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Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the literature

137 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

kondylotha 5y ago
New bumper sticker: "We Vote Our Science..." in small print "Using the Voters We Choose!"
j0ba 5y ago
Consensus is the currency of politics, not science. Before Einstein there was > 99% consensus that Newtonian gravity was ultimate description of gravitational force.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  The scientific method does not deal in 'ultimate descriptions', it only deals in 'to the best of our knowledge' and the whole point of the scientific method is to be able to replace today's best version of the explanation with a better one tomorrow.
- dumbfoundded 5y ago
  Not really. Consensus is used all the time when a definitive answer isn't possible or attained. Most people assume the Riemann hypothesis is true and then build from there. Sometimes a definitive answer isn't possible yet.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Except that the consensus on the science has been growing, in defiance of the consensus of politics and the public, which has been slow to get on board. Your analogy doesn't work.
  - Leparamour 5y ago
    >Except that the consensus on the science has been growing, in defiance of the consensus of politics and the public, which has been slow to get on board. The consensus on man-made climate change has grown following the rise of aggressive identity politics and "social justice warrior" cancel culture on social media.
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      Alternatively, aggressive identity politics and "social justice warrior" cancel culture regarding climate change has grown following the rising scientific consensus that we have a disastrous future ahead of us. Looking at another political/scientific issue, abortion, that is also steeped in aggressive identity politics and "social justice warrior" cancel culture which instead of growing in consensus that it is bad seems to be declining, I would argue that politics and social power follow rational thinking, not the other way around. At least on long enough time scales.
- WalterGR 5y ago
  “Consensus” in this context does not mean that all the authors of those 3,000 papers got together in a room, debated it out, and released a statement. Re. Newtonian physics, the scientific method demonstrated otherwise. That’s how it works. Your point simply means that anthropogenic climate change may be incorrect. However, currently, it’s far and away the most likely explanation.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    I find it baffling how the "bayesian reasoning is best reasoning" style of thinking promoted by lesswrong and others has fully spread into online tech communities for every topic except science. As soon as you say "it is thoroughly reasonable to go with the conclusions of the bulk of professionals who competitively analyze a particular field" then people leap out of the woodwork with maximally rigid views of the function of science and largely argue that we cannot hold any view with sufficient confidence to ever act.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- adrianN 5y ago
  And if you made your politics based on the Newtonian consensus you'd make exactly the right politics in all fields concerning mechanics that don't involve extreme proximity to very heavy objects, speeds not attainable by objects we care about in our corner of the galaxy, or extremely precise clocks. Heck, the same is true to a somewhat lesser degree if you based your celestial politics on the consensus before Kepler, the epicycle models weren't half bad either at predicting celestial movement.
  - headsoup 5y ago
    Alright, make it simpler then. There was once broad consensus the earth was flat. I believe the OP's point was around consensus as truth, rather than which example is used to demonstrate...
    - adrianN 5y ago
      Asimov wrote a nice essay about this topic: https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht... The point is that unless you're omniscient, using the best knowledge available at your time to choose which policies to apply is the best course of action. Of course it might later turn out to be wrong, but you don't know in which way it might turn out to be wrong.
      - headsoup 5y ago
        Of course, my thoughts are that's fine so long as those proposing or supporting alternatives may still do so, rather than be silenced entirely. This based on where political interference abuses the scientific consensus or manipulates it. As the OP said, there's a difference between science and consensus (not saying I disagree with the climate change consensus, I think it's absolutely an anthropogenic issue)
        ashtonkem 5y ago
        > This based on where political interference abuses the scientific consensus or manipulates it. Funny how this standard is never applied to oil companies. You know, the ones that figured out half a century ago that climate change was a problem, and have been running an interference campaign since then? Given the state of energy consumption today, the idea that it’s the green side that’s abusing the political process to get what it wants is downright laughable. Meanwhile congress is openly bought by fossil fuel interests, and we can’t even stop burning coal. > not saying I disagree with the climate change consensus, I think it's absolutely an anthropogenic issue Ahh, the anti-anti position, how annoying. You’re convinced that climate change is real, but you’re going to waste a lot of time making bad arguments about consensus and scientific change because…? For someone who thinks it’s “absolutely” an anthropogenic issue, you sure are trying to muddy the water a lot.
- headsoup 5y ago
  Indeed. And while we can confidently agree with an outcome and believe evidence as we please, it is dangerous when we decide that consensus means we should no longer consider other opinions and then worse, actively shut them down to prevent speaking. For instance we can disagree with and admonish others' views without silencing and removal through the 'disinformation' label. worrying times seeing this grow.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- brink 5y ago
  Right, Galileo was sentenced to prison because the consensus about the solar system in the 1600's was geocentric. Just because the mob is with you doesn't make you right.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > Galileo was sentenced to prison because the consensus about the solar system in the 1600's was geocentric Except that he wasn't sentenced to prison, and what he was sentenced to was not for that reason, either in the superficial sense (that wasn't the nominal offense) or the substantive one (that wasn't the thing that changed between the time when the same people wanted him punished where he wasn't and when he was.)
  - SquareWheel 5y ago
    That was a view from the church which wasn't arrived at scientifically. Using it as a criticism of science thus seems unfounded. Besides, modern climate scientists are hardly a mob. They collate data and come to their own conclusions. Those conclusions happen to agree, indicating a very strong position.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    > Galileo was sentenced to prison because the consensus about the solar system in the 1600's was geocentric That was not the scientific consensus. > Just because the mob is with you doesn't make you right. Science is not a mob. What basis do you have, other than the mob with you?
