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Comment by 444bradly | Hacker News Reader

Anthropogenic warming hypothesis states: 1) Human activities have a net warming effect 2) that effect is large

I have read 2007 IPPC report and evidence of the above two claims is burried under mountains of fear mongering and dire predictions about the consequences of the claims being correct. The actual evidence is barely addressed and comes down to trusting a handful of computer models that only a few dozen people understand.

Recent warming amount and rate is not unusual for the earth's recent pre-human past.

When you add to this the myriad of political causes that have latched on to anthropogenic hypothesis being true, its pretty reasonable that informed individual is sketical. Especially with authoritarians calling for violence and censorship against"climate deniers".

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I feel the same way - I’m somewhat skeptical partly because it’s good to be skeptical of most things, especially something that you can’t really see, but mostly because when I ask the climate change people what I should do in order to combat climate change, their first and only answer tends to be “vote democrat and never vote republican!” That being said, I still mostly do what (I think) the climate change people say I ought to do such as recycle, prefer energy efficient alternatives, and try to walk when I can. To the extent it doesn’t hurt us, we all might as well be “environmentally conscious” even if it turns out we didn’t actually have to be.

Where are you finding these bizarre "climate change people" who are giving you stupid answers to your legitimate question?

You are unfortunate to live in a country with only two parties, one of which denies that there is a problem.

One denies there is a problem, the other says there's a problem and the only solution is to fully fund their (enormously expensive) pet projects and in other ways give them large amounts of power.

I'd rather have politicians saying "there's no such thing as climate change" with people fighting back against them then have politicians saying "climate change is real, and you can help fight it by giving up plastic straws!" sapping the willingness of people to do anything more - something that might actually be of use.

We need to be environmentally conscious, not because of CO2, but because of real pollutants that are harmful for human health. For CO2 we need technology to control weather, which is not as crazy as it may seem at first. Even the most naive approach of building large number of aerostats to change the amount of light certain regions get would work, it would require large investment, but all the solutions suggested by climate change people require large investments too, and this one would be actually useful.

It's interesting that you chose a report more than a decade out of date rather than one of the more recent reports they have published.

Well, he kind of had to in order to make his point. As long as I’ve been alive (four and a half decades), they’ve been insisting that we have “only a decade years to save the planet” - so going back to a report from 10 years ago and comparing their 10-year-predictions against right now is a good way to figure out how concerned you should about their current 10-year-predictions.

"Save the world" has shifted goal posts considerably during this time.

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