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Among the conservatives/libertarians/etc in my life, who I broadly consider among the smartest people I know, there is a broad unwillingness to have a real disc

Among the conservatives/libertarians/etc in my life, who I broadly consider among the smartest people I know, there is a broad unwillingness to have a real discussion for fear of being shamed. The climate debate has become more about moral posturing and smearing people who disagree as "deniers", which has made it impossible to convince anyone who's not already convinced. It has also deprived climate activists of substantive critiques that could help them move past their own biases (which are substantial).

llamataboot 9y ago
Reasonable people can disagree about what our course of action should be and what sort of incentives we should use to bring it about. Reasonable people cannot disagree about the science, which is overwhelmingly on the side of possibly catastrophic climate change that has been brought about by human activities. They are /right/ to be shunned as science deniers, just as we "smear" anti-vaxxers, etc.
- xupybd 9y ago
  I'd like to point out that yes there is evidence of the possibly of catastrophic climate change. But we do not know enough to have any certainty on probability of catastrophe, we also don't know enough to be sure we could properly mitigate the current changes. Or that any mitigation will have a net positive effect on life on earth. There are very dogmatic people involved in this argument that want to put in place very expensive measures to avoid a catastrophe but we have to be careful. We could drive our global economy into the ground if we go to far. The cost to the environment would be far worse. Industry gets very dirty when people go into survival mode. Clean technologies could alter the balance, but they're only going to get developed if we have the money to invest in them.
  - stuaxo 9y ago
    That sounds like something that could be tackled further down the line. I see people against any changes. Even if global warming wasn't a thing reducing pollution is worth investing in for all sorts of reasons.
- xupybd 9y ago
  Also I don't know if shunning people is the best approach, especially if you're talking about things like anti-vaxxers or climate change. There really needs to be intelligent discussion and education on these issues, they only really get solved if people agree. Shunning someone can only bully them into submission it doesn't change minds. Shunning only adds to the tribalism that's dividing the left and the right, it really doesn't help.
- dinoleif 9y ago
  The problem, as your comment beautifully illustrates, is the scope of what is considered a "scientific" question. You left that ambiguous, and in that ambiguity lies the problem. For example, the greenhouse effect is a piece of well-established science. Climate change is even less scientific. To what extent humans contribute to the problem is even less scientific. Analyzing the costs/benefits of climate change is an even less scientific question. And what sorts of policy prescriptions might be effective is the least scientific question of all. Climate activists fail to acknowledge any of that nuance, instead lumping all of those things together and labeling anyone who has a nuanced opinion on one of those points as a "denier". It's total intellectual corruption.
  - klipt 9y ago
    It's a question of risk mitigation. Would you say that a 5% risk of humans going extinct it worth it, for an oil company to collect an extra $50 billion in profits? I would say no. An oil CEO might say yes. Who should have a bigger say in public policy, the civilians facing the 5% possibility of human extinction and no extra paycheck, or the oil CEO weighing their paycheck against possible human extinction? The current head of the EPA clearly thinks oil industry profits are more important. Trump clearly thinks oil industry profits are more important.
    - civilian 9y ago
      It's _not_ just about an oil CEO. It's about everyone who uses energy. Gas tends to be a high percentage of poor people's cost-of-living, and cheap oil tends to act as a progressive reverse-tax. In cold climates, heating one's house is also closely linked to energy prices. When you hamper the economy, everyone loses a little. It weakens wealth creation slightly. We're at a moment in history where we're pulling people out of poverty, through economic growth. So any actions that limit economic growth need to be judged with a high bar. https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-billion-people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bil... I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it, and if it is actually a 5% catastrophic risk then I think it would be prudent to take action at the cost of leaving millions of people in extreme poverty. But there is a trade-off, and it needs to be examined.
- Veelox 9y ago