  - malloryerik 5y ago
    If I understand correctly he was given life imprisonment by the Church, not by other scientists vying for turf in the department.
  - tzs 5y ago
    Galileo got in trouble for a combination of reasons. 1. His heliocentric theory wasn't noticeably better at explaining or predicting the motion of heavenly bodies than the geocentric theories such as the Ptolemaic system. Galileo, like the Church, believed in a universe that was intelligently designed by an all-powerful God, and he believed that the laws of physics that such a God would choose would be mathematically beautiful and elegant. If observation did not match beautiful and elegant rules, then he would dismiss the observation as error or optical illusion. The Church's position was that God made the universe, and if empirical evidence from observing the universe showed it clearly working in ways that didn't fit what the Church believed the Bible said the mistake must be in the Church's interpretation of the Bible. 2. He had a big ego. His genius brought him fame. He became a celebrity who was regularly invited to hang out with the rich and famous and powerful. His big ego really loved that. 3. He was an asshole. He was rude and intolerant to those he saw as rivals or that he saw as his inferiors (which due to his big ego included pretty much everyone). 4. He had a poor sense of politics. He failed to realize that some of those rivals or inferiors that he was a major asshole towards either had way more political power than he did or they had good connections to such people, and that they could wield that power to make his life miserable if he kept being a major asshole to them.
- godelski 5y ago
  Einstein writes hypothesis. Hypothesis gets submitted to peer review. Peer review passes and grows in acceptance. Peers challenge the idea and try to poke holes, better proving the hypothesis stands. Peers test implications of hypothesis. Eventually this becomes a theory and consensus is born. That's science working in action. Science depends on consensus. Consensus doesn't mean you're right, but it does mean that no one can find a serious flaw.
  - b215826 5y ago
    > Consensus doesn't mean you're right, but it does mean that no one can find a serious flaw. This assumes a very naive view that the average university researcher is trying to challenge prevailing theories on a daily basis. The reality is that challenging prevailing theories of science is near impossible in today's grant-chasing arena called academia. Do you really think a grant proposal that questions some of the prevailing views in climate science is going to get funded? And even if does get funded, good luck getting it published in any mainstream journal.
    - addicted 5y ago
      This is hilarious considering there’s trillions of dollars invested in assuming climate change doesn’t exist.
      - slt2021 5y ago
        If you think that the market is wrong, you are free to bet your money in an opposite side and get rich from being right about climate change. Put your money where your beliefs are, so to speak
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      Do you have solid evidence of these claims?
      - tasogare 5y ago
        Anybody who had a feet for more than 5 minutes in a lab know he's right. Heck I can't even challenge my own supervisors when they make swallow statements that are in fact contradicted by a bunch of papers, how could I get funding from external entities by submitting socially unpopular ideas? Impossible, especially in highly politicized fields.
- hotpockets 5y ago
  It is the oil companies who are speaking truth. Yes, that is it.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Consensus is the currency of politics, not science. What is that based on? Scientists use the concept, including in this scientific paper and many others. > Before Einstein there was > 99% consensus that Newtonian gravity was ultimate description of gravitational force. Certainly not: They knew there was a lot unknown about gravity; they just didn't have the answers. And after Einstein, there was plenty scientists were aware was unknown, such as the mechanism for mass - the Higgs Boson wasn't discovered until 2012. There's a lot unknown now; no scientist will tell you that we have the ultimate description; for example, we can't reconcile gravity yet with other fundamental forces. Newton's predictions are accurate to this day, except in the narrow circumstances described by Einstein. And what does it have to do with climate change? If the predictions are as accurate as Newton, we aren't going to get much more certain information. What alternative theory is a better bet?
  - throwaway69123 5y ago
    hypothesis and repeatable experimentation
    - addicted 5y ago
      Repeatable experimentation to what end? What does repeatable experimentation prove? For that matter, what about the Apple falls to the ground experiment disproved Newton’s theory?
- addicted 5y ago
  This is hilariously wrong.
- mgraczyk 5y ago
  This isn't true in general, and your specific example isn't true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Perihelion_precession_of_Mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Pe... For nearly 50 years, the "consensus" was "Newton's theory explains most things but doesn't explain this one big thing". The same could have been true of climate change, but there is no "precession of Mercury" for human-caused climate change. The data is clear, and the theory matches the data close enough to justify overwhelming consensus.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  First off: the main opponents of action to address climate change - the coal and oil industries - found the science behind human-activity-induced-climate-change to be sound more than fifty years ago, according to their own internal documents: https://www.sciencealert.com/coal-industry-knew-about-climate-change-in-the-60s-damning-revelations-show https://www.sciencealert.com/coal-industry-knew-about-climat... > Consensus is the currency of politics, not science No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus "Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study. Consensus generally implies agreement of the supermajority, though not necessarily unanimity.[1] Consensus is achieved through scholarly communication at conferences, the publication process, replication of reproducible results by others, scholarly debate,[2][3][4][5] and peer review." > Before Einstein there was > 99% consensus that Newtonian gravity was ultimate description of gravitational force. Again, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity "Albert Einstein published the theory of special relativity in 1905, building on many theoretical results and empirical findings obtained by Albert A. Michelson, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré and others. Max Planck, Hermann Minkowski and others did subsequent work. Einstein developed general relativity between 1907 and 1915, with contributions by many others after 1915. The final form of general relativity was published in 1916." ...but it's worth noting two things. The first is that Newton himself found his own theory, to put it colloquially, fucking absurd, and said that anyone who believed him was out of their goddamn gourd. He was never able to experimentally show the cause of gravity. Second: you have a strange basis for your criticism of science, given the scientific community tossed a centuries-old theory about motherfucking gravity out the window pretty rapidly once there was experimental evidence to back the new theory. To this day, we're still finding all sorts of new evidence that Einstein was right. Just like we keep finding new ways to verify almost every aspect of human-induced climate change theory. We have exhaustive amounts of evidence around CO2 levels, climate change, and sources of said CO2. The state of science is such that we've been able to figure out CO2 levels on earth going back 400 million years, with ice cores alone providing evidence of CO2 levels going back 800,000 years. Some of the evidence and experiments around CO2 date back more than a hundred years. "We're causing the climate to change" was something that scientists theorized several centuries ago. Almost every day, as science keeps gets better, we keep confirming that centuries old core theory. https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...
