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Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard'

reuters.com

31–40 of 92 posts

Re: Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard'

#31
post #29
post #3

Take two parts physics, four parts advocacy science, and two hundred parts advocacy journalism, and what do you get? In Christian circles, you get creation science. It's cute when climate scientists pretend their work is on the level of finding the Higgs boson. Advocate science is garbage.

Readers who come after, this user is not trying to argue in good faith, they are using the front page of this board to spread their fringe ideas. I recommend not engaging, logic will not convince them. If you're interested in learning more about this why this style of argument gets used online, I recommend The Alt-Right Playbook series on YouTube.

Except of course, that I am neither alt-right and I have actual experience in science. But don't let that stop you.

Re: Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard'

#32
post #4
post #3

Take two parts physics, four parts advocacy science, and two hundred parts advocacy journalism, and what do you get? In Christian circles, you get creation science. It's cute when climate scientists pretend their work is on the level of finding the Higgs boson. Advocate science is garbage.

What makes you think it's 'advocacy' science? How would climate science have to change to convince you otherwise?

The science isn’t the problem. The evidence and research are solid. It’s the communication.

Science comes in two flavors: research and experiments. Other things, even if attempting to sound scientific, are probably not science. One example is consensus, which itself isn’t science unless we are talking about behavioral sciences. The average person is not a scientist, certainly not a climatologist, but is generally decent at perceiving the basics of interpersonal communication and can discern if something is science or not regardless of their agreement or bias.

That is problematic, how do you talk to those people? They won’t understand the science, but alternate means of communication results in potential for arguments that are manipulative or far out of scope.

The idea is that climate change is a big deal. It is disruptive and that disruption will be very expensive and damaging, possibly catastrophic. Bad stuff. So, you want to convince people it is bad in order to change policy. Here is where the challenge begins, because policy discussions are generally political and not scientific even if all the supporting evidence is science and that evidence is overwhelming. The goal of science is advancing knowledge according to the scientific model, which is different than the goal of a policy conversation. Knowing nothing about climate or research a person can still detect that shift in conversation from science to policy/persuasion. Accounting for that without losing your message is delicate.

You can be good at science and less good at communication. If the conversation is purely fact and research based it isn’t emotionally compelling, but if it isn’t emotionally compelling there is no drive for policy change. At the same time if it is emotionally compelling it is open to falsification by irrational and illogical means. That is a hard problem to solve.

Re: Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard'

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the followup inflammatory comments, of course.

I'll admit that I couldn't resist replying; such comments are usually discouraged. However, I felt that you deserved to know the reason why Hacker News downvotes comments for the off chance that you didn't know already.

I know the official reason. I also know the real reason.

Honestly, do you think you are fooling anyone?

Re: Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard'

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you consider the sharp upturn in divide between the rich and the poor since 1972 to be "totally reasonable".

I definitely don't! I also don't attribute that to fiat currency. I attribute that at least within the United States to "trickle-down economics," reduction of the top federal income tax rate in the US from 92% in the 1940s (and 72% in the 1970s) to 37% this year [1], and the estate tax from the high 70% range [2] in the 1970s to 0% moving forward. The reduction in the social safety net and the government services aff…

> if you let rich people keep more of their money, they have more of the money. If you simultaneously take from poor people, they stay poor.

Not to join the debate here, but the use of language here really interests me. When talking about the rich, it's that we "let [them] keep more of their money" as if "we" (the government) has a right to every cent a person makes. When talking about the poor, we "take" from them, as if it's unjust theft.

Not trying to argue against you, it's a perfectly normal view, I just find it funny how much ideology paints language.

Re: Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard'

#35
post #22

Judea Pearl should have written "The Book of Why" about the millions of preventable deaths attributed to global warming. Instead, he wrote about, what appears to be the same phenomena, the "cigarettes are bad deniers" of the 1900s.

The Book of Why DOES have a section on climate change toward the end - he actually uses climate change to illustrate the idea of counterfactuals and even provides an example about how to calculate how much man-made carbon emissions X can be a "sufficient" / "necessary" cause of storm Y... GIVEN we can agree on a model.

Among other (likely more polarizing) reasons for why folks remain so obstinate regarding climate change, it certainly is possible that not every involved party may agree to the same model of how climate affects weather

Re: Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard'

#36
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think it's 'advocacy' science? How would climate science have to change to convince you otherwise?

The science isn’t the problem. The evidence and research are solid. It’s the communication. Science comes in two flavors: research and experiments. Other things, even if attempting to sound scientific, are probably not science. One example is consensus, which itself isn’t science unless we are talking about behavioral sciences. The average person is not a scientist, certainly not a climatologist, but is generally dec…

RCP 8.5 is, even according to the IPCC, highly highly unlikely. One could say the evidence for that scenario is... not overwhelming, or even whelming.

Evidence for "just what" is overwhelming... you find out the "just what" is nothing much, really.

There's a correlation between CO2 rise and a very small temperature increase, tht may or may not be a big deal. We don't know.

Re: Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard'

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely don't! I also don't attribute that to fiat currency. I attribute that at least within the United States to "trickle-down economics," reduction of the top federal income tax rate in the US from 92% in the 1940s (and 72% in the 1970s) to 37% this year [1], and the estate tax from the high 70% range [2] in the 1970s to 0% moving forward. The reduction in the social safety net and the government services aff…

> if you let rich people keep more of their money, they have more of the money. If you simultaneously take from poor people, they stay poor. Not to join the debate here, but the use of language here really interests me. When talking about the rich, it's that we "let [them] keep more of their money" as if "we" (the government) has a right to every cent a person makes. When talking about the poor, we "take" from them,…

That's a really interesting insight! I hadn't caught myself doing that, thanks for pointing it out.

Re: Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard'

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you let rich people keep more of their money, they have more of the money. If you simultaneously take from poor people, they stay poor. Not to join the debate here, but the use of language here really interests me. When talking about the rich, it's that we "let [them] keep more of their money" as if "we" (the government) has a right to every cent a person makes. When talking about the poor, we "take" from them,…

That's a really interesting insight! I hadn't caught myself doing that, thanks for pointing it out.

Yeah, it's funny how we work. Heck, read my comment, you can probably just as easily pick out my ideology. I wonder if linguistics has a term for that. It's something like "spin", but not exactly because it's not intentional or malicious.

Re: Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard'

#39
post #29
post #3

Take two parts physics, four parts advocacy science, and two hundred parts advocacy journalism, and what do you get? In Christian circles, you get creation science. It's cute when climate scientists pretend their work is on the level of finding the Higgs boson. Advocate science is garbage.

Readers who come after, this user is not trying to argue in good faith, they are using the front page of this board to spread their fringe ideas. I recommend not engaging, logic will not convince them. If you're interested in learning more about this why this style of argument gets used online, I recommend The Alt-Right Playbook series on YouTube.

[deleted]

Re: Evidence for man-made global warming hits 'gold standard'

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to evaluate scientific contracts for the federal government. I was lied to on a monthly basis. Scientific fraud is not a thing of the past. It's not even rare. Karl Popper is turning over in his grave.

> Scientific fraud is not a thing of the past. It's not even rare. Sure, but even accusations of scientific fraud require evidence to back them up. Can you provide some credible evidence to show that the majority of the scientific community is engaging in fraud?

Who defines credible? If I provide you PhDs and studies, what ingredient is necessary to override your confirmation bias?

How do you even know what the majority of the scientific community believes? Do you know any scientists?

If I mocked someone for using a linear regression on cyclical data, do you know why that's bad?

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