5 ms·

I think we need to stop saying “As someone who believes in Global Warming”. It is as ridiculous as saying “As someone who believes in theory of gravitation”. I

I think we need to stop saying “As someone who believes in Global Warming”. It is as ridiculous as saying “As someone who believes in theory of gravitation”. It somehow perpetuates an awareness that Global Warming is optional to believe in. The belief part is off the table. Same thing with debates about whether earth is flat or earth is 6000 years old. The fact that these debates take place gives undue credibility to the non-scientific opposition and elevates to the same stage as the scientific views.

ebg13 8y ago
> It somehow perpetuates an awareness that Global Warming is optional to believe in. The belief part is off the table. This is a pretty odd take. Believing anything is optional. You may believe that the evidence is incontrovertible, but even that is an optional belief. The person you're responding to is just signaling that the questions are not based on climate change skepticism. In 100 years that signal may no longer be valuable, but today it probably is.
- spectramax 8y ago
  That’s my point. Believing in anything is optional - except for hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally to a “believable” level relative to the other side which is presenting anecdotal evidence. Everything can be wrong. Even theory of gravitation. That’s besides the point.
  - ebg13 8y ago
    > Believing in anything is optional - except... Except nothing. > hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally Science isn't in the business of proving things. Science develops explanatory models that account for known evidence. Saying that science proves anything is super wrong and leads to all kinds of problems.
    - spectramax 8y ago
      Fair, you are absolutely correct. Science is in building models about how nature works. Mathematics is in the business of proving, I guess. I think we are engaging in unproductive pedantry while going away from my original point. I want to emphasize my point again - we have 2 arguments. Argument A and argument B. A is presenting scientific evidence, in your corrected terms - presenting a model of climate change. Argument B is anecdotal evidence. The fact that they are both argued on the same stage gives the audience (who may not know anything about A or B) a false assurance that both A and B are arguable and therefore, they are on the stage. It is fine for casual conversations, I am speaking about large debates that we still fucking have about whether Earth is flat. It is equivalent of "Trolling" and should not be entertained.
      - samiru 8y ago
        Many times the consensus has provided scientific evidence (e.g. geocentric model) and has still been wrong. For some reason, I feel that something similar is going on with the climate debate. Mix money, politics and some aspects of religion and one just might arrive to the place where we are in today.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- Buldak 8y ago
  I've seen this trope around for a while now, that is, people who insist that it's somehow incorrect to say, "I don't believe in global warming" or "I don't believe in evolution." I used to find this bizarre, as it seems straightforward for a climate denier or creationist to say such things. I think what people who get rankled by this have in mind is a certain, pluralistic connotation of "believe." Often when someone says, "I believe in Christianity," it's implied that atheists or people of other faiths are not unreasonable to believe differently. (Something similar could be said about political or ethical beliefs. It's difficult to spell out the sense in which you can view someone who disagrees with you as reasonable, but I think you know what I mean.) So people who think "belief" is not applicable to global warming or evolution are trying to deny that we should be pluralistic about these matters. I still think this is a somewhat obtuse equivocation on the word "belief," but I think I understand the intuition beneath it.
bb2018 8y ago
I was simply stating I have trouble with this issue because of the media aspect not the general scientific consensus. The article makes no mention of how local people, businesses, etc. are affected by the temperature change. The intended article takeaway is clearly about climate change and how this fits into the current state of climate change. Yet, the chance that one specific area is +/- a certain average over a flexible and short amount of time has nothing to do global warming. It paints an inaccurate picture for those who don't read academic papers on their own. It reminds me of articles that talk about how a stock is down 5% when it is up 100% in a few years and make it sound like the company is imploding. By not framing it with a general sense of regular variation the article itself is confusing.
mikeash 8y ago
The problem is not the people who feel a need to clarify that they believe the science. The problem is the large number of people who don’t believe the science. Focus your ire at them.
RandomInteger4 8y ago
Nobody doubts gravity, so it doesn't make sense to declare belief or disbelief in gravity to put one's self on a certain side of the gravity issue, because there is no gravity issue. People double global warming, so it makes sense to declare belief or disbelief in global warming to put one's self on a certain side of the global warming issue, since it's actually an issue of contention. It doubly makes sense if you want to alleviate the knee-jerk responses that will dismiss what you're about to say since people seem to respond emotionally rather than logically to such a contentious issue. Prefacing the side you're on in this case is like going up to a guard dog at your friend's house and saying "It's ok buddy, I'm on your side. Don't worry." in a soft non-threatening voice.
chrisco255 8y ago
Placing global warming on the same tier as gravity is a stretch. One theory has hundreds of years of math and scientific experiment and exploration behind it. And the other is a 2-3 decade old hypothesis built on weak modeling that's not very predictive, I might add. The climate is a complex system and we don't have a model of it that works as well as the Gravitational constant. If you're gonna downvote, would love to see you point to a specific climate model, and the math behind it...that has the predictive capabilities that the Gravitational constant does about how the universe works.
- 11235813213455 8y ago
  Global warming is not a great name, it could be called something like: (human-induced environmental and) climate changes, ... This planet is a complex balance, and once you remove more than 50% of the forests, suck up significantly hydrocarbures reserves, destroy more than 80% of the insect population, of the soil life, reject huge quantities of pollutants in the air, water and soil at planet scale, it's a matter of logic to understand the climate is affected I don't know exactly when we went past the balance point. But we could probably be 10 billions humans without a negative impact on the planet. The problem comes from the way most first-world and emergent countries people live, the lack of a sustainable system
  - oceanplexian 8y ago
    We can't even predict, or agree how to predict which direction a hurricane will travel outside the span of a week or two. Weather predictions, like climate change predictions, are based on models- models which are based on different theories of how air masses, temperatures, and pressure interact to affect the atmosphere. It's not unreasonable in the least to say, "Perhaps the climate is changing, but I am highly skeptical of the models that specifically implicate AGW in certain weather patterns, or insinuate that certain weather patterns are the direct result of climate change" In fact I think it's much more plausible that a few decades of "dry weather" would be categorized as weather phenomena and not climate phenomena, since such decades-long changes in weather patterns are frequently a part of the historical record.
woodandsteel 8y ago
I think he said it because he wanted to make clear he is not a member of the group of irrational people who disbelieve in global warming. That is so his comment would not be taken as an attack on the idea.

