.

The second link you posted seems to be a 70-minute video featuring a bunch of activists, with no text summary to explain why it should be interesting or relevant - no WONDER you didn't get lots of upvotes! (I haven't watched it, but would be happy to skim a transcript, a summary, or an article on the same subject).

The third link you posted does mention tipping points, but not based on any recent news or anything the IPCC just said. It's an essay written by some dude who is quite alarmed about things, referring as a source back to a essay written by some other dude last year which in turn refers back to papers in 2007 and 2012. There doesn't seem to be any NEW information about "tipping points" therein. Yes, people were talking about speculative "tipping points" back in 2007. Most of that sort of talk has been dialed way back since then, in large part because nature didn't cooperate. Surface warming trends are flat, and weather isn't notably more "extreme" that it has been in the past.

Actually, it's worse than that. When you look at the specifics of HOW the IPCC thinks we're currently being impacted by climate, a huge negative current impact they note is the damage done by a rise in food prices, a rise which was in large part caused by crop diversion for use in biofuels. Which is to say, a misguided program from the past that was allegedly intended to help the environment, hurt us all on a global scale. If in 2007 the US had simply taken a chill pill and ignored the IPCC's warnings rather than instituting more of a biofuels mandate, we'd all be better off today; the measurable current harm from climate change would be a fraction of what it is and we'd have released less net CO2.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/10716756/Biofuels-do...

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-biofuel-hope-that-beats...

Those who are willing to take IPCC at its word need no convincing. Those who are not so willing also need no convincing. By now there's no third category of meaningful size, and everyone on both sides is sick and tired of arguing over it.

The IPCC's job is basically to find or invent ways to claim the sky is falling and continually declare "it's worse than we thought" regardless of what the data says. They've been doing this for long enough that by now most sensible people have tuned out.

In context, the most recent IPCC reports confirm earlier impressions that the likely costs of climate change are relatively small compared to the benefits of economic growth over the same period whereas the cost of doing much about climate change now is much larger than the cost of doing nothing. So even if we chose to get "stirred", what would you have us do about it?

Lomborg gives a few relevant numbers here:

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/bj-rn-lomborg-sa...

Most researchers say that actually IPCC is rather conservative in its views not the other way around.

First time I hear about Lomborg. Will read later.

> Most researchers say that actually IPCC is rather conservative in its views not the other way around.

Sure, if you're listening to people like David Suzuki you'd have that impression. But on the other side there are people like Chris Landsea - here was his resignation letter from the IPCC:

http://cstpr.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_policy...

The IPCC's charter is to tell us about risks related to climate change. Not the benefits. If there weren't any risks or we were fully informed about them, the IPCC would have no institutional reason to continue to exist. So naturally it focuses on the latest big scary "we just noticed THIS risk!" stories and puts much less emphasis on "it turns out we were wrong about THAT risk!" stories. For all we know, each new report could be exactly the same as the last one in terms of the net overall danger documented and it would still look like things were "getting worse", because areas where things are "getting better" generally aren't mentioned or are soft-pedaled.

For instance, the IPCC once tried to claim a high certainty that there'd be more hurricanes in the future due to climate change (see Landsea's letter linked above), but now they either don't make such claims or assign them a much lower certainty level. The IPCC once claimed Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 ( http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jan/20/ipcc-hima... ); that turned out to be a mistaken claim based on grey literature. If there were some sort of a rundown in each report listing all the ways things "are worse" AND all the ways things "are better" since the last one it'd be easy to keep score. But there isn't, and the summaries and press releases emphasize any mentioned "this is worse" stories because bad news travels fast.

Suzuki complains that the IPCC report doesn't focus on the loss of arctic sea ice, but if they DID mention sea ice, they might have to mention that overall sea ice levels worldwide are currently above the long-term (30 year) average because we've gained more sea ice cover in the antarctic than we've lost in the arctic. And so on. (Given a big, complicated planet you can always find SOME areas or trends that seem to be "getting worse" but that doesn't mean throwing them - and only them - into the mix would make the report more accurate.)

That's a highly political (i.e. lots of beating around the bush) resignation letter. What's his point exactly? That IPCC has vested interests in fear mongering or what? And what exactly are the good things that we can expect from climate change? In any case I believe that just the accelerating rate of catastrophic weather incidents is dismantling that argument(?). Of course there is a multitude of interests and even a market for climate change (i.e. books about it) but this doesn't mean that the problem is not there, evolving and getting worse every day. He -too- does not deny that.

About the Arctic/Antarctic ice: I guess that http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php argument 25 addresses that. Also seeing the whole system oscillating between extremes (too few ice - more ice) is not comforting or reassuring that it reaches a new balance.

PS: I'm not Suzuki's spokesperson. I didn't even know the guy till yesterday. Maybe he's overeacting and maybe not. I also note that the party is obviously full of fear mongers and shady traders of all sorts. I also note that it is not logical to dismiss the whole argument because of such people.

