3 ms·
A part of the problem, and perhaps a significant part, is that climate science has done a terrible job of selling itself to the public. The history of climate s
by AmericanChopper 8y ago
A part of the problem, and perhaps a significant part, is that climate science has done a terrible job of selling itself to the public. The history of climate science is 30 years of marketing catastrophe and doomsday predictions, backed by near unanimous support from the scientific community. Sadly, it’s also 30 years of bunk predictions, and scientists appealing to a sense of impending doom, justified by the idea that overselling the evidence is worthwhile due to the importance of the cause. The consequence is that it doesn’t matter to many people whether they’re right or not, because the communication around this science has done such a remarkable job of undermining its own credibility.
- vixen99 8y agoDon't even bother with stuff like this on HN. A majority of folk are utterly impervious to or unaware of the actuality of those '30 years of bunk predictions'. And those that are not, don't bother commenting because they know what happens.
- AmericanChopper 8y agoIronically, this kind of smug attitude just adds to the problem.
- akvadrako 8y agoI admit it's hard to counteract the majority of alarmists, but I don't think it hurts to have a few well-reasoned dissenting comments on every story. The point is to show a few readers that there isn't consensus on the issue and give them a reason to research it themselves. Until I reached a threshold of doubt to do that it just seemed like a safe bet to believe the rhetoric.
- mirimir 8y agoIf you actually look at the history of predictions about climate change, you'll find that they've been remarkably conservative. But whatever, let's just see what happens.
- AmericanChopper 8y agoClimate science has a well established history of falsified predictions and fabricated doomsdaying. https://m.huffingtonpost.ca/jasmin-guenette/al-gores-inconvenient-sequel_b_16669842.html https://m.huffingtonpost.ca/jasmin-guenette/al-gores-inconve... https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/02/15/97-an-inconvenient-truth-about-the-oft-cited-polling-of-climate-scientists/#6a9cb3de205a https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2017/02/15/97-an-inconven... https://www.wsj.com/articles/thirty-years-on-how-well-do-global-warming-predictions-stand-up-1529623442 https://www.wsj.com/articles/thirty-years-on-how-well-do-glo... The average person can see that climate alarmism is complete fud, they can probably also see that climate denialists also pedal fud, but it doesn’t matter because climate activists have already done the job of undermining the science for them. If you want more people to take climate change seriously, this is the problem that needs to be addressed. Spending your energy naval gazing wondering “why don’t people have the same views on climate change that I do? It must be because they are not smart enough to understand it on the same level I do...” really just makes it worse. Nobody’s ever been so good at condescension that they managed to change somebody mind.
- mirimir 8y agoSeriously, I do hope that you're right. But I doubt it.
- AmericanChopper 8y agoI actually haven’t made a single comment about the validity of climate change in this thread. I have exclusively talked about the chronic issues with climate science communication and it’s propensity to publicly promote outrageous predictions. The underlying science doesn’t even enter the picture for many people. Because if you spend 30 years saying the world is about to end, then people don’t need to know a single thing about the science, because they know for a fact that the world didn’t end.
- mirimir 8y agoMaybe science journalism has been iffy, and maybe some advocates have aimed to shock. But the fact remains that scientists have been talking for decades about what it's going to be like in 2050 or 2100 or whatever. And those projections haven't changed much. It's just that 2050 is no longer so far in the future.