- jlebar 5y ago
  I do "love" how a wrong, one-sentence comment spawns so much argument. So many person-hours spent arguing this point online. So much of our lives. I'm as guilty as anyone. Yes, "someone's wrong on the Internet", haha. But really. This guy isn't arguing in good faith. Frankly at this point nobody arguing online that climate change is not real is arguing in good faith. Can we find a way to channel our collective energy towards productive climate action? Serious question.
- Xixi 5y ago
  It's important to first note the obvious: physics didn't change when Einstein came up with his theory of relativity. Where classical mechanics had proven to be very accurate, Einstein's relativity had to be in agreement. It could not have been otherwise. It's only where classical mechanics had not been tested (or not been tested with much success) that relativity could diverge. This is something that is often misunderstood by those who dismiss scientific knowledge: accumulated observations and experiments don't end up in the trash. Any new breakthrough theory is first going to have to be in agreement with all of them. That's why classical mechanics is still not only taught at school, but also widely used by engineers to this day: it's extremely accurate (within some bounds).
iExploder 5y ago
during inquisition in 17th century there was 99% consensus on geocentric model of our solar system among scientists. remaining 1% was excommunicated and possibly burned at a cross. this seem vaguely familiar.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  No it doesn't.
  - iExploder 5y ago
    Yes it does, and my original post being flagged and downvoted is proof of it. But you can't argue with ideologues... tribal hindbrain working double shifts
chmod600 5y ago
Is there consensus on what to do about it?
- jandrese 5y ago
  Step 1: Stop burning fossil fuels.
  - fareesh 5y ago
    i.e. stop the backbone of everything in the world with no practical replacement. Probably not the best step 1
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      But even so it might be better than the alternative in the longer term.
      - lovecg 5y ago
        Better for whom? Burning fossil fuels literally lifted billions out of poverty, what you’re proposing if not done carefully will quickly reverse that.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      There are practical replacements. Switching to them is expensive.
    - jandrese 5y ago
      Step 2 is sequester the excess carbon out of the atmosphere. There is no step 3.
  - chmod600 5y ago
    If there were consensus on something so simple, it would already be done. I think what you mean is that there's consensus on "Everyone else stop burning fossil fuels, and I'll get around to it as soon as it's convenient for me. By the way, no nuclear, it's scary. And make sure to keep my AC running, it gets stuffy here. And my current car needs gas, so buy me a Tesla instead. And my jet rides around the world don't count, because travel is a culturally enriching experience so it's exempt."
BurningPenguin 5y ago
Anyone wants some popcorn for the comment section?
frogpelt 5y ago
Slightly tangential: if any of these 99% are still using fossil fuel transportation I would question whether they believe their own research.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  It's possibile to believe that humans are causing climate change but not care about it. I know potato chips are unhealthy, but I still eat them because they taste good.
- Sebguer 5y ago
  This isn't slightly tangential, it's a ridiculous assertion. Fossil fuel transportation is, for most people, the sole accessible mechanism of transportation. Because someone believes in human-driven climate change, they shouldn't have accessible transit?
- nmz 5y ago
  Given this logic, The web and windows are infallible tools because they are the ones most people have to use.
- vegetablepotpie 5y ago
  I hope someone is paying you to post this stuff. If not, you’re working for free.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  The changes needed to meaningfully change our trajectory of our society are massive and systemic. The entire present fleet of electric cars isn't going to have a substantial effect let alone one scientist doing so. People in many parts of the US especially can't afford to give up driving and keep cars for 10 plus years. Buying one will set you back 30k+ now and EV have only recently got so "affordable" along with infrastructure becoming slightly more prevalent. One would therefore expect those scientists making enough money to afford an EV to be more likely to choose an EV as they naturally upgraded as opposed to the ridiculous hypothesis that anyone who believed in their research ought to have them.
gotoeleven 5y ago
I dunno at some point if you have "99%" consensus isn't that like Kim Jong Un getting 99% of the vote in North Korea? It doesn't sound like a very healthy scientific community. The climate is a complex, dynamic, non-stationary system so isn't this level of certainty too high?
- all_factz 5y ago
  No? There is over 99% certainly for many hypotheses - doesn’t mean they’re false.
- zamalek 5y ago
  The weather is a dynamic, non-stationary system, that is hard to predict. Climate works on 30 year cycles. There is some stuff we are uncertain about: Californian wildfires as one example: are they natural, are they manmade (for climate or forestry reasons), or a combination. We'll know for sure in maybe 60 years. For the very significant vast majority, we know for an absolute and utter fact. https://www.livescience.com/siberian-wildfire-smoke-reaches-north-pole.html https://www.livescience.com/siberian-wildfire-smoke-reaches-...
  - cryptoegorophy 5y ago
    There are cycles within cycles as well. history of sea ice in the arctic https://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/jbg/Pubs/Polyak%20etal%20seaice%20QSR10%20inpress.pdf https://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/jbg/Pubs/Polyak%20etal%20s...
