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Comment by speedplane | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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