PS2: HN is the last place I would expect to find myself fighting against climate change skeptics.

Landsea's point is that the IPCC was making alarmist official statements that had no basis in fact and ran counter to the underlying scientific literature. Landsea was the relevant expert on the subject and even he couldn't stop the fear-mongering; he quit because he didn't want to be associated with it. The issue he quit over was that there really wasn't an "accelerating rate of catastrophic weather incidents" to the degree the IPCC was trying to claim at the time.

On good things we can expect: The main measurable good thing we can expect from the next 1-3 degrees of warming is increased agricultural productivity. In the northern areas where most of the world's food is grown, warmer average temperatures means a longer growing season which makes it easier to feed the world. (It also increases the range where we can grow crops and makes winters less bitterly cold in places like Canada.) Closer to the equator the warming part doesn't help so much but the extra CO2 makes forestry more productive - it helps trees grow better due to CO2 fertilization. (My main source on this is the AR4 IPCC report - I haven't read AR5 yet.)

Also: many more humans die each year from excessive cold than from excessive heat; a planet with less bitterly cold winters is a more habitable one.

Also: being warmer puts us a little further away from the next ice age. Climate always changes; given the choice, I'd rather it get a little warmer than a little colder. (There is no reason to think the temperature in, say, 1990 was optimum for human life worldwide. We don't need to return to that, nor do we need to keep it where it is now.)

With regard just to sea ice it's not "oscillating between extremes" so much as there's been a shift over time as to where more sea ice collects on the planet - more in the south, less in the north. Changing sea currents and weather patterns can do that over long cycles. When alarmists look at growing sea ice in the south they dismiss it with "oh, the currents have changed" or "oh, the weather patterns have changed" or "yeah, but ignore that and look at the LAND instead!" but when they look at shrinking sea ice in the north they tend to insist it's due to warming and only that; I'd like to see a little more consistency.

SkepticalScience is not a reliable source - it's a propagandistic site run by a cartoonist, not a scientist - but in this case that's not a factor: argument 25 at that link is about sea level rise. Since I agree that sea levels have (very slowly) been rising over time, I'm not sure how that's relevant. (FWIW, I also agree that measured temperatures increased in the last half of the last century and that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that some recent warming has been the result of human activity.)

> HN is the last place I would expect to find myself fighting against climate change skeptics

The article you wrote suggested in passing that the planet could become uninhabitable in mere decades because we've passed a bunch of "tipping points" - you're bound to get some pushback if you try to make wild-eyed claims of that sort. If you want to say stuff like that you should try to figure out where the claims are coming from, whether there's any science behind them, and whether the science is any good.

So -according to Landsea- IPCC (an international scientific organization) is moving in ways that are more political than scientific. Weird and disturbing. Weird because I'd expect such an organization to be gravitating towards big industrial nations' interests if we're to assume that they are susceptible to lobbying - not the other way around. Disturbing because if they are doing politics rather than science then we have a different kind of problem which is that the bodies of experts that we should be trusting on very complex subjects are not to be trusted and I don't know where that leaves us as a society.

I'll accept the point of not putting forward very well researched links but to my defence: 1. Climatology is far from my expertise. As is microbiology, or nuclear power or space exploration. And that's why I'm ok with paying people (from my taxes) to have an educated opinion on such matters. 2. as you probably know it's quite difficult to find who are the generally respectful scientists (remember dismissing a whole lot of them just a while ago (IPCC)). 3. I -sorry about that- thought that we're past scepticism on the subject as I have only seen that attitude only in conspiracy theorists (right or left leaning). 4. I pitted the problem as a problem that can (or at least should) be solved in the same way that humans have been improving their lives - with ingenuity and a mind for the society as a whole.

Anyway - thank you for your long and researched answer and I sincerely hope that Landsea is right because I don't believe that we're about to change anything in our ways any time soon.

The IPCC is supposed to summarize the state of the existing literature, but it was born political, tends to attracts eco-activists of all sorts and relies more than it should on "grey literature" - unrefereed "reports" written by ecological organizations. The IPCC also to some degree generates the consensus it is supposed to be merely reporting on, in that the lead authors have been known to push specific articles into print supporting "their side" of things and delay articles supporting "the other side" with IPCC deadlines in mind so that their side gets the last word. That's one part of the process where excess alarmism gets to creep in. On the other side, your sources are correct that the result then gets massaged into acceptability. The "summary for policymakers" in particular is the result of political compromises - various country's representatives argue about it and then the rest of the document in some cases gets rewritten to reflect what the summary says, leaving nobody happy.

Nonetheless, the IPCC documents aren't terrible and do tend to be worth reading if you really want to know what's going on.

On being "past skepticism": The most credible skeptics tend to be "lukewarmers". They believe reality is a bit more complicated and uncertain than has been portrayed, they tend to suspect climate sensitivity is a lot lower than the models predict and they tend to be suspicious of doomsday claims generally. But almost nobody at this point doubts "CO2 is a greenhouse gas" or that the planet has warmed, so all those "97% agree!" articles miss the point - the skeptics "agree" too.