ebg13 8y ago

> It somehow perpetuates an awareness that Global Warming is optional to believe in. The belief part is off the table. This is a pretty odd take. Believing anything is optional. You may believe that the evidence is incontrovertible, but even that is an optional belief. The person you're responding to is just signaling that the questions are not based on climate change skepticism. In 100 years that signal may no longer be valuable, but today it probably is.

spectramax 8y ago
That’s my point. Believing in anything is optional - except for hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally to a “believable” level relative to the other side which is presenting anecdotal evidence. Everything can be wrong. Even theory of gravitation. That’s besides the point.
- ebg13 8y ago
  > Believing in anything is optional - except... Except nothing. > hard scientific facts that have been proven experimentally Science isn't in the business of proving things. Science develops explanatory models that account for known evidence. Saying that science proves anything is super wrong and leads to all kinds of problems.
  - spectramax 8y ago
    Fair, you are absolutely correct. Science is in building models about how nature works. Mathematics is in the business of proving, I guess. I think we are engaging in unproductive pedantry while going away from my original point. I want to emphasize my point again - we have 2 arguments. Argument A and argument B. A is presenting scientific evidence, in your corrected terms - presenting a model of climate change. Argument B is anecdotal evidence. The fact that they are both argued on the same stage gives the audience (who may not know anything about A or B) a false assurance that both A and B are arguable and therefore, they are on the stage. It is fine for casual conversations, I am speaking about large debates that we still fucking have about whether Earth is flat. It is equivalent of "Trolling" and should not be entertained.
    - samiru 8y ago
      Many times the consensus has provided scientific evidence (e.g. geocentric model) and has still been wrong. For some reason, I feel that something similar is going on with the climate debate. Mix money, politics and some aspects of religion and one just might arrive to the place where we are in today.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
Buldak 8y ago
I've seen this trope around for a while now, that is, people who insist that it's somehow incorrect to say, "I don't believe in global warming" or "I don't believe in evolution." I used to find this bizarre, as it seems straightforward for a climate denier or creationist to say such things. I think what people who get rankled by this have in mind is a certain, pluralistic connotation of "believe." Often when someone says, "I believe in Christianity," it's implied that atheists or people of other faiths are not unreasonable to believe differently. (Something similar could be said about political or ethical beliefs. It's difficult to spell out the sense in which you can view someone who disagrees with you as reasonable, but I think you know what I mean.) So people who think "belief" is not applicable to global warming or evolution are trying to deny that we should be pluralistic about these matters. I still think this is a somewhat obtuse equivocation on the word "belief," but I think I understand the intuition beneath it.

