Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change • Hacker News Board

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#181

Post by ossreality » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 1:06 AM UTC

Sailfish wrote: post #145

Daishiman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What "other side"?? The only people who are questioning the science are the ones who don't have the necessary knowledge to evaluate the claims scientifically and who have an economic stake in continuing fossil fuel usage. No climate scientists oppose it. I have not seen a single, reliable and useful model which goes against the fundamentals of climate change. There are no alternative hypothesis that explain the clima…

"The only people who are questioning the science are the ones who don't have the necessary knowledge to evaluate the claims scientifically and who have an economic stake in continuing fossil fuel usage." Wrong! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_th... Where as, Warmists have Arnold, Gore, Pope Francis, Hollywood celebs and lying pols, &c ... all eminent scientists in their own right ... NOT! An…

"Warmists"

Thank you! Finally, non-ironic usage of "SJW" is no longer the biggest indicator of someone who is a tool. Now it's "Warmist".

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#182

Post by gus_massa » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 1:07 AM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #68

mrfusion wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure a large majority of nutrition scientists supported a low fat diet 20 years ago. (Food for thought)

> I'm sure a large majority of nutrition scientists supported a low fat diet 20 years ago. (Food for thought) Sure, and a large majority of physicists supported General Relativity 20 years ago. If your point is that vague analogies aren't helpful and specifics are needed, I think that was precisely what toomuchtodo was getting at.

General relativity I much easier to test in simple systems, like planets traveling in the vacuum, or to get more precision you can test it in the lab https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity . I'm not sure if this is the more accurate current test but from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound%E2%80%93Rebka_experiment :

> The result confirmed that the predictions of general relativity were borne out at the 10% level. This was later improved to better than the 1% level by Pound and Snider. Another test involving a space-borne hydrogen maser increased the accuracy of the measurement to about 10^−4 (0.01%).

Nutrition and diets are more difficult to measure (you can't enclose a few thousand persons in the lab for 20 years) and it's full of side effects and interactions. IIRC a low fat diet is still recommended. I think that a better example of the changes in nutrition is the butter vs margarine recommendations, see for example http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/1179683...

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#183

Post by vlehto » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 1:09 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #104

I believe that man-made CO2 emissions likely have a significant impact on the climate, and we should do something about it, but even so the issue is a very complex one and its politicization hasn't helped. Here's why it's not so easy: 1. The data is crap. What you need is average temperatures and other data (humidity, pressure, cloud cover, albedo, etc.) over the entire Earth down to a fairly small scale. What we hav…

I was skeptic until I studied the history of the subject. It's a sad state. Nobody would expect to study lets say material science from historical perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...

There could be some major breakthroughs since 1970, but the whole shebang is so polarized, that I would not know that to believe.

From policy point of view human emotions have to be taken to account. Motivations for denialism are often either "nah, it doesn't matter" or alternatively "They say we all die! I don't want to believe that." I was in the latter camp.

Prehistoric events show us that climate change is probably not the end of humanity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...

And on the other hand ask any farmer how he feels about unpredictable weather. Agriculture is completely based on predictable seasons. It's very likely that combating climate change could save millions of lives.

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#184

Post by vlehto » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 1:12 AM UTC

gnaritas wrote: post #179

vlehto wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say anything about climate change on the above comment. I only said the argument was not solid. I'm not "climate skeptic", I'm true believer. I just try to combat these authority heretics.

Argument from authority is not always invalid; especially when virtually all of the authorities on the subject agree. In fact you can't find a statement I made in the original post you objected to, that isn't true. It is factually true that if you disagree with most scientists on a subject, you are probably wrong. I didn't say you were definitely wrong, I said it was near 100% certain that you were wrong. > It's weir…

Argument from authority is not invalid when it can be backed with fact.

It's often unnecessary, because you need the fact anyhow. In some cases it's justified to save time. Like in the military.

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#185

Post by vlehto » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 1:27 AM UTC

gnaritas wrote: post #174

vlehto wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you agree because someone says so, that's just another form of ignorance. If you really wish to know the shit, you find the facts science has provided. There are facts. This "99% of scientists" stuff is making the signal/noise ratio quite bad.

> If you agree because someone says so, that's just another form of ignorance. No it isn't, it's not possible to educate yourself to the depth required on a great many things without becoming a professional in the field and while that's cool for those that want to; it's utter arrogance and ignorance to ignore the entire scientific community as a laymen and pretend you know better. Quite simply, if you are not a clima…

You have to be philosophist with a degree and specialization in philosophy of science to consistently make that argument.

Are you?

