Hacker News Reader

Comment by krona | Hacker News Reader

Science has been settled

Science can never be so arrogant. Most people probably know this but it's worth restating in a heated debate about the 'evidence': The null hypothesis exists for a reason; that is because we can not prove anything. We can only eliminate those theories which are demonstrably false.

View on HN

As far as I know, there is no heated debate about the evidence among climate scientists, at least not on the points that matter for policy decisions. The debate only exists outside of expert circles.

There is no real debate about whether climate change is real nor whether or not it is a major threat, but there is still debate on policy-relevant points. I'm not a climate scientist myself, but I do work with a bunch of them and from what I gather from talking to them there is still a lot of work and debate over consequences, remediation, and urgency. The latter mostly ranging from "extremely urgent but we still have time to avoid the most severe consequences" to "it's too late to prevent widespread disasters and we need to try to minimize the worst."

Right, there is plenty of confidence that climate change is real and caused by humans, but pretty much zero confidence in the long term effects of climate change on human population.

Yeah; nobody knows for certain how long we've got left. Could be a century or more, could be a few decades. Personally, I'd rather not risk it.

The author of the article in question was asked by the IPCC to be an 'Expert Reviewer' for the next Assessment Report.

Yes, you're right. When "science is settled" we scientists stop debating, exchanging data, collaborating and discussing about it. We move to new fields, where the science is not settled.

In the past 10-20 years we settled so many things, and predicted so many others, that we are running out of ideas on what to settle soon.

Are you being pedantic, or, if someone is not worked up about "science has been settled", are they playing loose with truth?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com