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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

It's not that clear cut. I'll use the environment as an example. Nobody wants to drive mass extinctions or ruin America's agricultural climate. There is no party in favor of doing those things. The only way to have absolutely no push-back against industries that do that stuff is to deny that it's happening. You could accept that it's happening and then try to bargain based on future discounting and economic growth, but then the answer would be some kind of restraint greater in magnitude than zero. If you want to have absolutely no restraints you are forced to convince everybody that there is no problem. The moral obviousness of the choice turns a political issue into a scientific one, and brings the politicians along with it.

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Let me annotate this as somebody accused of climate denial.

We who are not trolling do not deny the data. The data are clear, there is a general warming trend so far. And it's most likely primarily caused by human action. But there's a problem.

You see, when we noticed Uranus had perturbations in its orbit, we looked at the theoretical model, did the math the theory demanded, predicted that a planet should be in a location, looked there, and saw Neptune. In that order. That's how rigorous scientific theory works.

Climate theory is very far from that rigor. Each University has a different model. Most of them have many models. They're software, written by programmers that embed their assumptions into their code. They all disagree. And we never know which model is correct except in hindsight. Even more problematic, the model that best predicted climate change in 2015 is not the model that best predicted climate change in 2019. Of the thousand models, we see every year in the news "this one was right!". But we didnt know it was right before we looked in hindsight, and we don't know in the least which one will be right tomorrow. Climate theory is still in flux.

Moreover, the supposed solutions do not address the fact that the biggest problem is not the West, which has been declining in emissions simce the 70s [0]. It's the exponentially growing developing world. None of the solutions I've heard except "global nuclear fission or war, now" have a chance at stopping climate change as generally predicted by the entertainment media like CNN et al. Solar and wind is a mere fairy tale unless we're talking about comoletely carpetting AZ, NV, and half of TX in solar paneling. And then braindead things like the Green New Deal pop up, that even my Democrat friends make fun of. I'm left with a sense that the evangelists of climate change either don't take what they believe seriously, or they're ignorant of the gravity of their predictions.

So yeah. I'm withholding judgement because for the foreseeable future, the absolute worst case is my grandparents can outwallk climate change coastal changes and we get more net arable land in Canada and Siberia.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...

> ... because for the foreseeable future, the absolute worst case is my grandparents can outwallk climate change coastal changes ...

For someone who starts their argument with "climate science is imperfect and we don't know which model will predict the future correctly," you seem to have a lot of confidence on your "absolute worst case" which looks like, honestly, pulled out of thin air.

So... You can't outwalk climate change? Tell me more about how the sea levels are rising that fast.

Its exhausting, all the deniers who gloss over global ecological disaster with "I'll just stay in my apartment" or whatever naive notion makes the problem go away.

E.g. When sea levels change, reefs on shallow shelves get less light. They die and regrow at the more favorable optimal depth, which takes decades/centuries. Even a few inches of rise.

All sea life essentially exists in the top few meters of water, and depends upon coastal ecosystems. They collapse - the vast majority of sea life is affected.

Vast numbers of human beings depend utterly upon fishing. Usually poorer people in less developed nations. They will starve.

Starving people numbered in the hundreds of millions/billions will have a political effect. The refugee issues we've see upsetting nations (thousands of refugees! We can't cope!) turns to millions then hundreds of millions.

Yes you might survive the weather change in your midtown apartment far from the sea. But will we all survive the 'ring of fire' resulting from global catastrophic refugee migration? Resulting brush wars that turn into regional conflicts that turn into worse?

That's one simple scenario resulting from ecological collapse due to one variable. Multiply by all the effects from ecosystems everywhere.

Conclusion: we must weight the danger of a false negative (doing nothing until its too late) which in this case is immense, when figuring our response to the climate issue.

That’s the point of competitive academia, no? To have people try different stuff and to converge to a pratical solution when there’s no provably exact one. So of course climate scientists will try a universe of models to get better at predicting.

You put your comment as long, well thought out description of what is happening, but it’s frankly embarrassing. Climate scientists don’t disagree fundamentally at all, and we can all be grateful if their models get better and better.

So please, if you dismiss policy proposals as braindead when they’re trying to accomodate for our collective failures and the learnings we had during the last 30+ years, be better than that.

Okay okay okay, check this out. (Yes global mean ocean temperatures are rising, but at least in the USA, climate change appears to be making the country have milder weather)

> New York City has not had a daily high temperature above 100 degrees since 2012, and it has had only five such days since 2002. However, in a previous 18-year span from 1984 through 2001, New York City had nine days at 100 degrees or higher. When the power went out in New York City earlier this month, the temperature didn't even get to 100 degrees - it was 95, which is not extreme. For comparison, there were 12 days at 95 degrees or higher in 1999 alone.

