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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

A lot of your points are addressed explicitly by that twitter account. I would encourage you to spend some time reading through and examining the extensive studies being presented.

Believe me, I would love to dismiss it as a biased person and be done with it. But the truth seems to be nuanced.

Suppose tomorrow someone had concrete scientific evidence that climate change wasn't man-made. (It's a thought experiment, so humor me for a moment.) Do you think society at large would accept the evidence? Or would it be more along the lines of society tearing down whoever tried to present it?

EDIT: Excellent link, by the way. Thank you for pointing out https://twitter.com/Simon_Whitten/status/1173319663322841088.

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>had concrete scientific evidence that climate change wasn't man-made. (It's a thought experiment, so humor me for a moment.)

I think that there would be a rush to find out what process was causing climate change and to develop mitigations for that.

In fact this is a kind of worst case - AGW has a silver lining; we are doing something to make it bad. If we stop doing that then it will go away (slowly). That's all we have to do (at the moment) - just stop it.

If the kind of radical climate change that we are seeing were being caused by a natural process we would have to take action to counter that. Also we would have to contemplate the idea that the process might not have a human scale end - for example the sun could be warming the earth by 1'C extra every decade for the next million years. The earth would be heated by an extra 5'C in our childrens life times, and 15'C in our grandchildrens.

We know there is a hard stop on AGW. The earth warms by 4'C and civilization disappears (along with most humans). Sure, it takes 500 years for carbon to fall back to "normal" and it's debatable if the climate resets or moves to a new stable state. But in the end, 500, 5000 or 50,000 years from now this to will pass, obliterated by the glacial beat. A natural process might simply cook life off earth.

You might find this paper interesting for a counter perspective. http://joelvelasco.net/teaching/3334/block99-how_heritabilit...

The person is biased and dismissing is a good option.

> Suppose tomorrow someone had concrete scientific evidence that climate change wasn't man-made.

This depends entirely on what the alleged mechanism is instead, who is publishing the paper, the extent to which it depends on statistics, and which existing research it contradicts exactly? How difficult is it to reproduce the relevant experiments, or does this rely on analytical interpretation of evidence? How difficult is is to gather more evidence on the same topic?

(Also, are we though-experimenting that it's not happening, or that it is happening but the radiative forcings are much smaller than expected and something else is causing the warming? Because the latter is still a huge problem!)

Humoring your thought experiment: yes, I think society would accept the evidence. Lots and lots of people already dismiss the science, claim it's a hoax, or don't want to contend with the inconvenience climate change demands.

But...I think you'd continue to see pushback on pollution in general, because living in polluted environments is just terrible. Remember LA in the 80s? Been to any of the SE Asian megacities now? Even if it had zero impact on the future of the planet, reducing emissions is still a laudable goal for the myriad other human costs.

Moving away from car-centric lifestyles has a lot of benefits aside from the impact on carbon pollution, like reducing the time spent sitting in cars on gridlocked freeways and city streets. People would still push for the societal changes that reduce auto dependence for those reasons, even if there was zero human cost to carbon-producing transportation there.

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