Ask HN: Climate Denialism on HN?
Recently, it's seemed that there's more and more climate change denialism related articles being submitted to HN. To me, this is horribly sad, as I have found that the intelligent commentary and debate on HN add a lot to my daily routine. What should concerned users such as myself do? I try to debate as I can and to present the evidence as it stands, but ultimately, this is a drain on my time. Any suggestions?
10 comments
I can't say I've read all (or even most!) of the articles posted on HN about this topic, the ones that I have haven't been climate `denialism' but rather scepticism and more specifically scepticism towards individual claims... There were some people outright rejecting AGW in the comments, but even that wasn't that common.
I'm of the opinion that the AGW hypothesis is correct. I'm very confident of it. (In particular because one can derive a correlation between atmospheric CO2 and average global temperature directly from the properties of CO2.) On the other hand, I'm sure that there are many individual pieces of evidence that are false.
It's good that they're questioned and subjected to rigour. False evidence for a true hypothesis is not something we should accept.
This is how science works and it not a bug but a feature.
The political spin being put on it is a minor irritation that will go away with time.
And be thankful you don't have relatives who tell you that global warming is a government conspiracy to give power to the UN demonstrating that the Antichrist is near. That is really irritating.
I'm of the opinion that the AGW hypothesis is correct. I'm very confident of it. (In particular because one can derive a correlation between atmospheric CO2 and average global temperature directly from the properties of CO2.) On the other hand, I'm sure that there are many individual pieces of evidence that are false.
It's good that they're questioned and subjected to rigour. False evidence for a true hypothesis is not something we should accept.
This is how science works and it not a bug but a feature.
The political spin being put on it is a minor irritation that will go away with time.
And be thankful you don't have relatives who tell you that global warming is a government conspiracy to give power to the UN demonstrating that the Antichrist is near. That is really irritating.
> (In particular because one can derive a correlation between atmospheric CO2 and average global temperature directly from the properties of CO2.)
Except that if you actually do the arithmetic, you find that the "heat trapping" properties of atmospheric CO2 concentrations can't produce the claimed temperature increases. That's why the AGW folks talk about the feedback effects, effects which are dependent on other things.
Note that the paleo record shows much higher levels of CO2 in the past (2-10x) with comparable to today temperatures....
Except that if you actually do the arithmetic, you find that the "heat trapping" properties of atmospheric CO2 concentrations can't produce the claimed temperature increases. That's why the AGW folks talk about the feedback effects, effects which are dependent on other things.
Note that the paleo record shows much higher levels of CO2 in the past (2-10x) with comparable to today temperatures....
Well, we're actually in a discussion of the magnitude of its effect at this point... (Which could lead to the discussion of whether there could be multiple causes for climate change rather than _just_ rising CO2...)
Like any chaotic system, it is difficult to predict the outcome, just that temperature is likely to increase. Think about the Mandelbrot set.
In any case, this is where one needs to look at other evidence.
Like any chaotic system, it is difficult to predict the outcome, just that temperature is likely to increase. Think about the Mandelbrot set.
In any case, this is where one needs to look at other evidence.
but rather scepticism and more specifically scepticism towards individual claims... [although] I'm of the opinion that the AGW hypothesis is correct.
Hats off to you for refusing to poison the debate. I hope you'll read this question in the same spirit.
Have you given any thought to what evidence you'd have to see before changing your position?
Hats off to you for refusing to poison the debate. I hope you'll read this question in the same spirit.
Have you given any thought to what evidence you'd have to see before changing your position?
In my case, I'd be more skeptical of AGW if there were better theoretical explanations of how large changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration might not cause macroscopic climate changes. As far as I can tell, most of the debate is over the instrumental record, i.e. an argument that as an empirical fact, warming isn't happening. But we do know that CO2 concentrations have increased (I don't think those measurements are controversial), and as far as I can tell the theoretical understanding is that this ought to produce a warming effect. Are there contrary theoretical models that predict that CO2 levels could increase at magnitudes approximately around those we see and yet not produce a warming effect? (Not a rhetorical question; I'm curious if there are.)
Thanks!
It's hard to ask for evidence in advance (and probably mildly contrary to the scientific spirit :) ), but at the very least it will have to explain lots of seemingly contrary evidence (or show flaws in _all_ those studies).
update: I should also mention that I'm fairly trusting of at least some of those studies, since I know some people involved in them and they're both smart and trustworthy... Also, I'd be very surprised if CO2 was completely innocent.
