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Comment by rfatnabayeff | Hacker News Reader

The Earth is fine, people. One herd of farting cows diminishes all the human effort in CO emission decrease in nearby town. One volcano eruption diminishes it worldwide. One major earthquake contributes to Earth landscape change more than all the humanity did. Claiming that human can change the Earth is like claiming that the single flea drives the whole elephant. Earth is fine, people.

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[citation needed]. Seriously, because there's a body of evidence [1] completely disagreeing with your assertions. You're directly going against the overwhelming majority [2] of scientific consensus with those statements.

[1]: http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/volca...

[2]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

How many times does it need to be stated that science does not advance by consensus. Science is not an exercise in democracy. Evidence, yes, but please don't talk about consensus.

I suggest you don't get your science from Discovery magazine or from the Washington Post. This link (from a sceptical website) cites innumerable original peer-reviewed papers showing that even the IPCC now retract on their earlier claims about an increase in extreme weather. You can find many more links to <evidence supported> data on the site.

That said, we should all bemoan the cutting down of forest and the pollution of the oceans to mention only two aspects of man's disastrous activities on our planet.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/13/ipcc-ar5-draft-leaked-...

"Rawls has completely misrepresented the IPCC report." http://skepticalscience.com/ipcc-draft-leak-global-warming-n...

Why is it a problem to discuss consensus if the consensus is from educated parties and founded on empirical evidence supporting the consensus? Challenging the status quo is fine if you have data to back up your assertions but that isn't what happens in the most case. With the issue being so politicised, data is no longer the ultimate trump card. That's the problem.

Regarding the sources, they're simply the first that I find when I search for information I've previously read and want to reference. I applaud your effort to source thoroughly cited references on points you present, but unfortunately when I'm reading HN between my day job I don't have the same time to build an equally bulletproof case.

FWIW, I don't hold a particular view either way on what you cited. I haven't read it enough. I'm sorry that I can't comment specifically on it.

> Why is it a problem to discuss consensus if the consensus is from educated parties and founded on empirical evidence supporting the consensus?

When people talk about general relativity they don't refer to the scientific consensus behind the theory? It stands up to scrutiny because there are numerous reproducible experiments lending to its validity along with some very solid mathematics to back it up. The science behind climate change is very hard to create experiments for, however, and so we must lean heavily on computer simulated models (which, by the way, are rarely used to prove much of anything in the hard sciences). Thus, you hear a lot more about "consensus" than you would otherwise.

Erm...what? Do you have any data behind those claims?

The InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) disagrees with you: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-...

While we're at it, so does the National Academy of Sciences: http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10139&page=1

So does the EPA: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/Downloads/endangerment/Enda...

Sorry but you haven't kept up with the publications. This is a report on IPCC ar5!

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/13/ipcc-ar5-draft-leaked-...

"IPCC AR5 draft leaked, contains game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing – as well as a lack of warming to match model projections, and reversal on ‘extreme weather’"

Looks like you haven't kept up with the publications except those posted by the conservative foes of climate science like Alex Rawls. There have been many rebuttals of the claim that there is a "game-changing admission" in the leaked document, here's a good one: http://skepticalscience.com/ipcc-draft-leak-global-warming-n...

"Rawls has completely misrepresented the IPCC report."

I don't trust scientific documents being "leaked" - this isn't politics where leaking information does the public a service. This is science, where it's advantageous to wait until the data matures, not spill it immediately. When it's ready for publication and is done so through official, peer vetted channels, I'll consider it authentic.

So, actually, yes, I have kept up with my publications. Furthermore, the person who leaked that has a well known bias against climate change. Coupled with my earlier statement, this holds no scientific weight against what I cited.

You are the reason that reason has such a hard time in politics. You've made up your mind about something that evidence and facts overwhelmingly disagree with you on.

Is this a personal attack?

You know, when local rednecks witness slight daily weather change, they proudly attribute it to 'global warming'. I mean, we track the weather for at most a hundred year. We tend to see any several-year trend as an alarming global tendency. Weather change periods definitely have very low-frequency components, so it's unwise to declare any locality as a global tendency.

This is the most depressing comment I've read all week, for so many reasons. :(

Yes. Its like saying that malaria is not a problem because people die in road accidents.

You're right. For ordinary people around me malaria is not a problem. And yes, here people die in road accidents and should it happen that one side of the accident is a local government/enforcement member friend or relative means that they'd escape justice. And this is the problem. And problems must be solved from largest to smallest, as the cut tree is worked by the big axe first and by the tiny needle last.

The biggest lapse in understanding is that people cannot deal with the order of magnitude differences in numbers involved. Humans are sometimes "the flea" and other times "the elephant". It is difficult to decide intuitively which we are at any particular point. This table[1] demonstrates this point quite well. Humans interact with the environment in ways that are orders of magnitude different in terms of impact, but it is hard to conceptualize that fact.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)

I didn't get your point. Should we stop controlling road traffic and prevent car accidents until the very last malaria mosquito is dead?

One of my favourite clips: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL8HP1WzbDk Alas, the point is very hard to get across.

That's was the clip that motivated me to make the comment in the first place.

Actually, it's methane from cow burps that gets people worried, not farts.

You're right about geological and astronomical events having much more importance on the Earth than an insignificant mammal.

Earth will always be fine. The Earth doesn't care whether it is Mars or Venus. Only people care. If your species isn't winning, it's losing. Change is inevitable.

I don't think your points quell the issues raised by the Amazon diversity when considering biological diversity issues.

We should still make our best effort to minimize human impact --

http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/11/documerica-images...

Why? One would probably tend to keep the impact tolerable enough for themself, but you're not going to find enough people except green fanatics to be motivated to minimize it.

Because the impact is difficult to appreciate at a personal level over the short (years to decades) timeframe. As a result, individual humans struggle to realise it in their daily interactions. Nevertheless, the damage accumulates and causes significant negative results for future generations.

Your logic assumes a feedback loop that shows the person the results of their actions. Like the Crypto article yesterday [1] touched on, if you lack that feedback loop you won't know the negative consequences of your actions.

We owe it to our offspring that we leave them with an environment that's not beyond recovery from the actions we take by the time they're in a position to affect change. Anything else is purely selfish.

To put it in the Hacker News analogy, if I corrupt one bit of your system's RAM, you'll rarely notice the effects and will probably use your PC for its functional life without realising your RAM even has a fault. If I corrupt a significant percentage of it, you'll be crying murder when you get hourly system crashes.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775165

The only way we're going to truly minimize human impact is by forcing developing nations like China and India to dramatically change the way they are growing their economies, which frankly, doesn't seem very fair. They have as much right as the rest of the 1st world to develop their country and nobody is going to be able to tell them otherwise. The only real way out of this mess is a mass exodus away from fossil fuels over to nuclear power or the discovery of some sort of new abundant power source like fusion (solar and wind aren't going to cut it).

>The only way we're going to truly minimize human impact is by forcing developing nations like China and India to dramatically change the way they are growing their economies

Firstly, the US and EU combined output more CO2 than China and India combined, so we can make a substantial contribution to reducing CO2 emissions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dio...

Secondly, a mixture of Solar, Wind, Hydro, Tidal and Geothermal can certainly "cut it".

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