Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarmig | Hacker News Reader

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So, you seem flummoxed by the downvoting. I'm not sure it's warranted, but here's an explanation so you don't run into it in the future:

Most climate change denialists don't know how science works. Or, if they do, they cynically prey on the public's ignorance. I'm not up to date on sea level data, but even if what you say is true, you didn't just disprove climate change and proved that scientists are a bunch of conspiratorial UN socialists.

Multiple lines of evidence all feed into AGW as a theory. No area of active scientific research has everything fit together neatly. Anyone who has spent a cursory amount of time genuinely researching the issue knows this. But the approach that denialists take is decontextualizing one piece of evidence and claiming that it disproves AGW, or at least makes it a 50/50 proposition.

Your comment falls firmly in this tradition, if unintentionally. The scientist's response to seeing a crazy outlier isn't to immediately fall into spin mode; it's to go, wow, that's weird, what's the strongest explanation?

It's akin to someone posting about an awesome new discovery at CERN about the standard model, and then someone else jumping in and going "well the Standard Model doesn't explain X perfectly, so this is just a conspiracy." It's unproductive and toxic to scientific discourse.

While I agree with you, I also agree with Dilbert(http://blog.dilbert.com/post/158159613566/how-to-convince-sk...). He points out how much of a persuasion fail climate change has been. Perhaps by the nature of science, climate change, and the flaws in human reasoning(even if they're scientists) it is impossible to put a "good persuasive" front, but it should be attempted.

I think a lot of that is due to a determined astro-turfing effort and I'd say this down voted commenter is a part of that. For genuine questions I think answering people is good, but paid astro-turfers always post genuine sounding questions.

It's a newly created account that followers a standard denier strategy and labels scientists deceptive, the poster then implies there is a conspiracy. This has all the fingerprints of a paid astro-turfer.

No matter how much money this makes, I suspect it's not much, shills will bitterly regret their work later.

Let's direct our anger towards the buyer's, not people who could very well be poor, desperate, disabled (it's one of the few low skilled work from home jobs around) and trying to feed a family.

I write that down for my daughter's daughter when her last crop fails in 2048.

I get what you mean, I believed the same not to long ago. Ultimately though, it's a losing strategy that makes more enemies than friends. We have to bring people with us, not shove them down behind us.

So a poor person who becomes a paid hitman has no culpability in their crimes? This stuff kills people by lying to the world about the harm we're causing. It's deadly serious.

Not no culpability, but when there's 50 other poor people lined up behind it's a shit strategy if you want actual change. That person you're attacking will become a true believer.

And the account is 13 hours old - which adds to the suspicion

Trying to describe global warming with solid science is beyond most people; even someone smart (regardless of other "issues") like Scott Adams feels the need to ask why there are multiple models and why don't we just pick the best one.

Most people accept science solely on the basis of the tangible results it produces, and feel free to be prefer gut feelings (superstitious, spiritual or otherwise) where they believe, or are led to believe, that it doesn't.

However, handwaving the science behind global warming theories makes it easy to refute with non-facts. And due to the time scales involved, you can't fall back to shared experiences to get people to accept the parts they don't understand, the way they do for example with illness and medicine (mostly).

The author of Dilbert doesn't believe in fossils, but does believe that wishing can make things true. He's not a good source on science.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Adams

That's an incredibly American centric view. By population, something like 70-80% of the world accepts AGW as a fact of life and over 50% believe that its already a very serious problem that is effecting global populations as we speak [1]. The US is just a special case of corporate interests and propaganda.

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/04/18/what-the-wor...

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