I want to believe it's bots pushing propaganda, and not that a non-insignificant portion of HN refuses to believe in climate change. But I really don't know these days.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-c...
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-10-30/high-tid...
This prediction was too pessimistic, but I'm not sure what general point you are trying to make by cherry-picking one article from 14 years ago. Care to expand?
They're trying to downplay or deny climate change, without actually taking a contradicting position, because they know that will actually get downvoted to dead.
It's cowardly and intended to further the denial position.
If you don't believe it and want to ignore science, that's your ignorance.
They've been writing the same "decade to live" headlines since the 70s.
People are jaded.
Your comment is a non-sequitur just to personally attack me for a position I didn't take.
Same issue with believing that crime is terrible now, when it's objectively not. And politicians rely on the ignorance of voters to gain power, so they have no interest in making media literacy any better.
This strikes me as a Motte-and-Bailey style argument. I don’t think the issue is whether the climate is changing, but people who bang on about the climate changing are typically doing it in service of some policy outcome. If I don’t believe those policies will have their purported effect, or are feasible at the required scale, or if I think those policies with have far more disastrous consequences than maintaining the status quo (for example, mass de-industrialization in order to limit global carbon emissions, which after a series of waving hands, saves the planet or something). Does challenging those policy proposals mean that I refuse to believe in climate change? To a non-insignificant portion of climate commenters, the answer is probably “Yes.”
The issue here is you have a large number of people in the hacker news 'community' who are domain experts with insufficient humility. While it's great to be informed, essential in fact to engage with a useful conversation about public policy - it's ludicrous to get ideological about areas of scientific knowledge in which one is a layman. If the consensus is, based on UNEP, IPCC etc, that we're going to see the deaths of at least hundreds of millions, the loss of major sea fronting cities and a likely systems collapse of our civilisation... Then mannered critiques of policy outcomes read like defences of appeasement in 1939. Buffoonery masquerading as serious engagement with reality.