> Kansas City, Missouri, for example, experienced an average of 18.7 days a year at 100 degrees or higher during the 1930s, compared to just 5.5 a year over the last 10 years. And over the last 30 years, Kansas City has averaged only 4.8 days a year at 100 degrees or higher, which is only one-quarter of the frequency of days at 100 degrees or higher in the 1930s.

> Here is a fact rarely, if ever, mentioned: 26 of the 50 states set their all-time high temperature records during the 1930s that still stand (some have since been tied). And an additional 11 state all-time high temperature records were set before 1930 and only two states have all-time record high temperatures that were set in the 21st century (South Dakota and South Carolina).

> So 37 of the 50 states have an all-time high temperature record not exceeded for more than 75 years. Given these numbers and the decreased frequency of days of 100 degrees or higher, it cannot be said that either the frequency or magnitude of heat waves is more common today.

Source: https://m.accuweather.com/en/weather-blogs/realimpactofweath...

Like seriously, what are we predicting again?

The science question is fun because I'm not sure who you're arguing against. Scientists are doing good work fighting an intractable problem. And their results are contradictory and disappointing so far.

But more interestingly, where did we fail exactly? And how is giving totalitarian control of the economy to a 20-something, easily manipulated bartender with a 400s credit score going to make anything better?

> And their results are contradictory and disappointing so far.

Absolutely not.

Where did we fail? Listening to scientists 50 years ago that had the data already. Changing our infrastructure while we had the time. Signing treaties for 30 years instead of incentivizing sustainable business.

I'm not going to comment on your ad hominem. Like yeah, people from all walks of life being able to participate in politics is called DEMOCRACY, I think you heard of it. It's also entirely offtopic for you to keep going on that.

> And how is giving totalitarian control of the economy to a 20-something, easily manipulated bartender with a 400s credit score going to make anything better?

Well, it's good to see that you're responding to actual policy suggestions and not just pulling shit your of your ass.

> We who are not trolling do not deny the data. The data are clear, there is a general warming trend so far. And it's most likely primarily caused by human action. But there's a problem.

For one, that's false: there're plenty of people denying the data, and there're plenty of people denying that humans are the primary contributors to it. These aren't nutballs shrieking on street corners, but nutballs who currently run our government (Trump). So acting like the public debate is between well meaning people who disagree about model validation is not reflective of reality.

For two, if you believe the issue is with needing to do more research, shouldn't we be, you know, funding more research? Why is Trump cancelling NASA's Carbon Monitoring System [0]? Why are Republicans in North Carolina banning the use of models of sea level rise that try to take into account climate change[1]? Why is the administration issuing gag orders preventing scientists from communicating about peer reviewed research[2]? Why does the budget cut climate change research generally [3]?

There are countless examples of this, and it's very difficult to take the people who say "we need more research!" seriously when they support and vote for a party that's hellbent on preventing any new research from taking place.

[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/trump-white-house-qu...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-northcarolina/north-c...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/24/14372940/trump-gag-order-...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/the-ene...

[0] did you.. did you even the bipartisan followup? https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/nasa-climate-science...

[1] is exactly my contention

[2] not really relevant. That order was highly specific and targeted to policy statements that could be confused with administration policy. I may not agree with it, but it's really really edge case.

[3] cut is a really fun word. 31% reduction to 6 billion. Not the disaster you're looking for. Also WaPo, not exactly non partisan. And the left has everything to gain from lying or dishonestly framing to get back in power.

So, your defenses are that Trump only tried to do it, and failed; that it's totally insane to predict sea level rise based on models that account for climate change, but totally accurate to use models that don't account for it; "it's just a single example!"; and a multibillion dollar cut doesn't matter, even though you yourself were saying we need more research, not less.

>the left has everything to gain from lying or dishonestly framing to get back in power

Looney tunes.

I may have voted for Trump, and I probably will again, and I may bear my share of responsibility for his blunders, but I don't agree with many things he does. He was probably wrong that time. Other presidents do horrible things, like when Obama didn't challenge the family separation rule on the border, gave Libya to ISIS, waited too long in Iraq, or presided over Fast and Furious. And I still voted for him twice.

No, the contention of [1] is that they wanted to influence the real estate market based on an unvalidated fringe model that predicted more extreme sea level rises than the majority of the other models.

[3] is interesting because I'm not sure how much money should be pumped into climate research, and neither is anyone else. There's a point between 0% and 100% where it becomes a net drain on the world. Who knows where that is. But single digit billions of government funds plus all the University endowments feels reasonable. I could probably be convinced it should be double digit billions. But nobody knows the right answer. And research isn't stopping by any stretch.

WRT Looney Tunes, i said the same thing about Republicans in 2009. shrug that's politics. You win by changing opinions, not saying true things.

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