  I think you have provided a great example of why people don't feel comfortable expressing doubts about climate. A thought exercise to hopefully make it easier to empathize with these people. Imagine you are transported back several hundred years into a Catholic ruled country. You don't believe in God but you don't discuss that with strangers because you often hear people say things like "Reasonable people cannot disagree about Scripture, which is overwhelmingly on the side of eternal damnation on those who don't believe." Imagine you hear this stuff in the market, at your job, and from the street corners. No amount of hearing this is going to convince you to believe in God. If anything this reinforces the feelings you have that religious people are hateful and ignorant.
  - SauciestGNU 9y ago
    This is a bad metaphor. Religious belief is predicated on faith in the absence of evidence. Climate change science is based on acceptance of the best available body of evidence.
    - shawndumas 9y ago
      http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N35/col35guest.35c.html http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N35/col35guest.35c.html
      - SauciestGNU 9y ago
        This is an interesting essay, but I do not think it contradicts what I said above. I am being careful to avoid ascribing a moral value to faith-based belief. I understand that reasoned knowledge is inductive, which is why I claimed it is based upon "the best available body of evidence". When a belief is shown to be false we must reject it and reevaluate what we believe to be true. That is why one of the most exciting events in the scientific realm is proving a belief to be false, as that means we have fundamentally altered the corpus of human knowledge.
    - yters 9y ago
      Not during medieval times. Scripture and philosophy were the standard for best evidence at the time.
- tim333 9y ago
  >Reasonable people cannot disagree about the science Reasonable people do disagree about scientific theory quite a bit. There are some parts of climate science that are pretty settled, for instance the earth has warmed and human activity has played a big part in the recent warming. There are other parts that are not such as to what extent positive or negative feedbacks will kick in beyond the basic CO2 forcing. I'm not sure how helpful it is shunning people as deniers.
anigbrowl 9y ago
a broad unwillingness to have a real discussion for fear of being shamed Oh for heaven's sake. There are a lot of websites, books, and spokespeople who are claiming to 'debunk' climate science, and this debate has been going on for decades now. Are you seriously arguing that your friends have the right answer but they're sitting on it because they're worried some leftie know-nothings will say mean things to them?
incompatible 9y ago
I suppose denying that CO2 is increasing, or claiming that it doesn't cause climate warming or isn't a problem, is a lot easier than trying to find a solution consistent with conservative or libertarian principles.
mturmon 9y ago
"...broad unwillingness to have a real discussion for fear of being shamed..." That's not exactly what I've observed. I've observed people driven to be contrarian, who use an assortment of tactics: - cherry-picking evidence for one side (this one study shows ice melting may be smaller than expected in one place, thus, I dismiss the entire AR5 report without ever even reading the executive summary); - providing contorted arguments they would never accept in a context involving, say, their own home ("the effect is small by historic standards"; "warming will have benefits that have been overlooked"); - dismissing the expertise of others in favor of their own undergrad-level science judgements ("we can't even predict the weather past 14 days, how can we predict climate") -- again, with a degree of skepticism they would never exhibit in relation to, say, their architect ("you need more shear strength there"), gardener ("it's a root fungus"), or car mechanic ("it's your oil pump"), or even Stack Exchange ("change permissions on the file and reboot"). Broadly, HN avoids the worst of the above problems - for which I'm thankful. But you will still see them here in any climate-related discussion thread. I possess some of the same contrarian tendencies, and seeing how easily skepticism turns into ignorant defense of the status quo has been a useful corrective for me.
- jamez1 9y ago
  It depends what your null hypothesis is. Your contrarian friends only need one piece of evidence to disprove the climate catastrophe narrative. Whilst you've taken the worst case as your default assumption, which is why their train of thought seems off. You sound like you need a large body of evidence to disprove climate catastrophe.
  - mturmon 9y ago
    About large bodies of evidence that I find convincing, please see the AR5 synthesis report (http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/ http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/). I'm not aware of a similarly convincing counterpart on the side that says nothing new is happening.