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    > Climate works on 30 year cycles. without having any standing at all in the field, I can't imagine that such a simple, reductive statement could possibly be generally true about something as physically massive and chaotic and infinitely, fractally complex as the planet's climate.
    - zamalek 5y ago
      https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_weather.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_we...
mrslave 5y ago
Considering how any public disagreement with the official story resulted in being labelled a Denier and career cancellation, how meaningful is this?
- dontreact 5y ago
  Considering any disagreement with the idea that gravity is a force would end your academic career in physics and an over 99% agreement with that idea, how meaningful is that?
  - Drybones 5y ago
    1. The existence of gravity and it's proofs are vastly different than this topic and not comparable. 2. What gravity even is at a technical is still unknown and debated right now between a few theories. The question here isn't about if humans affect climate to any degree, because that would be an easy agreement, but is it actually significant and what percentage of the changes we measure, which so far are quite minute over the past century, are human vs natural changes.
  - rdtsc 5y ago
    > Considering any disagreement with the idea that gravity is a force would end your academic career Gravity is not a force. So thinking it is a force would end one’s academic career. See, even scientists can live in their own “bubbles” once things get complicated enough :-) Gravity is the effect of masses moving along geodesic lines in curved space-time. Edit: Since you probably don’t believe me https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XRr1kaXKBsU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XRr1kaXKBsU
    - ars 5y ago
      That video is not persuasive - every single thing described there would apply to a charged object in an electrical field. So why is charge a force and gravity not?
      - rdtsc 5y ago
philliphaydon 5y ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-100-wrong/?sh=2e0910fe3f9f https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-cl... Reminds me of this: The 97 percent claim is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intimidate the public—and numerous scientists whose papers were classified by Cook protested: “Cook survey included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral.” —Dr. Richard Tol “That is not an accurate representation of my paper . . .” —Dr. Craig Idso “Nope . . . it is not an accurate representation.” —Dr. Nir Shaviv “Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument . . .” —Dr. Nicola Scafetta
- woodruffw 5y ago
  That article was written in 2015, and the claims about a climate plateau have not aged well[1]. [1]: http://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature http://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/c...
  - refurb 5y ago
    What happened to the global warming "pause"? The one that Nature devoted an entire edition of their journal to? We went from significant consensus that a pause or at least slowdown happened to "there was no pause". It's now being "debunked" as a myth which is amazing because that means some climate scientists are actively "debunking" other ones. And maybe someone can explain why we don't have a reliable way to measure the temperature change? Apparently the new models say there was no pause, but why is that model correct and the old one wrong?
    - woodruffw 5y ago
      > What happened to the global warming "pause"? The one that Nature devoted an entire edition of their journal to? It seems to have received attention and was entertained seriously by climate scientists. Ultimately, confidence in the models that predict a sustained pause diminished, and all current research shows that the data from that period fits into our improved climate models[1]. In other words, science "worked" exactly the way it was supposed to. There was no "debunking" -- climate scientists took the best models and information they had at the time and drew conclusions from them, and those conclusions have been (and will continue to be) revised as the data and models improve. And, for what it's worth: the new models don't say that there wasn't a pause. They account for the pause using our improved understanding of global weather patterns. The page I linked about goes into some detail about it. [1]: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/why-did-earth%E2%80%99s-surface-temperature-stop-rising-past-decade https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/why-did-ear...
TedShiller 5y ago
Science by definition does not require a consensus. If there is such a thing as "scientific consensus" then it's not actually scientific at all.
- phreeza 5y ago
  While it's true that science internally does not need or want a consensus, there must be some mechanism to convert science back into action recommendations for non-scientific life, unless we want science to be an entirely hermetic activity with no outputs. Observing if there is a (close) consensus among scientists seems like one way of achieving this, wouldn't you agree?
- woodruffw 5y ago
  “Consensus” is not itself a scientific object. It’s a social object describing the shared views of a bunch of scientists, which is exactly what TFA says.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  Is there scientific consensus that the Earth orbits the sun?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - TedShiller 5y ago
    There may be but there shouldn’t have to be
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  But engineering does. We make decisions based on the best available understanding at the time, and the best available understanding right now is that greenhouse gas emissions must be dramatically reduced or else the planet will experience temperatures high enough to cause extreme disruption to critical human systems. Is it possible that everybody has missed something and the field is totally wrong? In theory, yes. But that is almost entirely irrelevant to whether we should act. This whinging over the nature of science is just a distraction tactic.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aritmo 5y ago
Even without any scientific background, you can see that the denialism is really fishy. The denialism stinks. Those that are antivaxx, are also climate deniers. To the core.
- adamrezich 5y ago
  I find it interesting that you correlate these two things and that your instinctual reaction to those who hold such beliefs is suspicion, distrust, and a general negative value judgement on the individual, as opposed to understanding, empathy, and acceptance of worldviews other than your own. this kind of behavior seems increasingly common and downright socially acceptable with regards to these topics and a few key others—it's a fascinating phenomenon to witness. most people are mostly good people, regardless of whether they agree with you on things such as these. it probably wouldn't hurt to reflect on where such dogmatic negative generalizations about large swaths of people you've never met stem from internally, because it's not a very productive lens to view the world through (again, despite being increasingly common and socially accepted (or even expected in some cases!)).
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    It's because blatant ignorance or motivate thinking are the only possible reasons to be anti-vaxx or a climate denier in 2021. Furthermore, these ignorant or motivated beliefs are causing very direct harm to millions today and billions tomorrow. So no, there is no reason to be kind to people spreading anti-vaxx or anti-climate change propaganda. That's not to say that they should be harmed or anything like that, but it's necessary to silence and combat their "arguments" and not allow them to spew their propaganda anywhere unimpeded. Writing from a country where anti-vaxx idiots are partly responsible for the worst death toll from the 4th wave of Covid.
