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Comment by aero-glide2 | Hacker News Reader

There are many "faster than we thought" headlines for Climate change. What about "slower than we thought"? Do such studies not exist?

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> What about "slower than we thought"?

How about "humanity's collective inability to react in any meaningful way to a known existential threat?" ;)

The thing is the IPCC is kind of the authoritative body on global warming. Their synthesis reports are basically meta analysis for all climate change related science. They produce these reports using a team of volunteer scientists working through a consensus based process.

Which means everyone on the team has to agree to everything in the report. This process is inherently conservative. Language has constantly been tempered to avoid any fear of sounding alarmist or even slightly going out on a limb.

So the latest science is pretty much always running out ahead of the IPCC showing it to be underestimating the impacts.

Our rate of carbon emissions is changing slower than we hoped. Would that count?

Halting unsustainable hyper consumption is happening slower than we thought.

Perhaps there is a really high certainty threshold before something is allowed to become part of the official IPCC reports, so that this happens as a result?

Scientists don't get tenure by publishing research with negative results.

That the rivers change faster is a negative result.

What’s the point of a comment like this?

I think he’s just pointing out that many of the doomsday scenarios predicted in the past have revealed themselves to be damp squibs. Without denying the existence of climate change, it’s true that exaggerated claims have become the norm (and arguably harmed the credibility of ecologists).

> it’s true that exaggerated claims have become the norm

This is a very strong claim, and it is incumbent on you to provide evidence - for example, has there been a notable increase in retractions of scientific work in the fields you mention?

Remember all the talk about El Niño in the early 00’s and how it’s disappearance would signal tangible catastrophe?

How about the hole in the ozone layer? To nambw but a few

We took action on the ozone layer.

El Niño is important is it not?

A weakened El Nino just contributed to an unparalleled rainstrom in British Columbia, cutting off ~3 million people from the rest of the country for a week[1], causing logistics failures that are expected to take months to resolve, killing tens of thousands of livestock, and was hours away from causing the Fraser river to flood the City of Abbotsford, which would have put half of it, and a large stretch of Highway 1 under 10 feet of water - which would have taken years to dam and drain.

The province has since been in a state of emergency, banning non-essential highway travel. The Coquihalla highway, the primary lifeline into the rest of Canada won't even re-open for essential traffic until the end of January - and full repairs will take far longer.

[1] The city of Chilliwack (pop ~100,000) was completely cut off from all supply routes for more than a week. No road access. No rail access. It has no airport of note. No food at the groceries, no prescriptions at the pharmacy, no food for the tens of thousands of livestock raised by its farmers. Right now, there's only one way into it (from Vancouver), and it is still being intermittently cut off by flooding.

It boggles the mind that somehow the ozone layer story isn't a positive one for countries cooperating to stop and reverse a problem mapped out by satellites?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion#Antarctic_ozon...

I don't know why the poster you're replying to posted that, but it seems a reasonable question given that it's possible to have a distorted view of the world if there are selection biases that prevent certain narratives from being presented. For instance, it's worth asking "if there were cases where climate change were happening slower than expected, would I hear about it, or would it be filtered out at some layer before it reaches me because it's either not noteworthy enough to merit attention or it doesn't confirm a certain narrative?"

(To be clear, I have no doubts that climate change is happening and it's really bad. But I do think it's important to be wary of confirmation bias in all things, and to occasionally think about whether information that challenges your current understanding of the world would reach you or not.)

Also, it may be that there aren't any significant examples where climate change is happening slower than expected. If so, that would be an interesting thing to know.

Thanks. I’ll try to keep your charitable interpretation in mind.

elihu posted exactly what I meant to say. I'm not a climate denier by any means.

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