Comment by metacritic12 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metacritic12 | Hacker News Reader

To quote Scott Adams, why are people seeing a single data point as evidence for climate change, when those same people deride the alt-right for seeing cold weather in April in their town as evidence against climate change?

It's behavior like this, reeking of bias in which singular data points count and which don't that gets the other side to think climate change is just a base/faith political belief instead of something derived from evidence.

Even the article itself is editorially-suggestive. The question is posted throughout the article "what fraction is due to climate change? we don't know!". A single record-breaking 20C day above a trend of say 5C is 15C warmer, whereas the best guesses for the magnitude of human-caused sub portion of global warming is about 1C. The quote in the article say says the warm record is largely due to global warming is totally misleading in the R^2 technical sense, and even needs to be couched in the technical language of "well the trend of warmer temperatures..."

For full disclosure, I believe climate change, but also that these singular data points have very little information value.

> the best guesses for the magnitude of human-caused sub portion of global warming is about 1°C

As far as I know the global average temperature increase caused by humans is about 1C. You can't simply compare that to single days and say that we couldn't have cause this.

More records days per year seem to indicate more extreme weather, which is expected by climate change. The average global temperature doesn't have to rise much for this.

The thing is that small changes in the mean affect the long tail of the distribution in a very visible way. How is it biased to point out extreme weather events like this which are happening more frequently now than in the past? The NYT has a great graphic illustrating this point. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/28/climate/more-...

I think that climate change absolutely is faith based and political. And we shouldn't be afraid of that. Lots of changes in human behaviour have a faith and moral component. Just think about hand washing. People don't need to understand microbiology to wash their hands. They need social pressure and a sense of morals.

Climate change deniers see environmentalism as a faith based political movement. Well it is. Even if you believe in climate change, there is nothing that says we have to do anything about it! It is perfectly reasonable to just shrug your shoulders and not do anything. The drive to protect the planet is a matter of conscience. And that is how people need to be pursuaded. Science is just not very convincing in everyday life, even among educated rational people.

I think it's dangerous to turn a complex and global issue into a binary social signaling device. We do terrible things to the planet. We should stop. Combining "should", goals, and politics only turns the majority of the planet against you. The global economy, global politics, national politics, and climate are all extremely complex systems. Ban plastic straws and cows and you may think you're helping, but end up being an example of failure to others. Make an electric car that is cheaper, more efficient, and outperforms gasoline, and you've taken a solid step towards saving the planet. When it's a binary issue, you lose the nuance of having choices. You burn witches before even figuring out if they were helping or hurting with their heresy. Is nuclear worth the risk and waste to offset carbon? Is the wind farm worth it if it destroys a bird's only habitat? Those are cost benefit questions. Believer or denier is a witch trial.

There is no scientific formula that tells you if a coal miner should loose their job, or if a wind farm should be allowed to kill birds. As you say it is complicated. We are balancing a huge range of issues that feel like a false dichotomy. Just telling people "because science" is not the answer. That is actually what makes it a binary choice because you are leaving no room for argument. By talking about morality you broaden the argument. The democratic political system is our algorithm to decide these questions and is driven by more than just fact and science. You may not like this but it is the reality. You can't answer a load of massive false dichotomy's with science. You need other avenues.

"We know our village has been beset with wolves. We have hundreds of attacks in recent months."

"This morning I found a sheep dead with bite marks."

"Your singular data point doesn't mean anything!"

To be more clear, the scientific offense of cherry-picking only applies when one intentionally picks a data point against the body of evidence. You can't look at each individual raindrop in a downpour and argue that each one is only a singular data point and therefore it ain't raining.

You also misunderstand that a small increase in global temperature can, and is predicted to, cause very large, local, increases and decreases in local temperature, largely through disrupting the world's prevalent wind and water patterns.

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