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"We should do whatever we can to preserve the coral reefs, but as usual, cataclysmic forecasts from scientists proved to be wrong yet again, and nature is a lot

"We should do whatever we can to preserve the coral reefs, but as usual, cataclysmic forecasts from scientists proved to be wrong yet again, and nature is a lot more resilient than expected." Yet again, someone falsely ascribes views to scientists that they never had. I keep track of this stuff, and I don't know what forecasts you are talking about. Actual forecasts (ipcc reports), if anything have been overly conservative. And they are grim. There is active research as to why they are overly conservative and reality is proceeding worse than the already grim forecasts.

cagenut 7y ago
this is how the reactionary mind works. the problem isn't the problem. the problem is how THOSE PEOPLE reacted to the problem such that now I, THE REASONABLE AND INFORMED ADULT MODERATE, must now devils-advocate (aka advocate) for the problem.
- dmix 7y ago
  People just love kicking down anything or anyone popular. But just because that is an automatic human reaction, as you mention from some "I'm smart and know better" than other people, for some emotional high, that also applies to the extremists who push it hard on both ends with the same "I know better" motivations. Often at a much higher and frequent degree. You could make a good argument that the moderates are often the lessers of evils and the most frequently right, just as long as we stay aware of their own weaknesses as motivation killers or overly compromising middle ground that can sometimes be the worse of the three generalized positions (sometimes doing nothing is better than something for the sake of appeasing the loudest voices, which one could argue is not true moderation). Regardless these meta discussions only have so much value and are always a massive distraction.
  - throwaway5752 7y ago
    At our core, we are socially uncomplicated. We exhibit swarm behavior and calibrate ourselves based on our nearest neighbors (or, in a more complicated way, how social media can be used to distort our views). This is how the Overton Window works, it's why there's a bias towards appearing as a moderate. It's a good heuristic, it's just wrong in the case of our climate situation.
    - dmix 7y ago
      There will always be plenty of grey area when it comes to what we can practically do in response to climate change, even if we all did reach a common sense type consensus on how bad it currently is. Especially when it comes down to local level policy for such a global issue. This will always be a hard fight.
- tdb7893 7y ago
  As I've gotten older I've realized that "moderates" who generally agree with you but advocate for less action (and often inaction) are generally the biggest stumbling block to getting things done. MLK's letter from Birmingham jail is still really true to me today (you can just search for "moderate" to find the part I'm talking about) https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
  - Loughla 7y ago
    I've found in my personal life (so maybe this doesn't hold true on the internet, but maybe it does when there is something at stake, like karma points) that moderates who advocate for lesser actions, but 'agree' with me are really just people who don't agree with me at all but don't want to take an action (disagreement) they perceive as possibly being damaging to a relationship. One Person's Source: All of the people who say 'I'm fiscally conservative but socially liberal' in my life have turned out to be veeerrrryyyy socially conservative.
    - kls 7y ago
      You ever though that maybe they have seen this bullshit before and realize it is not the end of the world, That we need to do something just like we did for Acid rain and the Ozone layer but that all of the bullshit predictions that where made where nothing but bullshit. They where real and valid issues, we dealt with them and we did so in measured and moderate courses. But the radicals had us all dead multiple times over while we dealt with them with moderate action.
      - cagenut 7y ago
        If you think the greenhouse gas problem is comparable to the acid rain or ozone problems then you fundamentally do not understand the science, and you as an engineer fundamentally do not understand what "orders of magnitude" are. It is only from a position of wholesale ignorance of the scientific reality that you can make such a facile equation. To put it in a simple analogy, you just said "those alarmists told me it was going to rain last week and it didn't, therefore this hurricane warning is bullshit i'm not evacuating".
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
  - cagenut 7y ago
    OK
repolfx 7y ago
No, quite a lot of scientists have made such claims about coral reefs over time. Not all and some have refuted those claims too, so the media is certainly to blame for presenting a false consensus. But for example: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/03/expert-scientists-exaggerated-coral-bleaching-story/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/03/expert-scientists-exa... (original is paywalled) Activist scientists and lobby groups have distorted surveys, maps and data to misrepresent the extent and impact of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, according to the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Russell Reichelt. A former head of Greenpeace Canada famously turned on his old employers and started arguing that coral bleaching predictions related to climate change (ocean acidification, back then) were wrong: https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20Ocean%20Acidification%20Alarmism.pdf https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20O... Many papers on ocean acidification, said to be caused by rising man-made CO2 levels in the atmosphere, predict that it will result in the mass extinction of marine species that employ calcification, including corals, shellfish and many species of plankton, and that this, in turn, will result in the extinction of many other marine species. It cites some examples: Even scientists one might expect would be more moderate in their tone employ alarmist language. An example from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution: The anthropogenic rise in atmospheric CO2 is driving fundamental and unprecedented changes in the chemistry of the oceans. … We argue that ocean conditions are already more extreme than those experienced by marine organisms and ecosystems for millions of years, emphasising the urgent need to adopt policies that drastically reduce CO2 emissions So it's not really the case that scientists are pure-white victims of the press, here. Many scientists have made terrifying predictions about the health of the oceans and been happy to milk the resulting press coverage.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  I don't know what to tell you. Wattsupwiththat is not a scientific website, it's a political website. It is a source of misinformation You can just with your own two eyes at bleaching events in the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Pacific, and Caribbean if you don't want to believe the scientific community. You're cherry-picking counterexamples to make your case, which is not valid. Reality is bad. You are misreading the data. You are also conflating acidification with temperature change. Coral is going to die because of the heat well before aragonite and calcite dependent populations collapse because of pH changes.

