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Comment by epicureanideal | Hacker News Reader

I think the data has enough issues that I don't draw any conclusions from it.

Yeah, denialism is definitely one way to keep one's mood up. The problem is that we, and our children, have to live in the resulting world, and that reality will be worse if we don't act today.

There's no point saying "denialism" when it comes to talking about the data. You might as well just be saying "your tribe stupid my tribe good".

Who is talking about data in this thread? Someone made a half dig at it. Haven't seen any data yet. Other than the article. The bit about the hottest 12 months. Which seems pretty uncontroversial to me.

> Haven't seen any data yet

That's because tribalism entered the chat, instead of a question about sources for the claim

The wise man bowed his head, “no difference between true and untrue” etc

Similarly, our children will be burdened by the public debt and regulatory policies enacted in the name of climate doom.

This much is guaranteed, regardless of if the oft-cited apocalypse comes to fruition.

The great thing about debt is, everybody will be dead and no one will care about some number in some powered-off data center showing negative balance.

"How often do you think about the decline of the Roman Empire?"

What?

The vast, vast majority of people who are better equipped than myself - and likely you - disagree.

But let's put that aside. Let's put aside the fact that the mechanisms involved are demonstrable and simple enough for children to understand.

Even as laypeople, we can observe that in the past ten years there's been year after year after year of once-in-a-century catastrophic weather events. The odds of these being unrelated anomalies decrease every time. Unprecedented heat waves and forest fires across the North America, all the way up into the arctic, with entire towns burning to the ground. Deadly ice storms in Texas. God-sized hurricanes. In isolation these could be hand-waved away - in aggregate, they clearly point towards catastrophe.

lol. When data is not cherry picked then those better equipped people’s opinion might be worth listening to.

Can you cite an example of such cherry picking? I’m only aware of counter examples e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking#:~:text=Cherr....

Literally every study. They will remove a particular earth moment because “it’s not relevant” but adding it in makes their data look like global warming isn’t happening. Or they exclude periods claiming that the data from that period is not good when it goes against their claims.

I'm surprised and encouraged by your comment.

No one really ever wants to discuss this, the issues with the data, the missing data, the statistical techniques used to fill in that data, how the models are derived, the funding situation with climate research and the quality issues with all of it.

It seems like the only acceptable answer is the sky is falling and we're all going to die.

Maybe both things can be true: there is a man made effect on the climate and it's difficult to measure and a lot of the research quality is poor.

Perhaps humans have adapted to difficult climates throughout our entire existence.

Perhaps the models that predict the end of the world are a bit extreme, and there are conflicting interests.

Maybe, just maybe - everything will be ok.

Before we discuss the funding situation with climate research, let's discuss the funding situation against climate research. If indeed climate scientists were pay-for-play, don't you think some of the richest companies in the world would be better at finding credible people to parrot talking points that serve their financial interests?

What, you think (for example) Microsoft or nVidia is going to fund scientists to claim anthropogenic climate change doesn't exist?

They literally have PR teams that intentionally aligns company objectives towards the popular climate narrative.

The narrative has so much momentum that no individual financial interest could stop it. And big oil isn't half as influential as it were.

You just named “for example” the first and fourth biggest companies in the world. Look up what the third is.

I don’t know how “influential” big oil is, but I know they’re collectively quite rich. Collectively substantially richer than whoever you’ve imagined stands to gain from a shift away from carbon and has been willing and able to buy out the world’s scientific community for decades now. They can’t even pay their own scientists to shill for them; they knew about climate change since the 70s [0].

Edit: lol the list of companies I was looking at was by market cap. A list by revenue [1] makes your case even worse: five of the ten richest companies in the world sell oil. Another eight are in the top 50. Somehow no obvious boogeyman bicycle manufacturers to be manipulating the scientific consensus though.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-64241994.amp

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by...

95% of scientist have disagreed with you for 20 years and violently disagreed with you for 10 years.

> violently disagreed with you for 10 years.

Yep. That's true.

Strange isn't it?

Almost like their livelihood is at risk.

I’ve yet to find it again, but I read an interesting commentary recently noting that the bulk of enthusiasm in press coverage, and for spending money, is on the long term prevention side (“decarbonization” etc), while no real press or spending is directed at the survival/relocation side, and this is an interesting data point to some.

What are some of the issues?

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