llamataboot 9y ago

Reasonable people can disagree about what our course of action should be and what sort of incentives we should use to bring it about. Reasonable people cannot disagree about the science, which is overwhelmingly on the side of possibly catastrophic climate change that has been brought about by human activities. They are /right/ to be shunned as science deniers, just as we "smear" anti-vaxxers, etc.

xupybd 9y ago
I'd like to point out that yes there is evidence of the possibly of catastrophic climate change. But we do not know enough to have any certainty on probability of catastrophe, we also don't know enough to be sure we could properly mitigate the current changes. Or that any mitigation will have a net positive effect on life on earth. There are very dogmatic people involved in this argument that want to put in place very expensive measures to avoid a catastrophe but we have to be careful. We could drive our global economy into the ground if we go to far. The cost to the environment would be far worse. Industry gets very dirty when people go into survival mode. Clean technologies could alter the balance, but they're only going to get developed if we have the money to invest in them.
- stuaxo 9y ago
  That sounds like something that could be tackled further down the line. I see people against any changes. Even if global warming wasn't a thing reducing pollution is worth investing in for all sorts of reasons.
xupybd 9y ago
Also I don't know if shunning people is the best approach, especially if you're talking about things like anti-vaxxers or climate change. There really needs to be intelligent discussion and education on these issues, they only really get solved if people agree. Shunning someone can only bully them into submission it doesn't change minds. Shunning only adds to the tribalism that's dividing the left and the right, it really doesn't help.
dinoleif 9y ago
The problem, as your comment beautifully illustrates, is the scope of what is considered a "scientific" question. You left that ambiguous, and in that ambiguity lies the problem. For example, the greenhouse effect is a piece of well-established science. Climate change is even less scientific. To what extent humans contribute to the problem is even less scientific. Analyzing the costs/benefits of climate change is an even less scientific question. And what sorts of policy prescriptions might be effective is the least scientific question of all. Climate activists fail to acknowledge any of that nuance, instead lumping all of those things together and labeling anyone who has a nuanced opinion on one of those points as a "denier". It's total intellectual corruption.
- klipt 9y ago
  It's a question of risk mitigation. Would you say that a 5% risk of humans going extinct it worth it, for an oil company to collect an extra $50 billion in profits? I would say no. An oil CEO might say yes. Who should have a bigger say in public policy, the civilians facing the 5% possibility of human extinction and no extra paycheck, or the oil CEO weighing their paycheck against possible human extinction? The current head of the EPA clearly thinks oil industry profits are more important. Trump clearly thinks oil industry profits are more important.
  - civilian 9y ago
    It's _not_ just about an oil CEO. It's about everyone who uses energy. Gas tends to be a high percentage of poor people's cost-of-living, and cheap oil tends to act as a progressive reverse-tax. In cold climates, heating one's house is also closely linked to energy prices. When you hamper the economy, everyone loses a little. It weakens wealth creation slightly. We're at a moment in history where we're pulling people out of poverty, through economic growth. So any actions that limit economic growth need to be judged with a high bar. https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-billion-people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bil... I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it, and if it is actually a 5% catastrophic risk then I think it would be prudent to take action at the cost of leaving millions of people in extreme poverty. But there is a trade-off, and it needs to be examined.
Veelox 9y ago
I think you have provided a great example of why people don't feel comfortable expressing doubts about climate. A thought exercise to hopefully make it easier to empathize with these people. Imagine you are transported back several hundred years into a Catholic ruled country. You don't believe in God but you don't discuss that with strangers because you often hear people say things like "Reasonable people cannot disagree about Scripture, which is overwhelmingly on the side of eternal damnation on those who don't believe." Imagine you hear this stuff in the market, at your job, and from the street corners. No amount of hearing this is going to convince you to believe in God. If anything this reinforces the feelings you have that religious people are hateful and ignorant.
- SauciestGNU 9y ago
  This is a bad metaphor. Religious belief is predicated on faith in the absence of evidence. Climate change science is based on acceptance of the best available body of evidence.
  - shawndumas 9y ago
    http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N35/col35guest.35c.html http://tech.mit.edu/V121/N35/col35guest.35c.html
    - SauciestGNU 9y ago
      This is an interesting essay, but I do not think it contradicts what I said above. I am being careful to avoid ascribing a moral value to faith-based belief. I understand that reasoned knowledge is inductive, which is why I claimed it is based upon "the best available body of evidence". When a belief is shown to be false we must reject it and reevaluate what we believe to be true. That is why one of the most exciting events in the scientific realm is proving a belief to be false, as that means we have fundamentally altered the corpus of human knowledge.
  - yters 9y ago
    Not during medieval times. Scripture and philosophy were the standard for best evidence at the time.
tim333 9y ago
>Reasonable people cannot disagree about the science Reasonable people do disagree about scientific theory quite a bit. There are some parts of climate science that are pretty settled, for instance the earth has warmed and human activity has played a big part in the recent warming. There are other parts that are not such as to what extent positive or negative feedbacks will kick in beyond the basic CO2 forcing. I'm not sure how helpful it is shunning people as deniers.

anigbrowl 9y ago

a broad unwillingness to have a real discussion for fear of being shamed Oh for heaven's sake. There are a lot of websites, books, and spokespeople who are claiming to 'debunk' climate science, and this debate has been going on for decades now. Are you seriously arguing that your friends have the right answer but they're sitting on it because they're worried some leftie know-nothings will say mean things to them?

incompatible 9y ago

I suppose denying that CO2 is increasing, or claiming that it doesn't cause climate warming or isn't a problem, is a lot easier than trying to find a solution consistent with conservative or libertarian principles.

mturmon 9y ago

"...broad unwillingness to have a real discussion for fear of being shamed..." That's not exactly what I've observed. I've observed people driven to be contrarian, who use an assortment of tactics: - cherry-picking evidence for one side (this one study shows ice melting may be smaller than expected in one place, thus, I dismiss the entire AR5 report without ever even reading the executive summary); - providing contorted arguments they would never accept in a context involving, say, their own home ("the effect is small by historic standards"; "warming will have benefits that have been overlooked"); - dismissing the expertise of others in favor of their own undergrad-level science judgements ("we can't even predict the weather past 14 days, how can we predict climate") -- again, with a degree of skepticism they would never exhibit in relation to, say, their architect ("you need more shear strength there"), gardener ("it's a root fungus"), or car mechanic ("it's your oil pump"), or even Stack Exchange ("change permissions on the file and reboot"). Broadly, HN avoids the worst of the above problems - for which I'm thankful. But you will still see them here in any climate-related discussion thread. I possess some of the same contrarian tendencies, and seeing how easily skepticism turns into ignorant defense of the status quo has been a useful corrective for me.

jamez1 9y ago
It depends what your null hypothesis is. Your contrarian friends only need one piece of evidence to disprove the climate catastrophe narrative. Whilst you've taken the worst case as your default assumption, which is why their train of thought seems off. You sound like you need a large body of evidence to disprove climate catastrophe.
- mturmon 9y ago
  About large bodies of evidence that I find convincing, please see the AR5 synthesis report (http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/ http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/). I'm not aware of a similarly convincing counterpart on the side that says nothing new is happening.