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Comment by in_a_society | Hacker News Reader

I doubt I’ll be getting a Nobel prize anytime soon, but I appreciate the sear, even if not meant entirely in jest. We are trying to explain it and refining our models rapidly. My concern is that much of public discourse has come down to arguing about “how much money to give to government entities to fix the weather.” A large part of this is because the science isn’t “settled” as it is so often claimed.

Really, we’re trying our best but science is messy.

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You don't have to refine your models, you have to have even a hypothesis for where the extra energy is coming from if it's not the greenhouse effect. If you had something remotely credible then there's a lot of vested interests happy to shower you with money and show the world. All you have to do is show where the extra energy is coming from.

Climate scientists have observed a massive amount of extra energy, come up with an explanation and tested it. All you've done is say it's not that.

Falsifiability is important in science. I’m sorry that all I can do for now is call into question currently accepted hypotheses. When I say models I’m referring to ones that test other sources of temperature and climate gradation while incorporating current work where appropriate. We have funding but the bulk of money is channeled into co2 research, which I think is misappropriated.

Because of this, current political solutions are the equivalent of debugging a billion line program by randomly changing various functions, where each change costs billions of dollars.

I think when the GP is asking about alternate hypotheses, they are wondering what other sources of temperature and climate gradation you might be considering here. Changes in the sun for example?

You can't say "the data does not support Newton's laws" unless you have another hypothesis like relativity that can provide a better fit to the data. Then you can say that the data favours relativity over Newton, and by how much. You can also ignore the data and use theoretical arguments to say that relativity is a more plausible law to govern the universe than Newton's, but you need a really good theoretical foundation for that.

So if you think theory X is wrong, you must have at least a set of theories Y that you are willing to entertain as being more correct than X.

That's why GP and I are curious about what alternative hypotheses you are evaluating that you seem to think might better explain what's going on than CO2 does.

CO2 has a lot going for it as a hypothesis. It's a simple mechanism, easy to understand, proven to work on Venus, and it's rapidly changing along the same timescale that temperature is changing. It does also have an unfortunate political implication because its atmospheric concentration correlates with the use of particular energy sources. But setting politics aside and just thinking scientifically, I'm interested to hear what has you convinced that CO2 is not an adequate explanation for what we're observing.

Some things that are being investigated are: solar luminosity, the three periodic levels of change in geo orbit, variations in geo magnetic field, as well as more local things such as energy retention properties of various materials used at all levels of construction and seemingly boring things like industrial uses of organic flourides.

One nit: observing that Newtonian physics don’t hold up perfectly at all times would not necessitate having to immediately provide an alternative explanation but would motivate the search for one in the absence of such.

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