bb2018 8y ago

I was simply stating I have trouble with this issue because of the media aspect not the general scientific consensus. The article makes no mention of how local people, businesses, etc. are affected by the temperature change. The intended article takeaway is clearly about climate change and how this fits into the current state of climate change. Yet, the chance that one specific area is +/- a certain average over a flexible and short amount of time has nothing to do global warming. It paints an inaccurate picture for those who don't read academic papers on their own. It reminds me of articles that talk about how a stock is down 5% when it is up 100% in a few years and make it sound like the company is imploding. By not framing it with a general sense of regular variation the article itself is confusing.

mikeash 8y ago

The problem is not the people who feel a need to clarify that they believe the science. The problem is the large number of people who don’t believe the science. Focus your ire at them.

RandomInteger4 8y ago

Nobody doubts gravity, so it doesn't make sense to declare belief or disbelief in gravity to put one's self on a certain side of the gravity issue, because there is no gravity issue. People double global warming, so it makes sense to declare belief or disbelief in global warming to put one's self on a certain side of the global warming issue, since it's actually an issue of contention. It doubly makes sense if you want to alleviate the knee-jerk responses that will dismiss what you're about to say since people seem to respond emotionally rather than logically to such a contentious issue. Prefacing the side you're on in this case is like going up to a guard dog at your friend's house and saying "It's ok buddy, I'm on your side. Don't worry." in a soft non-threatening voice.

chrisco255 8y ago

Placing global warming on the same tier as gravity is a stretch. One theory has hundreds of years of math and scientific experiment and exploration behind it. And the other is a 2-3 decade old hypothesis built on weak modeling that's not very predictive, I might add. The climate is a complex system and we don't have a model of it that works as well as the Gravitational constant. If you're gonna downvote, would love to see you point to a specific climate model, and the math behind it...that has the predictive capabilities that the Gravitational constant does about how the universe works.

11235813213455 8y ago
Global warming is not a great name, it could be called something like: (human-induced environmental and) climate changes, ... This planet is a complex balance, and once you remove more than 50% of the forests, suck up significantly hydrocarbures reserves, destroy more than 80% of the insect population, of the soil life, reject huge quantities of pollutants in the air, water and soil at planet scale, it's a matter of logic to understand the climate is affected I don't know exactly when we went past the balance point. But we could probably be 10 billions humans without a negative impact on the planet. The problem comes from the way most first-world and emergent countries people live, the lack of a sustainable system
- oceanplexian 8y ago
  We can't even predict, or agree how to predict which direction a hurricane will travel outside the span of a week or two. Weather predictions, like climate change predictions, are based on models- models which are based on different theories of how air masses, temperatures, and pressure interact to affect the atmosphere. It's not unreasonable in the least to say, "Perhaps the climate is changing, but I am highly skeptical of the models that specifically implicate AGW in certain weather patterns, or insinuate that certain weather patterns are the direct result of climate change" In fact I think it's much more plausible that a few decades of "dry weather" would be categorized as weather phenomena and not climate phenomena, since such decades-long changes in weather patterns are frequently a part of the historical record.

woodandsteel 8y ago

I think he said it because he wanted to make clear he is not a member of the group of irrational people who disbelieve in global warming. That is so his comment would not be taken as an attack on the idea.