There's actually a theory going around that land use may be a contributing factor to climate change along with CO2: a forest absorbs heat differently than a crop field which is different from a city. This theory demonstrates that CO2-based AGW isn't either-or.
It's hard to ask for evidence in advance (and probably mildly contrary to the scientific spirit :) ), but at the very least it will have to explain lots of seemingly contrary evidence (or show flaws in _all_ those studies).
update: I should also mention that I'm fairly trusting of at least some of those studies, since I know some people involved in them and they're both smart and trustworthy... Also, I'd be very surprised if CO2 was completely innocent.
There's actually a theory going around that land use may be a contributing factor to climate change along with CO2: a forest absorbs heat differently than a crop field which is different from a city. This theory demonstrates that CO2-based AGW isn't either-or.
What I find far worse is the term "climate denialism". It's simply Orwellian. That sort of attitude just makes me mistrust people's intentions and motivations.
Any suggestions?
Flag content-free political junk. Ignore the rest. Don't take it personally. Submit interesting technology articles instead. And please don't contribute to the noise by complaining about it.
Flag content-free political junk. Ignore the rest. Don't take it personally. Submit interesting technology articles instead. And please don't contribute to the noise by complaining about it.
This has been a problem lately and it isn't confined to the Climate Change debate. There was a recent article from "The Mail" concerning the dissolution of the Euro that was devoid of any real content.
While the possibility of dissolution is real, the article was not. We should avoid sourcing from purely sensationalist sources like spiegel.de and the WSJ opinion page as well, although the latter is clearly more popular on this forum than the former.
While the possibility of dissolution is real, the article was not. We should avoid sourcing from purely sensationalist sources like spiegel.de and the WSJ opinion page as well, although the latter is clearly more popular on this forum than the former.
1) I think the HN community has a natural skeptical streak - are we bordering on denialism or respect for the debate?
2) http://xkcd.com/386/
2) http://xkcd.com/386/
That has got to be one of the most apropos links to xkcd I've ever seen. That said, if it were most any other forum, I wouldn't care so much, but I have found that HN is in general a quite intelligent community, and I hate to see that threatened by people so callously exploiting the natural skeptical streak you allude to. For instance, citing the Daily Mail is not actually respecting the debate, but going clear into denialist territory. I would be happy to see a real and substantive discussion of the faults of the IPCC, etc., but all I see is "AGW is wrong and the result of a conspiracy."
/Any suggestions?/
My suggestion would be to step back, realize that climate change is not a religion, and that you do not have to convert others to your cause.
If at that point, you still find it engaging and rewarding to debate the science and policy, go right ahead. But if not, you can ignore it all with no worries
My suggestion would be to step back, realize that climate change is not a religion, and that you do not have to convert others to your cause.
If at that point, you still find it engaging and rewarding to debate the science and policy, go right ahead. But if not, you can ignore it all with no worries
You label it denialism. I think it's closer to robust skepticism.
Yes, I do label it denialism. Propagating myths like the ones azgolfer is propagating over at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1125626 shouldn't be called anything else. As I said elsewhere, I welcome real and substantive debate. What I abhor, and am loathe to see taking root at HN, is the utter and complete denial of the massive body of evidence demonstrating AGW. Rather than pointing out problems in an intelligent and thoughtful way, what I see taking hold here is a never-ending parade of unfounded and demonstrably false assertions in the support of the denialist position.
Your labeling everyone as denialist certainly does you disservice, if what you after is real and substantive debate.
I submitted this study http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124236 yesterday and which did not attract much attention, being a weekend. The Study by Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts provides 111 pages of counter arguments to the Climate Change hypothesis.
I got interested in the Climate debate because as a Mechanical Engineer with a PhD, having specialized in Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics found it extremely difficult to accept that one could model the Atmosphere's heat balance to the point of accuracy required for such a debate.
Consider a column of air in the atmosphere, the bottom end is at say a temperature of 14 deg C and the top end probably at -60 deg C, add different gases, plus water vapor - which in itself is a greenhouse gas, introduce more CO2 and other pollutants, account for the variability of the Sun's output and try and predict the surface temperature (a vaguely defined term in itself) and you will become skeptical. Even simpler thermal analyses for example that of a building's internal temperature cannot be performed to the required accuracy.
