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Comment by josh_today | Hacker News Reader

What makes this group of scientists and their warning more legitimate than these previous “imminent tipping points”

https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-poca...

I would be suspicious abount anything published by "one of the Conservative think tanks funded to overturn the environmentalism of the 1960s, central to promoting climate change denial"[1]. The article is also clearly written in bad faith, with their so-called "counter-arguments" being a case of selectively choosing the information that supports their agenda and discarding everything else.

Having said that: that article cites about one scientist a year, while we are currently getting one warning a week. No scientist in their right mind would deny that global warming is real and it's here

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_Enterprise_Institu...

> environmentalism of the 1960s,

Unfortunately is was those very environmentalists who fought hard to stop the nuclear industry - and now it may be too late even with the explosion of green-technologies.

> global warming

I believe "climate change" is a better term to use these days.

Many environmentalists have been wrong about nuclear power and nuclear industry, and still are. That doesn't really make the opponents of environmentalism any more right.

If the opponents had focused on pointing out e.g. contradictory or irrational goals (e.g. nuclear power) or on genuinely questioning environmentalist claims without having an agenda of their own, you could say they were right in some cases. But that certainly doesn't describe most of the opponents of environmentalism, and definitely not the staunchest ones.

No, more of an existence proof - the fact that people have been saying similar things since at least the 60’s should make us at least consider the possibility that the reason for the current warnings are similar to the reason for the previous warnings. Sure, maybe all those other warnings were in good faith and happened to be wrong, while the current warnings are also in good faith and might turn out to be correct. But if you can’t even consider the possibility, then we’re in the realm of religion, not science.

Here’s a climate scientist who agrees about climate change, but disagrees about the urgency and nature of the actions justified, hopefully that doesn’t define him as “not in his right mind” -

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bj%C3%B8rn_Lomborg

More realistically, all of those warnings were actually quite right, and catastrophic global warming is well on its way, with almost all recent years being the hottest that we know of.

And about this Lomborg individual, I have no idea why anyone would listen to economists (people whose entire field is predicated on models which assume no major changes in the world) about what is necessary to combat catastrophic climate change - this what his think tank is all about.

Lomborg is not a climate scientist! Besides that he's been funded by the oil industry.

No one agrees with him besides industry people.

Don't post disinformation.

Comparing a few dozen cherry-picked headlines over 30+ years to a specific warning by 14,000 scientists is hardly apples to apples.

Also, CEI claims the ozone hole was climate alarmism and nothing bad actually happened, but that’s because scientists warned us and we took action. Even the chart CEI cites shows the hole stopped growing and leveled off. But apparently because it didn’t disappear completely, our actions were futile?

I didn't expect climate change denialism and the most base and idiotic and tabloid-tier cherry picking of facts, here on hn.

HN is a public forum. Even with heroic moderation efforts you find idiotic tabloid-tier rants for every topic.

The CEI article cherry picks sensational headlines with failed predictions, but that does not prove that climate change is not having disastrous effects on the environment.

Those predictions are only "failed" because they were too soon.

We're good at seeing the signs of things to come, but we're bad at predicting the when.

> What makes this group of scientists and their warning more legitimate than these previous “imminent tipping points”

Better models and more computing power?

It's been thirty years the IPCC is warning humanity about this. Should be about time to listen, nah?

Josh, why would you post such a fundamentally dishonest blogpost?

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