Hacker News Reader

Comment by badRNG | Hacker News Reader

> Unfortunately these are not scientists.

Are we really at the point where we are going to claim that the IPCC aren't scientists? This seems to be little more than reactionary backlash at a sound observation of the social impact of climate change on communities (and the report does a great job of elaborating which communities and what impacts.) Must we "eject" every scientist who observes a social impact that someone disagrees with? Should the IPCC stop the discussion the human impact of climate change to avoid offending certain sensibilities?

View on HN

Do you want people who are not left-wing to listen to scientists?

When you are trying to convince people to believe in something they don’t want to believe in, it’s a bad move to insult them or inject inflammatory political views into the discussion.

This kind of language about colonialism, inequity, etc. is going to alienate a lot of people — just like the smug self-righteousness of “I believe in science” (which implies that anyone who disagrees with the speaker doesn’t believe in science) alienated millions of people and made the anti-vax movement stronger.

This presupposes that scientists are the reason that "not left-wing" people (in reality a small fraction of US conservatives) aren't listening to scientists. The fact that climate change is human caused is political in the states, should that, too, be left out of the IPCC report to make it more palatable?

> This presupposes that scientists are the reason that "not left-wing" people (in reality a small fraction of US conservatives) aren't listening to scientists

No it doesn't. My argument is that if the scientists start bringing more politics into this, they make the political situation even worse than it is now, and they give people even more reasons to resist listening.

So where's the line? How much scientific evidence must we suppress to avoid offending reactionary sensibilities?

The fact that climate change is human caused is deeply political in the US. Should the IPCC suppress this fact too to cater to a tiny minority of science deniers?

The line is where the expertise of scientists ends. They need to stay in their lane. They are no more qualified to talk about colonialism than anyone else, and attempts to do so are definitely taking a political side and will be perceived as such.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com