I am also skeptical of the way the Carbon trade is being developed, but that is another story. I can be a skeptic on the Climate debate and an environmentalist on many other issues.
These are issues that touch all of us and do belong to HN.
I submitted this study http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1124236 yesterday and which did not attract much attention, being a weekend. The Study by Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts provides 111 pages of counter arguments to the Climate Change hypothesis.
I got interested in the Climate debate because as a Mechanical Engineer with a PhD, having specialized in Thermodynamics and Fluid Mechanics found it extremely difficult to accept that one could model the Atmosphere's heat balance to the point of accuracy required for such a debate.
Consider a column of air in the atmosphere, the bottom end is at say a temperature of 14 deg C and the top end probably at -60 deg C, add different gases, plus water vapor - which in itself is a greenhouse gas, introduce more CO2 and other pollutants, account for the variability of the Sun's output and try and predict the surface temperature (a vaguely defined term in itself) and you will become skeptical. Even simpler thermal analyses for example that of a building's internal temperature cannot be performed to the required accuracy.
I am also skeptical of the way the Carbon trade is being developed, but that is another story. I can be a skeptic on the Climate debate and an environmentalist on many other issues.
These are issues that touch all of us and do belong to HN.
I did see that post, started to skim it, but was uncomfortable with their tone.
Page 4 Item 11: "systematic hyping." I realize you can't lay out your entire case by page 4, but I would have felt more comfortable with an indication of the basis for this term and that it will be proven to be systematic hyping.
Page 5: "Recent revelations from the Climategate emails, originating from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia showed how all the data centers, most notably NOAA and NASA, conspired in the manipulation of global temperature records to suggest that temperatures in the 20th century rose faster than, in reality, they actually did."
"Conspired" is possibly accurate, but a little jarring, especially when applied to "my" NASA; they gave us Tang, after all. A more specific reference or reminder, rather than a footnote to an entire report, would have been good here to soften the blow to someone who watched the Apollo 11 landing in my pajamas on my knees 18 inches from the TV.
Page 5: "Around 1990, NOAA began weeding out more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. They may have been working under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It can be shown that they systematically and purposefully, country by country, removed higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler."
"They may have been working under the auspices ..." Were they? Weren't they? Some indication of why, beyond assumption, the authors think so would have been good, or a statement that this will be revealed later in the document.
"It can be shown that they systematically and purposefully ..." Then show it, or refer me to later in the document where you fulfill the promise that "it can be shown."
"Purposefully" is also something that I need to have either proven, or a reference to where you're going to prove it or have seen it proved.
I only intended to skim the document, but by the time I got here I felt a little uncomfortable at what I perceived as wild-eyedness.
Everything I object to here may well be true, and may be proved later in the document, but without any indication that proof would be forthcoming it started to sound like so much hand waving.
Speaking as a robust skeptic.
Page 4 Item 11: "systematic hyping." I realize you can't lay out your entire case by page 4, but I would have felt more comfortable with an indication of the basis for this term and that it will be proven to be systematic hyping.
Page 5: "Recent revelations from the Climategate emails, originating from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia showed how all the data centers, most notably NOAA and NASA, conspired in the manipulation of global temperature records to suggest that temperatures in the 20th century rose faster than, in reality, they actually did."
"Conspired" is possibly accurate, but a little jarring, especially when applied to "my" NASA; they gave us Tang, after all. A more specific reference or reminder, rather than a footnote to an entire report, would have been good here to soften the blow to someone who watched the Apollo 11 landing in my pajamas on my knees 18 inches from the TV.
Page 5: "Around 1990, NOAA began weeding out more than three-quarters of the climate measuring stations around the world. They may have been working under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It can be shown that they systematically and purposefully, country by country, removed higher-latitude, higher-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler."
"They may have been working under the auspices ..." Were they? Weren't they? Some indication of why, beyond assumption, the authors think so would have been good, or a statement that this will be revealed later in the document.
"It can be shown that they systematically and purposefully ..." Then show it, or refer me to later in the document where you fulfill the promise that "it can be shown."
"Purposefully" is also something that I need to have either proven, or a reference to where you're going to prove it or have seen it proved.
I only intended to skim the document, but by the time I got here I felt a little uncomfortable at what I perceived as wild-eyedness.
Everything I object to here may well be true, and may be proved later in the document, but without any indication that proof would be forthcoming it started to sound like so much hand waving.