    - adamrezich 5y ago
      has there ever been a period of human history before where faith in scientific consensus has reached this level of widespread overt ideological zealotry? I'm racking my brain trying to think of any but I'm no historian. absolutely fascinating times to live in.
endymi0n 5y ago
See, there is still disagreement! Let's teach a balanced viewpoint here. /s "North Carolina GOP lawmakers want to require teaching 'balanced political viewpoints' in schools" — https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/north-carolina-gop-lawmakers-want-to-require-teaching-balanced-political-viewpoints-in-schools/ar-BB1fpaFw https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/north-carolina-gop-lawmake... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
slt2021 5y ago
this is not science, they just random sampled some research papers and found that they all have consensus opinion on whether humans have effect on climate change. it is not news to anyone who reads news, as almost every week there is a research paper from another PhD student with claims of anthropogenic cause on climate change of somr sort. climate researches really should up their game in research RIGOR. I do understand that garbage like this makes it to HN front due to sensationalist and clickbait title, but so does almost every other climate paper and all of them end up being duds
- dumbfoundded 5y ago
  It's a literature review. Pretty common.
  - slt2021 5y ago
    so they bring nothing new to the field, just rehash and repeat: "he said this, she said that..." Agree, this is pretty common for "climate research" and is one of the reasons why climate research has major credibility problems and deniers - there will be people who deny this garbage level "research" due to lack of rigor
    - skummetmaelk 5y ago
      Considering the statistical overlap between climate change deniers and religiosity, belief in natural medicines, and likelyhood to believe in conspiracy theories. Climate change deniers are not denying it based on the quality of the research. They deny because they want to believe it is false. They want to follow the controversial viewpoint. They want to question the establishment. It's not exactly a scientific endeavour.
    - adrianN 5y ago
      Literature reviews are very common in every field. The number of papers being published in any field is much larger than what researcher can possibly read. Reviews summarizing multiple papers and drawing conclusions are very valuable.
wavesounds 5y ago
If you live in the US I urge you to contact your congressional representatives and ask them to support passing a bipartisan Carbon Tax, which Romney recently said he could support[1], via budget reconciliation. Manchin has blown up the CEPP and he's against a carbon tax (clearly he's against anything that's going to hurt coal), meaning the kind of transformative climate change legislation we desperately need is going to require some republican support. The last time we had a decent chance of passing large climate change legislation was 10 years ago. It's possible we might not have this chance for another 10 years. And by then it might be too late for the planet. 1. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/mitt-romney-leans-in-on-carbon-tax-to-spur-clean-energy-technology-breakthroughs https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/mitt-romney...
jpgvm 5y ago
Man this comments section is a cesspool. The reality is that consensus does play a part in science, this is because intuition also plays a large part - both in guiding experimentation but also in interpreting findings. Consensus is the mechanism used to translate scientific findings into actionable advice/recommendations/engineering. Without it nothing would ever happen. Science is always full of unknowns, consensus allows us to move forward in absence of complete information (because such a thing often doesn't exist). The means by which scientists and engineers reach consensus are very different from politicians and other soft studies. Because of the role peer review plays in the scientific community consensus is built up over time, not through discussion but rather through experimental results and verified data. Consensus is less "we sat around and decided X is true" but rather "there is an overwhelming amount of data that suggests this is true". This is often translated into models which spur further experiments to attempt to verify or disprove these models (for instance the LHC and the Higgs boson as a high profile example). So no. 99% consensus in science isn't that uncommon and no it's generally not a bad thing. A big difference is also that in science it only takes a single very compelling counter-point to significantly disrupt consensus. See here Einstein's photo electric effect or his theory of relativity - both disrupted fairly intrenched consensus. This latter point is very important because unlike scientists soft fields often struggle to break consensus even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Everyone feels like they should get an "opinion" and that scientists are just voicing "opinions". This leads to people equating the voice of relatively uninformed individuals with that of scientists. I don't know this can be resolved but if it could be it would allow society to move forward at a much faster rate.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  > Consensus is the mechanism used to translate scientific findings into actionable advice/recommendations/engineering. Without it nothing would ever happen. Science is always full of unknowns, consensus allows us to move forward in absence of complete information (because such a thing often doesn't exist) FWIW, my experiences have been the precise opposite. My colleagues never seem to have consensus about anything. But companies move forward with our recommendations, both because we're more likely to be right, and if our recommendations happen to serve the company's goals. I'm sure a bunch of people will read into this comment, but I am speaking purely about my experiences as an ML scientist. It would be valid to say that ML represents a very small fraction of the global scientific apparatus, and I certainly don't claim to know what it's like to work at CERN. It surprised me, though, how often you were right -- there often is consensus, in the sense that everyone reads about a certain technique in papers and automatically assumes it's applicable to their own situation. For example, everyone in language modeling almost universally agrees that "lower loss is better," ("loss" is a specific ML term,"). But that's only true for general language models trained on large quantities of data. If you're fine-tuning a language model, you almost never want the steepest loss slope, because it means your learning rate is too high and you'll destroy the existing knowledge. I would say that experience matters, and each situation is different. It's super tricky to make an argument that consensus is both universally common and universally good.
hosh 5y ago
Among my friends, we came to the idea that whether or not we each agree that humans caused climate change, we should still take care of the planet. There is a lot more going on than greenhouse emissions. Soil health is in many ways, more vital, and mainstream commercial farming practices degenerate our soil year after year. We make poor use of water. Ocean acidification is problematic. It is impossible to sustainably fish — regenerative kelp and fish farms are a better practice. Diversity is how we can become more resilient, and we have been making it go away because diversity is too complex. Growing and buying local, helping our neighbors will build stronger communities and resilient economies; thinking globally, systemically, and holistically allows each of us to contribute something meaningful for something greater than ourselves. We can take care of the land, of each other, and still get our fair share.