cagenut 7y ago

this is how the reactionary mind works. the problem isn't the problem. the problem is how THOSE PEOPLE reacted to the problem such that now I, THE REASONABLE AND INFORMED ADULT MODERATE, must now devils-advocate (aka advocate) for the problem.

dmix 7y ago
People just love kicking down anything or anyone popular. But just because that is an automatic human reaction, as you mention from some "I'm smart and know better" than other people, for some emotional high, that also applies to the extremists who push it hard on both ends with the same "I know better" motivations. Often at a much higher and frequent degree. You could make a good argument that the moderates are often the lessers of evils and the most frequently right, just as long as we stay aware of their own weaknesses as motivation killers or overly compromising middle ground that can sometimes be the worse of the three generalized positions (sometimes doing nothing is better than something for the sake of appeasing the loudest voices, which one could argue is not true moderation). Regardless these meta discussions only have so much value and are always a massive distraction.
- throwaway5752 7y ago
  At our core, we are socially uncomplicated. We exhibit swarm behavior and calibrate ourselves based on our nearest neighbors (or, in a more complicated way, how social media can be used to distort our views). This is how the Overton Window works, it's why there's a bias towards appearing as a moderate. It's a good heuristic, it's just wrong in the case of our climate situation.
  - dmix 7y ago
    There will always be plenty of grey area when it comes to what we can practically do in response to climate change, even if we all did reach a common sense type consensus on how bad it currently is. Especially when it comes down to local level policy for such a global issue. This will always be a hard fight.
tdb7893 7y ago
As I've gotten older I've realized that "moderates" who generally agree with you but advocate for less action (and often inaction) are generally the biggest stumbling block to getting things done. MLK's letter from Birmingham jail is still really true to me today (you can just search for "moderate" to find the part I'm talking about) https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham....
- Loughla 7y ago
  I've found in my personal life (so maybe this doesn't hold true on the internet, but maybe it does when there is something at stake, like karma points) that moderates who advocate for lesser actions, but 'agree' with me are really just people who don't agree with me at all but don't want to take an action (disagreement) they perceive as possibly being damaging to a relationship. One Person's Source: All of the people who say 'I'm fiscally conservative but socially liberal' in my life have turned out to be veeerrrryyyy socially conservative.
  - kls 7y ago
    You ever though that maybe they have seen this bullshit before and realize it is not the end of the world, That we need to do something just like we did for Acid rain and the Ozone layer but that all of the bullshit predictions that where made where nothing but bullshit. They where real and valid issues, we dealt with them and we did so in measured and moderate courses. But the radicals had us all dead multiple times over while we dealt with them with moderate action.
    - cagenut 7y ago
      If you think the greenhouse gas problem is comparable to the acid rain or ozone problems then you fundamentally do not understand the science, and you as an engineer fundamentally do not understand what "orders of magnitude" are. It is only from a position of wholesale ignorance of the scientific reality that you can make such a facile equation. To put it in a simple analogy, you just said "those alarmists told me it was going to rain last week and it didn't, therefore this hurricane warning is bullshit i'm not evacuating".
dang 7y ago
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- cagenut 7y ago
  OK

repolfx 7y ago

No, quite a lot of scientists have made such claims about coral reefs over time. Not all and some have refuted those claims too, so the media is certainly to blame for presenting a false consensus. But for example: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/03/expert-scientists-exaggerated-coral-bleaching-story/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/03/expert-scientists-exa... (original is paywalled) Activist scientists and lobby groups have distorted surveys, maps and data to misrepresent the extent and impact of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, according to the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Russell Reichelt. A former head of Greenpeace Canada famously turned on his old employers and started arguing that coral bleaching predictions related to climate change (ocean acidification, back then) were wrong: https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20Ocean%20Acidification%20Alarmism.pdf https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20O... Many papers on ocean acidification, said to be caused by rising man-made CO2 levels in the atmosphere, predict that it will result in the mass extinction of marine species that employ calcification, including corals, shellfish and many species of plankton, and that this, in turn, will result in the extinction of many other marine species. It cites some examples: Even scientists one might expect would be more moderate in their tone employ alarmist language. An example from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution: The anthropogenic rise in atmospheric CO2 is driving fundamental and unprecedented changes in the chemistry of the oceans. … We argue that ocean conditions are already more extreme than those experienced by marine organisms and ecosystems for millions of years, emphasising the urgent need to adopt policies that drastically reduce CO2 emissions So it's not really the case that scientists are pure-white victims of the press, here. Many scientists have made terrifying predictions about the health of the oceans and been happy to milk the resulting press coverage.

throwaway5752 7y ago
I don't know what to tell you. Wattsupwiththat is not a scientific website, it's a political website. It is a source of misinformation You can just with your own two eyes at bleaching events in the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Pacific, and Caribbean if you don't want to believe the scientific community. You're cherry-picking counterexamples to make your case, which is not valid. Reality is bad. You are misreading the data. You are also conflating acidification with temperature change. Coral is going to die because of the heat well before aragonite and calcite dependent populations collapse because of pH changes.