641–650 of 968 posts
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Every single journalist in the video Paul Graham linked was on Fox News/Fox Business.
The video appears that it was put together by the folks at The Daily Show. You really think they went looking for clips from the "other side?"
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Just a friendly reminder that the consensus estimates about climate change have been reasonably accurate. Not perfect but decent enough as decision making tools. See for example the IPCC report from 1990: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_First_Assessment_Report There have certainly been very dramatic (all overly well reported) warnings representing a minority of researchers which have not been accurate. These sho…
> the IPCC report from 1990 Which overpredicted the warming that has occurred from 1990 to now (though its predictions overall were certainly much milder than the catastrophic ones that are being trumpeted as reasons to spend trillions of dollars on CO2 mitigation). Not to mention that there have been four more assessment reports since then (and the sixth is in the works now), and the more alarmist ones (in particula…
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> In the background global warming is a much greater threat to human life Before making such a confident statement, I would recommend re-reading this particular statement in pg's essay... "These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future t…
Your response is quite remarkable. PG's article contrasts 1) the careful predictions of experts, who study an issue in depth their entire life and pronounce on it carefully based on scientific models, with 2) the remarks of politically motivated hacks that seek to distract from the consensus for their own political agenda, often with remarkable (but unjustified) confidence. PG warns against 2), the hacks, and points…
> all the people who have made confident predictions over the years regarding global warming.
You can't deny that most of the people speaking publicly, and by far the loudest people, are not experts, they are politicians, journalists, and filmmakers. (And tech entrepreneurs...) Many of those have predicted disasters that never happened.
But judging by the downvotes, I guess that's an inconvenient truth.
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> I see one prediction from an actual modern climate scientist. That's a nice "No True Scotsman" right there. Unless, of course, you can give me a non-arbitrary reason why Dr. David Barber of the University of Manitoba speaking in 2008 is a "pre-modern" climate scientist, whereas Dr. James Hansen of NASA writing in 2009 is a "modern" climate scientist.
Sure, David Barber was off by a bit in that particular sentence, but arctic sea ice minima are now half of their historical values, and dropping. It is true, that in complex dynamic systems, predictions have to have wide error bars, but he was way less wrong than the charlatans who claim this isn't a problem or isn't a trend. https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/arctic-sea-ice/
The objection here is that we live in a media environment which continually emphasizes one end of that error bar. So long as we live in that sort of environment claims of catastrophic consequences are going to be taken with a degree of skepticism.
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No, it isn’t. The flu doesn’t require hospitalisation in 15-20% of the cases and doesn’t have a mortality rate of 1% in the best case . Please stop spreading misinformation.
https://www.icelandreview.com/ask-ir/whats-the-status-of-cov... 27,000 samples 1,500 confirmed 37 hospitalized (2%) 460 recovered Here's the official stats from Iceland. How would you comment these numbers?
I agree that we have huge amount of talking heads around with zero skin in the game and zero consequences when they are wrong, but I disagree covid-19 pandemics changed anything. There are literally dozens of politicians who have been disastrously wrong and gave advice in public which is diametrically opposite to what should have been, and suffered absolutely no consequences. And everybody's reaction to this is as tr…
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The thing missing here is that you're looking at deaths without looking at number of cases of each. The flu causes the number of deaths it does because it infects tens of millions of people a year[0]. The death rate is an order of magnitude lower than with COVID-19 across every single age bracket. [2] So when people say things like: > "I'm not worried about getting this illness" They are likely not considering that e…
I simply do not believe those figures at all. How can you even claim an "average death rate" when you don't even know how many people were infected, had mild symptoms, and recovered without reporting it to anyone? Of course the numbers will look scary when you only count hospitalized people as infected.
We can either throw our hands up and give up or we can do the best with what we have. So, what percentage of cases do you think are unconfirmed? You can adjust my math with that and see what those rates are. Those numbers still stay scary unless you assume a 90% unconfirmed rate, at which it equalizes for young people compared to the flu but is still 10x or more for some age groups. The point being, even accounting for underreporting this is still much more deadly and allowing it to spread like the flu would result in many more deaths.
I haven't seen any reliable numbers given about the underreporting rate, so if you have seen any that would be interesting!
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Daringfireball holds people accountable all the time, in particular for wrong prognostications. It's semi hilarious, in that it's relieving.
And what consquences does that have? As in, did anybody lose their job, go to jail or faced some other stiff penalty? If not then it doesn't count. In NL a minister resigned because he got caught in a lie. Imagine that. It wasn't even a big one, it is just that that is unacceptable here. I'm sure they lie all the time, it is just that getting caught is enough to do you in. So not a perfect system by a long shot but i…
"The answer, I realized, is that they didn't think they could get caught. They didn't realize there was any danger in making false predictions. These people constantly make false predictions, and get away with it, because the things they make predictions about either have mushy enough outcomes that they can bluster their way out of trouble, or happen so far in the future that few remember what they said."