- m0zg 5y ago
  > thinking globally, systemically, and holistically What does this even mean in practice?
  - hosh 5y ago
    See https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51947019-the-regenerative-life https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51947019-the-regenerativ...
    - MemesAndBooze 5y ago
      Nice Order Of The Nine Angeles symbol you have there
      - hosh 5y ago
        I am familiar with that order and what they do, but the symbol on the cover refers to something else and is not the same symbol.
    - m0zg 5y ago
      That's not "practice", that's a book. I'm asking what _you_, _specifically_ do to achieve your stated goal of "thinking globally, systemically, and holistically". Did you give up travel and vacations, perhaps? Get rid of your car? Stopped buying crap you don't need? Switched to locally sourced plant based diet? Moved to a smaller house in a warmer area where it doesn't need to be heated for 6 months in a year? Be as specific as you can. It's not idle curiosity, for two reasons. For one thing I dislike people who just talk about stuff, collect the online brownie points, and then don't really do anything (I'm not saying you're one of them though). For another, I'm trying to modify _my own_ lifestyle to be less carbon heavy, but without ruining my family's quality of life too much.
m0zg 5y ago
You'd literally be lynched by a mob if you were to do research to disprove any of it or in fact even question the means and methods. So I'm not surprised there's "consensus". That's not to say the consensus is incorrect here, that's just to say that it doesn't mean a whole lot. Under the normal circumstances scientists never 99% "agree" on anything.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Do you have evidence of that?
  - fareesh 5y ago
    I don't think the word literally was meant literally in this case
    - wolverine876 5y ago
      Sure, and reading it that way, any evidence?
      - slt2021 5y ago
        such research will never get funding because of ESG mandates for companies' Boards coming from shareholders. Try to get funding for research like this and your career will be cancelled instantly
        wolverine876 5y ago
        So no evidence.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Stop spreading this misinformation. Climate change has started as a hypothesis like any other, first proved by oil company researchers (the company proceeded to bury the research and force everyone to sign NDAs). There were many competing theories (including the default that no climate change is happening), and climate change has been consistently attacked and belittled by powerful interests for 50 years. Slowly though, the research kept trickling in and became incontrovertible, and alarming. As the question of IF became scientifically settled, funding naturally dried up for the fringe still looking for alternatives - just like funding for flat earth science is pretty dry today. This is normal and good and doesn't show bias, except towards simple scientific truths.
Sebguer 5y ago
So many people in the comments are making the exact same willfully ignorant argument that creationists make about evolution ("see, it's just a theory!") about the term of art "scientific consensus".
_pmf_ 5y ago
Consensus is a bug, not a feature. It makes science better manageable, but makes it less precise and varied.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  sigh. But what if the consensus is right? Demanding diversity of opinions for the pure sake of avoiding consensus is a good way to end up producing wrong results too.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  So how do we make decisions based on science? Especially incredibly complicated science that can't easily be replicated? I mean, there are people who believe the earth is flat, so do we just say, "well, it could be flat, so lets never decide anything based on the idea that it is round!"
p1necone 5y ago
Has Hacker News always been full of USA style right wing cultists?
- jacquesm 5y ago
  No, this is a thing of the past couple of years, starting ~2016 or so. Before then it was much milder here, it's a very slow trend so easy to miss but if you've been here for a shorter period then it may seem like it has been always so.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    A problem made worse by the fact that it literally does not even require a pulse to have an account on HN. It would take minutes to add even a captcha check for account creation and maybe an hour tops to require email validation before allowing comments. They don't care. I suspect it goes even further - that making it trivial for bots and PR manipulation makes HN look a lot busier than it would be if they put effort into validating accounts.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      That's incorrect afaik. The reason why it does not require an email address is because there have been instances where very valuable information was supplied regarding company internals by 'noob' accounts, so consider that a feature. As for bots and PR manipulation: HN expends a lot of effort to reduce these, so your argument makes no sense. There is no benefit to HN to seeming 'busier', the pay off in HN is that it is a community of people that YC (the parent company of Hacker News) can tap into as the feedstock for each new batch of companies that gets launched out of YC. This means that the community is the pay-off and being 'busy' or looking busier than it really isn't in any way a requirement for that, in fact it is a distraction. The fact that you've been here only for 30 days is telling (though you may have been lurking for much longer), you probably should check your assumptions about what HN is and how it functions until you've been here a bit longer.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
SlavikCA 5y ago
I see so much effort to prove, that there is "climate change" consensus, that I'm starting to be suspicious...
- vegetablepotpie 5y ago
  Well if you weren’t suspicious, would there be any need for the effort? Circular reasoning is fallacious.
- Ardren 5y ago
  You mean, suspicious of the amount of pushback against overwhelming evidence?
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Gonna have to call bullshit on this one. “I believed X until <subject of article> and now I’m skeptical” is a well known bad faith rhetorical trick.
mjfl 5y ago
Consensus is self-reinforcing, by the rejection of papers that contradict dogmas. It's also relatively rare to go into "Climate Science" as a field. I would expect no more than 1 in 20 physicists becomes a "climate physicist", if that. I also feel that it does select for those who are more convicted that humans are changing the world for the worse. You need motivation, and alarm is a good one. From all this, it would not surprise me if the field is a monoculture, with human caused climate change as the central dogma. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but pretending that the consensus measure is objective in any way is definitely flat wrong.
