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Comment by codeshaman | Hacker News Reader

> The results end up overhyped, overblown, and for soundbites like press releases and Nature papers. This just misinforms people.

I understand the scientist's desire for rigour, but ...

Most people won't bother reading the article at all. If it's up-voted or liked enough, the title is the truth. We all do it. We all accept a sentence as truth if we trust the source enough, without checking the facts. It's impossible to check all the facts all the time.

But the WaPo article isn't about the truth. It's about beliefs. The party line.

The belief that 'I, through my sinful actions am causing the ocean to slow down'. Ridiculous, but that is what most people will get from reading that headline. And maybe it's not that bad.

It doesn't matter what the truth is, it matters what you believe the truth to be.

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> It doesn't matter what the truth is, it matters what you believe the truth to be.

Some argue that the opposite is true: https://xkcd.com/164/

I don't understand why the assumption that your actions could have an impact on the world is ridiculous?

It's a matter of degree. Pissing in the ocean changes the PH, however the question would be, to what degree? The question isn't if humans impact climate, it's how much do they impact the climate. The answer to that is far from 'settled science.'

What about 7 billion people pissing in the sea? Of course the implications of that are not compltely predictable. But it is not just a matter of academic interest but an engineering/managment problem. How do we interact with the environment in an optimal way?

I'm sure there are aspects of it are not settled, but that is not the same as not knowing anything. We can not predict accurately if it will rain 10 days from now, but we still know it rains every now and then.

There are deserts on earth that have been created by humans (Iceland for example, and the "Karst", victims to wooden ship building), and large lakes that are almost gone because of human actions.

It also seems obvious that humans pollute water bodies around us to a degree that makes swimming in them or drinking from it impossible, to take up your pissing example.

With complex systems, you will never have irrefutable proof of much. If you're waiting for something air-tight, it will never happen.

It doesn't matter what the truth is, it matters what you believe the truth to be.

The truth doesn't matter, nor does what you believe. The only thing that actually matters is how you act. You could happily say that there's only a 0.0001% chance that humanity is affecting climate change, but if that's enough to get you to stop doing things that might harm the planet just in case then that's brilliant.

The most important thing to remember with climate change is that there's no downside to being less wasteful.

That's a very naive worldview. I'll skip the first part of what you said and focus on this though:

>The most important thing to remember with climate change is that there's no downside to being less wasteful.

It doesn't matter if you shower less or use the AC less or use an electric car, all that pales in comparison to you not existing in the first place. So the easiest way to solve the entire issue is not having more children. I feel like this is such a big choice with huge downsides for most people that it doesn't even get talked about that often.

Actually the average western/US CO2 footprint is so big, that it's very doable to fit yourself and a child in after you cut down on luxuries. Of course "use AC less" and "use electric cars" are not the kinds of changes that will get you there. More like no meat, no car, no flights, no grid powered AC etc.

Offsetting your baby's lifetime CO2 footprint is actually very affordable even with the average US figure. For a more hands on alternative you could strive to raise them to a line of work that would cause them to have a net negative climate footprint.

But yes, have a good hard think about these things when considering getting children.

One decent flight is more than pretty much everything else combined, people forget this far too much. Most of the people that try to offset their footprint are the same damn people that feel the need to fly around the world every couple of years.

For lack of a more credible source,

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/sep/09/carb...

For a slightly more provocative example for what is a "decent" flight, see http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-21/billionair...

“America’s lifestyle expectations are far too high and need to be adjusted so we have less things and a smaller, better existence,” Greene said in an interview today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “We need to reinvent our whole system of life.”

This was said by "Greene, who flew his wife, children and two nannies on a private jet plane to Davos for the week".

OK, he not only made a speech but also had a dinner with Tony Blair so it wasn't just for that speech.

So the TSA is harassing those who are ruining the planet.

They're doing God's work! /s

Before banning something because it may have a 0.0001% chance of being bad for the Earth's climate, you should be sure that it doesn't have a 0.0002% chance of being good for the Earth's climate.

That's why you need science and proof to try to know the truth, or at least do the best effort. If you don't care about the truth you can use Tarot cards or Ouija tables, that are cheaper and least wasteful than a bunch of Ph.D. that just want to put buoys and launch satellites to measure everything.

> a bunch of Ph.D. that just want to put buoys and launch satellites to measure everything.

I'm not really understanding here. "measuring everything" is how science is performed. Are you for or against "science?"

I'm for science. I thought that "use Tarot cards or Ouija tables" was enough to mark the rest of the sentence as ironic.

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