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Comment by mousepilot | Hacker News Reader

I listen to experts then try to judge the experts credibility. This goes to listening to the sources of climate change believers and unbelievers. What sort of people believe climate change is real? What sort of people don't believe it?

Also, what evidence does each side present, and how credible is this evidence?

Just relating what I do.

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This is one of the worst things about climate science as it currently stands. In General new theories are often looked about with skepticism until an experiment exists to satisfy the majority. Chemists in the early 1800s theorized matter was made of atoms but it wasn't until experiments were developed early 1900s and math worked on by Einstein got the whole community on board. Similarly we are still in a undecided state of what follows Newtonian-> relativism-> quantum mechanics. None are fully right but which is "more" right. each has their set of experiments that have been proven true or false. Climate science has very little proof because in the short time we have studied it most results cannot yet be proven to be correlation or causation. Unfortunately proof may not come for hundreds of years. The current route has been to take hypothesis and spin them as proof. I think the better route would be to split the theoretical and practical of climate change. we may not know for a long time if it is CO2 vs deforestation vs urbanization if we need to fix one or all to stop our impact/ if it will be enough at that point but that is separate from here are the impacts we see and best guess of what we will see in next 40-100 years and what can we possibly do about it. What if einstein chose not to release relativity because he knew it wasn't perfect or we ignored quantum mechanics because of it holes that are just now starting to be understood.

Climate change is one of those problems that you can't solve with experiments and controls, we'd have to have a test planet earth and run 200 year experiments or something lol

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