- lanevorockz 5y ago
  Indeed, there is also another piece of this puzzle. PhDs became a step in the career now, so people don’t study for ground breaking research or their masterpieces. Give me a subject that has companies interested in, you get scholarships and the companies lobby to get your paper published. You barely have to do any work.
- q1w2 5y ago
  I find surveys like this to be useful, although I don't think the number 99% is very meaningful. You are correct that there are biases in climate research and in scientist's selection of fields, experiments, and data. ...but even still, it needs to be quantified as well as possible, that the vast majority of published science confirms (or at least does not contradict) human driven climate change.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Yes, but at this point there is no number of nines that’ll convince the skeptics; you can’t argue someone out of a position that they didn’t rationally work themselves into.
- vegetablepotpie 5y ago
  If your Bayesian prior starts at 0%, no amount of evidence will change that confidence.
- cauliflower99 5y ago
  You mean there's something wrong with being skeptical? Come one...you can't say you don't believe that 'climate change' is a political bat used to beat opponents with. Anyone who takes this topic seriously understands that the environmental problems we face today are in the 1000s. And the solution to one problem is the producer of another. Environmentalism does not equal climate change does not equal global warming does not equal planet health. This is why it is such a frustrating topic to talk about. Saying I'm skeptical about the political influences and thoughtful about the multi-variate problem means people call you a 'climate denier'. You're right - it doesn't matter how many 9's there are. I'm still going to be skeptical about this and everything else I'm told. For example, I explained my position with my sister in-law that Greta Thunberg is a child who is used by the politicians around her and that she has never had anything thoughtful to say on the subject despite her prowess in the media. Apparently, now I don't care about the environment. It's not the skeptics you need to watch out for who are capable of original thought. It's the ones who treat the term 'climate change' as their dogma and cannot handle any thoughtful debate on the issue.
  - crowbahr 5y ago
    Skepticism is only useful inasmuch as it leads to research and action. Being skeptical of the politics around climate change? Totally rational, and digging will show bad faith actors. Being skeptical if the climate is changing? Completely irrational on the level of being skeptical if the Earth is a sphere or if Gravity will work tomorrow. A thought being original doesn't mean it's valuable: just that it's different.
known 5y ago
"Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same numbers to draw different conclusions" --Evan Esar (b. 1899)
chronolitus 5y ago
I know this topic usually devolves into flamewar, but I'm used to seeing at least a few interesting comments on climate posts on HN. Here's a few topics that would make sense for hackers to discuss: - Insider knowledge on state of green tech (carbon capture, progress in solar tech, industrial hydrogen, any energy prices analysts here?) - Anything new happening with load-balancing for renewables? Solar has been tomorrow's energy for a while, but what's the best way to store excess and rebalance today? Batteries? - Speaking of batteries: any discussion on batteries devolves into worries about lithium mining / shortages. How big is that problem, quantitatively? - A typical argument is that coal is worse than Nuclear, but everyone accounts for externalities / black swan events differently. Do modern coal plants still pollute as much? Are the claims about coal plants releasing nuclear material into the atmosphere true? - Is nuclear waste as big a problem as we keep hearing? We've been dumping old tires in a 100km2 are of kuwait for years - worse, they've been catching fire and burning away (https://insiderpaper.com/video-worlds-biggest-tire-graveyard-kuwait-fire-sulaibiya/ https://insiderpaper.com/video-worlds-biggest-tire-graveyard...). But it would be unacceptable to condemn a similar area for radioactive waste? Why / why not? - How temperature rise would / wouldn't affect the SV / Europe / Israel / Asia tech scene. Will people move? Why? How much can be mitigated with industrial solution (AC, etc)? - What are energy technologies where the widespread / mainstream / media belief and the reality are not aligned?
- orwin 5y ago
  > Solar has been tomorrow's energy for a while, but what's the best way to store excess and rebalance today? Reversible barrages. Some innovation in pumped gaz. ----------------- > Speaking of batteries: any discussion on batteries devolves into worries about lithium mining / shortages. How big is that problem, quantitatively? Its an issue for the price and how fast new vehicles can be produced. We will either change our battery tech or try getting lithium/cobalt from less concentrated deposits. The main issue for lithium/cobalt is how destructive it is when the mining is done in unregulated environments. Heavy metal pollution that will kill for millions of years. ---------- > Do modern coal plants still pollute as much? Not the new german one, no. Still worse than any other plant, even oil plants. ------------- > Are the claims about coal plants releasing nuclear material into the atmosphere true? Yes, but it isn't worse than natural radiation in granitic areas. And since its in the air, it wont produce enough radon to kill someone. Not a real issue. -------------- > What are energy technologies where the widespread / mainstream / media belief and the reality are not aligned? I'd guess offshore wind? I've a childhood friend who is working for total, in the NRE department, and the only reason offshore is done is subsidies and "plan" that the mast will stay 20 more years than planned. And that the maintenance crew will get cheaper.
