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Comment by peteretep | Hacker News Reader

I agree, that's my jaw-drop takeaway from it. I assumed it was science skeptisism, rather than simply being misinformed.

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I wonder if it would be an effective thing in the US to capitalize on that and put up billboards around the country saying something like:

"{0}% of all US scientists believe global warming is real, it is almost entirely man-made and a grave threat to humanity".

Fill in {0} with 95 or whatever the real number would be after a survey.

Here's an org that is communicating what many scientists believe through language that attempts to bring divided people together to fight a common enemy. They use WWII programs as a touchstone: http://www.theclimatemobilization.org

Their key documents address the issue of how best to tell people something they really don't want to hear, etc: http://www.theclimatemobilization.org/key_documents

Changing people's minds 'for their own good' is a really hairy problem.

you'd want to make that specifically US climate scientists - physicists or geneticists don't have relevant authority on the subject.

Ok, not geneticists, but radiative transfer is physics. What else would it be?

everything is physics at the fundamental level, but that doesn't make physicists qualified to talk about everything. Climatology is its own field tied to Meteorology - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatology

I didn't mean that I'd expect a physicist to understand every part of Climatology. I meant that I'd expect any competent physicist to understand the basic principles of the greenhouse effect, because that part is physics.

of course, but my understanding is that the debate isn't over whether the climate is changing, but whether it is driven primarily by human activity or a natural periodic system. A general physicist is probably not well placed to answer that question.

It's still something like 97% though

Source? Please don't say Cook.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveys_of_scientists'_views...

Yes. Cook.

So IOW, not climate scientists, but just anybody he could classify as a scientist.

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