He seems to be implying that this is a net good for tech companies to be funding research that doesn't directly affect their bottom line. I don't know what you read.
Oh I don't know the same way every other class of job across every other sector in the economy evaluates their candidates? Imagine hiring a PhD in Physics to lead your Applied Research lab and asking them to derive Maxwells Equations from first principles as part of the interview Or hiring a new Surgeon and asking them to perform some obscure procedure they did twice in Med School before hiring. Absolutely absurd. You've been fooled into thinking this is an acceptable way to judge people.
I applaud your honesty. There is a bizarre religion on HN where people think that doing well at Whiteboard/algo interviews makes you a good engineer or is somehow crucial to recruiting good talent.
The problem is that a mountain of evidence stands against climate deniers and your example "could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings."
There is overwhelming consensus that the current rate of climate change, which by the way is totally unprecedented in history, can be from no other source than anthropogenic CO2. You can read the research and see how thoroughly and completely every possible confounding variable was accounted for.
The scientists who claim "current changes are, like all past changes, caused by other factors than the man-made" are not taken seriously by the mainstream, form an unimaginably slim minority and frankly are dangerously wrong.
But there is a rump dumbass part of the population that doesn't believe in it and they consistently elect leaders that don't believe either. What exactly do you think people can do when their neighbors and elected officials won't do anything because they refuse to acknowledge the problem? I don't think you are actually recommending mass scale ecoterrorism.
To actually make a difference we would need a worldwide project on the scale of multiple Manhattan Projects or Moon Landings and I think there is exactly 0% chance of that happening until it's impossible to ignore but unfortunately too late to stop.
When half the leaders of the US don't think this is even a problem what do you expect to happen? Let's not even get started on China and India or the countless developing countries that simply cannot afford clean energy when their people are desperate for power. Europe has been the leader but with the fuel riots in France it seems that even there there is no appetite for lessening living standards to fight the problem.
Buy property in NZ and hope for the best because it is going to get very bad.
This is incredibly misleading. Even if we stopped all CO2 Emissions tomorrow the amount currently in the air would cause significant warming and acidification to the ocean. Without Carbon Sequestration on a massive scale we are in for serious problems worldwide.
In fact the link you yourself added lays this out quite clearly: "A report by United Nations' scientific panel on climate change released this month expects the atmosphere-on our current trajectory-to warm up by 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040. Even the effects of a 0.5 degrees increase will have far-reaching consequences. This research indicates that we are already past the tipping point; even if we significantly reduced emissions, climate change would continue (Source IPCC summary C3 section)."
""Phase 1" of climate change is reversible by reducing emissions, but we are no longer in "Phase 1." We're now in "Phase 2" and stopping climate change requires both emission reduction and removing CO2 from the atmosphere. "Phase 2" is occurring faster and hotter than we thought. If we don't act soon, we'll end up in "Phase 3" and be too late for both of these strategies to work."
Not sure they're the best example since they almost exclusively target disease whose treatment would be profitable. It's possible that many new drugs could be more easily developed for less profitable diseases but there is no incentive to do this.
The publish or perish system is obviously a major issue. But in fields like Physics all the low hanging fruit really is gone. To probe deeper into particle physics we need massively more powerful colliders that are economically or technologically unfeasible. Answering fundamental questions like is the Universe finite or is it curved would take experiments so large in scale that we are probably millennia away from being able to tackle them. There are only a handful of open questions left in physics and most of them are similarly intractable.
Yes clearly children should have the right to be born with Tay-Sachs disease, Harlequin ichthyosis and Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome. They should be forced to live a live of abject horror to conform with our primitive morals.