Speaking as a robust skeptic.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
Phil Jones is backing away from that "massive body of evidence",
As to its "mass", no one outside of the believer community has seen it. It's not reproducible. Every time someone checks something, the result is far less than originally claimed.
Phil Jones is backing away from that "massive body of evidence",
As to its "mass", no one outside of the believer community has seen it. It's not reproducible. Every time someone checks something, the result is far less than originally claimed.
Every time someone checks something, the result is far less than originally claimed.
Statements like this make us look like rabid partisans who are incapable of acknowledging that any actual science is occurring, and will be used to dismiss us when we make claims which are factually well-founded. Let's keep to claims which we can make which are well-supported by the evidence: there is significant scientific uncertainty about the degree to which global warming is anthropogenic, the "consensus" has been oversold, the rigorous system of checks that we have been told existed has repeatedly failed in ways both subtle and obvious, and the costs of measures designed to address global warming are unknown but acknowledged to be very, very high.
Incidentally, I would soft peddle one fact that I know but believe is inadvisable to say too loudly right now: the process of global warming science has been systematically compromised by politically motivated fraud. Twelve months ago, saying that around me would have drawn the same rebuke as above: don't say that, we don't have evidence for it, let's stick to what we can demonstrate. Then the "Climategate" emails came out. I don't care who you are or where you stand on this issue, threatening to destroy evidence to avoid it falling into the hands of researchers immediately pushes us waaaaaaaay into the "fraud" category. However, in terms of marketing, I'd say softpeddle that factually justifiable conclusion until we've shaken the apple tree a little more, and can present it as part of the pattern of behavior it appears to be, rather than "a regrettable incident from a single overworked, much put-upon scientist who might have contributed a few lines to a report which is 99.99% good science."
Sadly, we're not likely to get any help from the U.S. mainstream media in shaking the apple tree, at least until I can think of a good hook for why climate fraud is Dubya's fault. Oh well.
Statements like this make us look like rabid partisans who are incapable of acknowledging that any actual science is occurring, and will be used to dismiss us when we make claims which are factually well-founded. Let's keep to claims which we can make which are well-supported by the evidence: there is significant scientific uncertainty about the degree to which global warming is anthropogenic, the "consensus" has been oversold, the rigorous system of checks that we have been told existed has repeatedly failed in ways both subtle and obvious, and the costs of measures designed to address global warming are unknown but acknowledged to be very, very high.
Incidentally, I would soft peddle one fact that I know but believe is inadvisable to say too loudly right now: the process of global warming science has been systematically compromised by politically motivated fraud. Twelve months ago, saying that around me would have drawn the same rebuke as above: don't say that, we don't have evidence for it, let's stick to what we can demonstrate. Then the "Climategate" emails came out. I don't care who you are or where you stand on this issue, threatening to destroy evidence to avoid it falling into the hands of researchers immediately pushes us waaaaaaaay into the "fraud" category. However, in terms of marketing, I'd say softpeddle that factually justifiable conclusion until we've shaken the apple tree a little more, and can present it as part of the pattern of behavior it appears to be, rather than "a regrettable incident from a single overworked, much put-upon scientist who might have contributed a few lines to a report which is 99.99% good science."
Sadly, we're not likely to get any help from the U.S. mainstream media in shaking the apple tree, at least until I can think of a good hook for why climate fraud is Dubya's fault. Oh well.
Just so you know, when you use a pejorative label for those who disagree with you, some of us take you much less seriously.
The article about the 2035 glacier melting mistake was valuable to me: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1057991
I was quite happy to learn that there was a mistake when the IPCC predicted that the glaciers which feed China's and India's biggest rivers will be gone in 25 years.
Correcting mistakes isn't denialism, it's part of good science, and it will only make the case for global warming stronger once more accurate predictions start to roll in.
I was quite happy to learn that there was a mistake when the IPCC predicted that the glaciers which feed China's and India's biggest rivers will be gone in 25 years.
Correcting mistakes isn't denialism, it's part of good science, and it will only make the case for global warming stronger once more accurate predictions start to roll in.
Having read through some of that leaked code, I can safely say that if they are as bad at climate science as they are at programming, we have nothing to fear. In particular, the assertions that some have made that the "artificial correction for decline" code is commented out, and was only used for testing, is troubling. Test code intertwined with the production code is a recipe for disaster.