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#186

Post by SilasX » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 1:28 AM UTC

icanhackit wrote: post #173

SilasX wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to criticize taxing CO2 emissions (which has a solid case), but there is indeed an analogous dynamic here to Pascal's Wager: just as you ask "which God", one could ask "which emergency?", sampled from the set of events that respectable scientific movements have demanded immediate action on. In the 70s, for example, one respected movement held that there would be an overpopulation crisis that justified drastic mea…

there is indeed an analogous dynamic here to Pascal's Wager: just as you ask "which God", one could ask "which emergency?" Is it an analogous dynamic if the cure for almost all of the emergencies in the basket is reduction in harmful levels of pollution including inefficient farming/manufacturing/transport methods, noting the associated benefits such as food security that comes with unpolluted waterways in poor villa…

>Is it an analogous dynamic if the cure for almost all of the emergencies in the basket is reduction in harmful levels of pollution including inefficient farming/manufacturing/transport methods, noting the associated benefits such as food security that comes with unpolluted waterways in poor villages, not acidifying oceans, not tainting arable land with heavy metals etc? Belief in a certain God among many seems more variable than reduce pollution, aim for zero.

But what you really want is a method of weighing the harm of a given amount of pollution against the benefit. "Reduce it" doesn't translate into a heuristic for deciding which uses should be targeted first, and regresses to the original problem of "for which crisis is it okay to emit an additional unit of pollution to emit in service of fighting?"

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#187

Post by narcissus » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 1:39 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #175

narcissus wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that I hate about this argument of 'consensus has been wrong before' when it comes to climate change is that essentially, the argument seems to be 'everyone always said we were pumping too much CO2 into the air and that would cause global warming and now there's people saying that consensus is wrong'. Unless I'm seriously wrong with my scientific history (and it's extremely possible!) I didn't think this wa…

But I think that's true of everything, no? Before people thoughts ulcers were caused by stress they probably thought it was due to too much "humor" and required treatment by bloodletting. The point is that we advance scientific thinking by challenging ideas. If right now most scientists thinking global warming is real, then fine. Just don't try and shutdown the ones that don't agree.

Yeah, that's a good point and I see where you're coming from. But generally when I hear the argument about consensus, it seems to end with nothing other than an implication of "and therefore they're obviously wrong, simply because of the current consensus".

But yeah, I see your point.

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#188

Post by collyw » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 1:50 AM UTC

steven2012 wrote: post #30

I absolutely don't believe that human-created CO2 emissions cause global warming. However, I consider myself a staunch environmentalist. I believe we should be doing whatever we can to control pollution. It sickens me that factories pump out pollution, that we can barely eat fish anymore because of all the garbage and poisons we pump into our oceans. I think we need very strict controls on every form of pollution as…

"I dont't belive..."

Believe, the magic word, makes it a religion basically. I'll take the sceintific consensus. They have evidence.

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#189

Post by EdSharkey » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 1:52 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #176

EdSharkey wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So is the conversation something like, "air/water/ground pollution" X "planet is becoming uninhabitable"? Where X differs depending on who is talking? For Schwarzenegger, X seems to be "therefore". For me, X is more like, "but not". I treat the two arguments as separate. Shocking warnings have always come with pollution. For me, those warnings have mostly born out as true. I have chronic asthma, probably from air pol…

I have no idea where you get the idea that the planet is cooling, but you're 100% wrong about this. http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-guide/science/temp-recor... This is not "bad science." And it leads to predictable effects. The North West of England is partly underwater this week because of yet another "once a century" storm - the kind that have been rolling around every few years since 2000 or so. Increased rain…

Your second link states right at the start, "There is, however, a dawning realization among researchers that even these apparently tiny variations can have a significant effect on terrestrial climate." And there's uncertainty and debate between scientists mentioned throughout.

The sun inputs many orders of magnitude more energy as humans into the atmosphere. Even 0.01% variability in solar output should create fluctuations in surface temperatures that we can measure.

Re: Schwarzenegger: I don’t give a damn if we agree about climate change

#190

Post by magicalist » Tue, Dec 08, 2015, 1:59 AM UTC

vlehto wrote: post #184

gnaritas wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Argument from authority is not always invalid; especially when virtually all of the authorities on the subject agree. In fact you can't find a statement I made in the original post you objected to, that isn't true. It is factually true that if you disagree with most scientists on a subject, you are probably wrong. I didn't say you were definitely wrong, I said it was near 100% certain that you were wrong. > It's weir…

Argument from authority is not invalid when it can be backed with fact. It's often unnecessary, because you need the fact anyhow. In some cases it's justified to save time. Like in the military.

> Argument from authority is not invalid when it can be backed with fact.

Your line of argumentation doesn't make sense here. We can look for backing up an authority with facts which come from...that same authority, who we then have to believe or not, short of replicating their study. Or we can get someone else to replicate the study, and someone else to replicate that study, and...suddenly we're talking about scientific consensus again.

You do not have time to replicate and verify the work of every scientist. At some point you are going to have to choose to take some authority's word for it.