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Comment by iak8god | Hacker News Reader

> I imagine publishing a dissenting opinion is tantamount to career suicide.

Opinions are not publishable. It is so damaging to propagate the idea that some guys over there have one opinion, and then some other guys have a different opinion, and there's really no way to tell which is correct, and that this is what science is about. Discussions about climate science in the public sphere are politicized, but only because of massive disinformation campaigns by those who stand to profit less if reasonable countermeasures were implemented.

> I think a valid proxy for bias is the relative lack of publications discussing possible benefits of climate change.

We might go extinct but if we don't, it might be pleasant to vacation in the arctic? Is this the sort of scientific claim you have in mind?

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> We might go extinct but if we don't, it might be pleasant to vacation in the arctic? Is this the sort of scientific claim you have in mind?

I think GP means things like "all that potentially fertile land that will thaw off" that sometimes show up, e.g. wrt. Siberia. Personally, even if true, I suspect it doesn't compensate for the farming land lost - and even if it did, we won't be likely to survive the effects of mass migration and conflict for these lands.

>We might go extinct but if we don't, it might be pleasant to vacation in the arctic? Is this the sort of scientific claim you have in mind?

This is the sort of hysteria that results from one sided science, and makes it less likely for laymen to take climate science seriously. The worst case models predict extinction and so called tipping points. But, if you read the IPCC reports, the further you move down the chain of journalism->IPCC summary->literature, the less certain these catastrophic interpretations become.

>Opinions are not publishable

Sure, perhaps a poor choice of word. Let's call it dissenting literature.

>Discussions about climate science in the public sphere are politicized

You don't think that the same politicization could play at least a small role in the direction that climate science is being taken? These scientists are human beings, after all, and the problem space is broad enough to easily ask only questions that align with certain popular notions.

Not to mention, as someone who has dealt with geoscientific (though not climate) models, given a sufficiently complex model it's generally possible to obtain any desired (consciously or otherwise) result while simultaneously fitting historic and calibration data.

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