And doesn't the phrase Climate Denialism have kind of a religious bent? If Climate Change Skeptics are deniers, then Climate Change Proponents are Global Warming Alarmists. Is there really a need to cloud things with name calling.
And really, are people actually skeptical that the climate is changing, or are they skeptical that's it's changing so severely and destructively that we need to put a trillion dollars on hot.
Hasn't the climate always changed? Wasn't their a 1,000 foot deep, 20,000 sq m lake in Utah, and a land bridge between North America and Western Europe? Is this the one right temperature? By what measure?
And doesn't the phrase Climate Denialism have kind of a religious bent? If Climate Change Skeptics are deniers, then Climate Change Proponents are Global Warming Alarmists. Is there really a need to cloud things with name calling.
And really, are people actually skeptical that the climate is changing, or are they skeptical that's it's changing so severely and destructively that we need to put a trillion dollars on hot.
Hasn't the climate always changed? Wasn't their a 1,000 foot deep, 20,000 sq m lake in Utah, and a land bridge between North America and Western Europe? Is this the one right temperature? By what measure?
It's sad, yes, but my friends in the non-CS research sciences could tell you that that code is actually pretty good compared to theirs.
Think for loops that iterate over one element hardcoded arrays. Yea. That bad.
Think for loops that iterate over one element hardcoded arrays. Yea. That bad.
Having done some research work in CS I'm not inclined to cast too many stones at the poor climate scientists just for having outrageously bad code. I was on a project with $N million in funding that had no source control, a concept I was totally ignorant of the time. We had one of our profs attempt to edit the sole copy of the code, running in production, during a customer demo. This is a "Physician, heal thyself" for the academic branch of our discipline.
Just for those interested emails and code were on wikileaks which is now unavailable. You can download from http://www.eastangliaemails.com/
The issue has come up a lot in the last couple of months due to the CRU hacking, which is where I guess the HN link is.
The mistake you're making is that you're presuming an equal burden on the so-called "denialists" like they have to prove there isn't global warming. They don't. AGW is an hypothesis. The burden of proof is on it. This is the same mistake creationists make when they take any missing, incomplete, unclear or contradictory part of evolution to mean that God exists and he created Man.
If nothing else the CRU email hacking should give everyone cause for concern at the subversion of the scientific process. Efforts were clearly made to deny access to raw data, generally be obstructionist and the failure of respected journals like Nature not to enforce their policies of, say, the publication of raw data. Or the IPCC admitting their Indian glacier claims weren't based on anything other than a single unfoudned comment in a years old newspaper.
The mistake you're making is that you're presuming an equal burden on the so-called "denialists" like they have to prove there isn't global warming. They don't. AGW is an hypothesis. The burden of proof is on it. This is the same mistake creationists make when they take any missing, incomplete, unclear or contradictory part of evolution to mean that God exists and he created Man.
If nothing else the CRU email hacking should give everyone cause for concern at the subversion of the scientific process. Efforts were clearly made to deny access to raw data, generally be obstructionist and the failure of respected journals like Nature not to enforce their policies of, say, the publication of raw data. Or the IPCC admitting their Indian glacier claims weren't based on anything other than a single unfoudned comment in a years old newspaper.
I agree that the burden of proof is on creationists if they want to positively assert that God created man, but plenty of anti-evolution activists limit themselves to the narrower grounds of just claiming "evolution is only a theory, burden of proof is on the evolutionists". Yet they tend to get called "denialists" in that case, also. (Though I agree the evidence for evolution is much more mature than the evidence for AGW.)
I blame the sensational state of scientific reporting. Content providers have been in a rush to scare people for as long as I can remember.
It feels that anything reported on in the scientific community I read today which gets enough coverage to become "common knowledge" will have that popular stance make several 180° turns over the next decade. The climate feels like it's in the same vein as vaccine links with autism, or drinking wine while you're pregnant.
To quote Operation Ivy, "All I know is that I don't know, all I know is that I don't know nothing."
What I do know is that climate related science has more revenue, and green products are seeing more investment than ever before, and it's now big business.
It feels that anything reported on in the scientific community I read today which gets enough coverage to become "common knowledge" will have that popular stance make several 180° turns over the next decade. The climate feels like it's in the same vein as vaccine links with autism, or drinking wine while you're pregnant.
To quote Operation Ivy, "All I know is that I don't know, all I know is that I don't know nothing."
What I do know is that climate related science has more revenue, and green products are seeing more investment than ever before, and it's now big business.