A couple good blogs for credible "skeptical" views are: http://judithcurry.com/ http://climateaudit.org/

And a good blog for credible "alarmist" views is: http://www.realclimate.org/

(the most popular source for skeptical views is probably http://wattsupwiththat.com and the most popular source for alarmist views is probably skepticalscience. Those sites are indeed more readable and approachable, but the extra readability in both cases comes at the cost of (1) oversimplification of main posts, (2) attracting much dumber comments. So browse those sort of site with care and don't believe what you read there without checking it. )

Depending on who you ask:

- Most major governments are ineffective, if not corrupt. - We put almost no resources into educating our children. - It's pretty clear we've broken the planet (or are breaking it fast) - The masses are confused, and feel helpless. - The world economy appears to have been subjugated by central banks. - Our food is progressively getting more toxic. - Corporations (in general) have scraped together too much power. - It's 2014 - this is not the world we had dreamed of, it's lame, inefficient and generally run by emotionally immature, tiresome, short sighted people. - Many people have given up at some level.

OP your point is valid, but I think (in some way) some of us are just thinking 'f-- it, let it roll, we deserve it'

Disclaimer: I have not given up, I think things will get better - perhaps naive

Cannot disagree with any of the answers. Yet, it seems like this is one of the problems that has to be dealt with, no matter how hard or meaningless that may seem. Then again if I accept the inevitability of it all then not much of everyday normalcy is making any sense.

Such an issue is hard to affect on a personal scale, perhaps this is part of the reason for the indifference?

If there isn't anything I can personally do to resolve it and it's a slow barely visible change, I'll sit quietly and hope for some of the worlds governments to fund a viable solution.

I totally agree. Of course climate change and its newly announced irreversability is alarming. It's really hard, though, to figure out what immediate, effective action one can take.

That's a good explanation indeed. But then again that applies to almost anything of a political nature.

You have to include a provocative title that excites the newer HN members. Rename the article "How race/gender/class sees irreversible climate change" and re-submit it.

I think this is a joke but I don't get it... could you explain please?

Hacker News is not news nor for hackers, it's a place that (among other things) likes to bikeshed social issues popular in bay area tech circles.

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This comment seems guilty of most of what it's complaining about.

The HN community is pretty evenly divided. People who strongly favor one ideology routinely imagine that HN favors the opposite one. They can't be right, though, because their various complaints are contradictory.

I think it's because the ideological mind feels surrounded by enemies. When it sees something that it agrees with getting downvoted, or something it disagrees with getting upvoted, it feels aggrieved and jumps to a conclusion of general bias.

It's true that comment quality has declined, but not because there's a dominant ideology. It's because larger groups are stupider.

Interesting. The argument in the first paragraph: HN is getting extremely left-wing liberal

The examples in the second paragraph that are supporting the argument: cops protecting corrupt cops, the Vatican protecting pedophiles, etc

The interesting part is the (unconscious?) connection of left wings with corrupt cops and Catholic paedophiles. Wow, even right-wing propaganda in HN is on a whole different level.

PS: Don't worry - it's a site built around entrepreneurship - aka free market ideology. It cannot get extremely left-wing no matter what.

Nice try. But it was just an example of how groups protect themselves. Cops and Catholics are good people who protected a more corrupt version of themselves within their group. I compared Liberals with Cops and Catholics. Interesting seeing how you're trying to twist the meaning of my words.

Second, I'm not right-wing nor is "critisizing extremeist liberalism" right-wing propaganda. The real propaganda is you assuming "the other side is attacking" when someone constructively criticizes a group you belong to.

Third, "It cannot get extremely left-wing no matter what." you obviously know nothing about Reddit and Digg and what happened there. You are the perfect example of what I was talking about. Groups that protect the extremist sub groups within them. Denial, is almost always the first defensive method used to prevent discussion over what might be wrong with a group.

We're totally off topic here, so just a few clarifications: 1. Yes, I do not know what happened to Reddit and Digg. Where these sites though as clearly focused as HN? HN is clearly rotating around entrepreneurship. This means that politically (i.e. economically) is bound to oscillate around various forms capitalism ranging perhaps from socialdemocracy to neoliberalism. I'm not judging here - I'm just saying what the perceived specs are.

2. I personally detest religions and I'm allergic to cops (corrupt or not). I'm not an extreme left-wing myself but I happen to know some and I'm sure as hell that they cannot be compared to paedophiles or corrupt cops. In any case you can use some other -less extreme- examples to make your case. (Added bonus insight: Being Greek I've grown tired* of home grown right-wing official reasoning/propaganda that tries to equalize Greek neonazis with Greek left-wing and extreme left-wing parties. The way you phrased your examples is exactly the way some of the clever propaganda is constructed in Greece.)

* I also know how dangerous such propaganda is as it only serves to raise nazis poll percentages. Something that happens across all EU.

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