Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

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I see it pretty differently : people are trying to get educated. they don’t rely on official channels to tell them what to think, they try to understand the phenomenons. If you take climate chnage, most « official source of information » today don’t discuss the theory of climate change itself, simply because it’s a complex theory and that it doesn’t want to take the time to do it. Climate sceptics will make hours long video giving « scientific » explanations for why this can’t be true.

To me it’s a all in all a good thing. in the long term, this will force everyone to take the time to educate the audience before feeding them with a conclusion.

As a personal exemple, i tried to understand what were deniers saying, and in the process i learned a lot about co2, temperature networks, ice melting process, forest fires cycles, thermal conduction models, and the fact that medias outlets have been calling for an « upcoming climate disaster » for at least a century without interruption. This made me extemely careful not to call anyone a fool too hastly on this particular topic.

> people are trying to get educated. they don’t rely on official channels to tell them what to think, they try to understand the phenomenons ... in the long term, this will force everyone to take the time to educate the audience before feeding them with a conclusion

Everyone learns everything through some sort of channel, whether that's your parents, your school, the news, some academic papers, or social media. No one has the time or ability to study everything from first principles. For example, measuring something as basic as the force of gravity is a pretty time-consuming experiment.

People learn by ingesting a source, performing a credibility determination of that source, and then using critical reasoning to evaluate those conclusions. When YouTube (or anyone) promotes every crazy wacko with their own crazy idea as equally trustworthy, it eliminates an important component to learning.

The basic scientific method and logic need to be taught indeed, but all the rest relies on experimental validation.

The problem with climate change is that experimental validation for the theory of human origin is extremely hard to get. The timescales for validation is on decades, measurements networks are sparse and faulty, all kinds of data twisting and extrapolation need to be done, and in the end we still don’t see anything in our day to day lives. Bush fires have always happened, there’s still polar bears and ice on the arctic, the maldives islands still aren’t underwater, and people still go skiing in winter holidays.

But this is also a reason to be careful with climate change proponents : their model are really just model at the moment, and the experimental validation of them is still mostly pending (although there’s a debate on that as well).

Time will sort this out and will make it obvious who was right.

>Time will sort this out and will make it obvious who was right.

Is this something you really want to hedge your bet on? Because the end result of climate change being real is essentially massive worldwide damage to human society as we know it.

So while you're right that time will sort this out, if you're on the side of the climate skeptics while the world is burning you won't find many friends.

My personal opinion changed to "let's not panic yet" once i had a look at the history of predictions made by this field in the past. This field has been making apocalyptical predictions "coming in the next ten years" continuosly for more than 70 years now, and so far nothing has been verified. To be honest, i'm talking about media coverage trying to alarm the population (as well as public speakers). It's very likely real scientist working in the fields are much more careful than media, as it is pretty much always the case.

But there are huge amounts of videos on the mechanics of climate change - from 3 minutes to 2 hours, from PhDs to teenagers.

One only needs to look outside to see the climate change and only a basic understanding of physics is required to understand the link between human activity (GHG emissions, deforestation, etc.) and the warming of the atmosphere.

The problem isn't the lack of explanations for the truth, it's that the truth isn't as appealing. We don't want to believe it's our fault, and blindly going against consensus seems to be the popular thing to do this century. People have a huge incentive ($$) to make this content and a huge incentive (feeling superior, free of blame, etc.) to believe them. Where is the incentive for believing science?

I personally don’t have any kind of personal experience for climate warming. Last year in Paris was freaking cold, and people went skiing last christmas eventhough i clearly remember it wasn’t always possible thirty years ago (to be clear, i’m only talking about climate, not deforestation or other environmental issues humans are clearly visibly the cause of).

And i think that’s the crux of the problem on this particular issue : people are told the situation is alarming, and they see absolutely nothing alarming on their day to day lives.

And i think that’s the crux of the problem on this particular issue : people are told the situation is alarming, and they see absolutely nothing alarming on their day to day lives.

So you were out of town then for the record breaking heatwave where Paris saw temps of nearly 43 degrees and the ministry of health recorded nearly a thousand heat related deaths countrywide?

Wasn't that in 2003 ? It reached a peak then, and we haven't had that ever since... (and yet in that time CO2 concentration in the atmosphere kept raising and raising)

No it was the second heatwave that France saw in 2019 in less than a month.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2019_European_heat_wave#F...

> And i think that’s the crux of the problem on this particular issue : people are told the situation is alarming, and they see absolutely nothing alarming on their day to day lives.

Nearly every threat is not immediately visible. In a horrible recession, most people still keep their jobs. When one foreign country invades another, it generally has no direct effect on anything in the U.S. If an astroid is about to hit earth, it won't have any effect until impact.

Society relies on more than direct experience to evaluate threats.

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