jereze 5y ago
Now that we have a consensus, let's address the discourses justifying inaction or inadequate efforts. I just submitted a resource that I like on this topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941473
guilhas 5y ago
Because the money is there to prove it, if the researchers start concluding the opposite from the research, the funds would cease and there would be no paper And in today's environment any professional clamming the opposite would promptly be fired from University or institution There is no more debate, all science has to be approved by the ministry of truth
helloworld11 5y ago
The one necessary thing about science, and especially science in a subject that has been highly politicized and deeply subjected to real world policy initiatives that could affect the lives of billion of people is room for debate and opinion. Yes, some of that opinion will be ignorant, foolish or based on willful lies and conspiracy theories, but much of it won't be. In either case, even the more radical opinions deserve the right to be spoken because they also allow useful debate to slowly evolve. the contrary of this is repressing all but "correct" points of view in a way that also suffocates controversial but intelligent disagreements. The COVID pandemic and its still highly debated science and politics have if anything demonstrated the importance of this even more. (Lab leak theories anyone? Or how about the debate over mask use?). This is all to say that while many denialist points of view about climate change are flatly absurd, there are many others that are also much more nuanced and worthy of entertaining. I personally don't deny that we're changing the world's climate, and that this could have catastrophic consequences down the road. However, what I also accept as possible is that for one thing, politicians will absolutely take advantage of a dramatic scientific topic to hijack its vagaries in favor of their own agendas. Also that scientists are just as fallible and subject to prestige-seeking and ideological bias as anyone else with an opportunity for self-gratification, and that the mix of both of the above can easily lead to certain still ambiguous topics being pushed forward as concrete absolutisms for the sake of specific motives that are less altruistic than they seem at first glance. Will anyone deny that these characteristics are unlikely or impossible? Then of course there are the ideological fixations around proposed solutions too, such as the absolutely anti-nuclear stances of a large number of those who also claim that climate change should be battled. Are they really open to all scientifically/technically valid remedies, or are they selectively choosing those that fit their very personal political dogmas? As for the science itself, I don't know nearly enough about it to claim any expertise, but from everything I have read, it seems extremely dubious to think that the climate isn't being changed by human activity, generally in the direction of a warming trend. However, to what extent this will devastate us down the road, or to what extent we'll be able to counteract it with policies, technologies and social/economic tendencies that we today in 2021 might not even yet be conscious of is something nobody can claim to be certain of. This doesn't mean that concrete safety measures shouldn't be promoted now, based on what we do know, but it also doesn't negate open debate or acknowledging that emotional reasoning also exists among people who fervently believe in inescapable catastrophe over the next few decades of climate change. These people might be wrong, and they certainly can't say with absolute certainty that they're completely correct. Right here on HN i've seen comments that practically go into hysterics about how we're already fucked and that our future is deeply grim because of our climate actions. Can anybody seriously say that they're reasoning soberly and with all the known science on their side? I don't think so. If I were to bet on anything, it's that the world one century from now will be so different from what we know today in so many ways that few of our modern fears, even about climate change, can be considered settled. I'd also bet that by then we will have arrived at solutions to this global climate problem that many of the more extreme fears present today aren't even considering or aware of at all. Consider the major specific extrapolations of thinkers, politicians, scientists and many among the public and media in the year 1900. How many of them have more than minor relevance today? We're no less excempt from such blind spots than they were back then.
trhway 5y ago
Greater than 99% ! That is how Chechens voted couple weeks ago for their beloved President Ramzan Kadyrov. Such numbers always look impressive. (note: i was taught climate change back in middle school in the mid 80ties in USSR, and only coming to US i discovered to my big surprise that there are still people who thinks the other way - notable though that those people are mostly well under influence of the forces/people standing to lose much from public acceptance of climate change. This is how Russia prepares for the climate change for example https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/russiaarcticbuildup_012316e.jpg https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/russiaa...)
joelbondurant 5y ago
99% consensus is the scientific standard for a fact.
sinyug 5y ago
All scientific arguments for and against AGW became irrelevant the day the debate became religious and political. The only thing that matters (at least to me) is the weaponization of this consensus by believers in the developed world against the energy infrastructure of the developing world. This phenomenon used to be called "Global Warming" till narrative builders decided that the term was inconvenient and switched over to "Climate Change." You can see Google Trends for the terms over a period of time and even predict with some accuracy as to which party is in power in any given US state based on searches for the two terms in those states.[1] Then you have the nice propagandists at Wikipedia rewrite history by pretending that the article had always been on "Climate Change."[2][3][4][5] This is how you manufacture consent. And consensus. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=global%20warming,climate%20change https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=g... [2] Global Warming. 21 August 2020. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_warming&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_warming&ac...) [3] Global Warming. 29 July 2019. (https://web.archive.org/web/20190730111640/https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_warming&action=history https://web.archive.org/web/20190730111640/https://en.wikipe...) [4] Climate Change. Today. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Climate_change&dir=prev&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Climate_change&di...) [5] Climate Change. 29 July 2019. (https://web.archive.org/web/20190730191647/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change https://web.archive.org/web/20190730191647/https://en.wikipe...)
complianceowl 5y ago
I see people the politically-correct term, "human-caused". I am a gentleman; feel free to use "woman-caused climate change".
complianceowl 5y ago
fsdfsd
- welcome_dragon 5y ago
  I concur

137 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

New bumper sticker: "We Vote Our Science..." in small print "Using the Voters We Choose!"

j0ba 5y ago

Consensus is the currency of politics, not science. Before Einstein there was > 99% consensus that Newtonian gravity was ultimate description of gravitational force.

jacquesm 5y ago
The scientific method does not deal in 'ultimate descriptions', it only deals in 'to the best of our knowledge' and the whole point of the scientific method is to be able to replace today's best version of the explanation with a better one tomorrow.
dumbfoundded 5y ago
Not really. Consensus is used all the time when a definitive answer isn't possible or attained. Most people assume the Riemann hypothesis is true and then build from there. Sometimes a definitive answer isn't possible yet.
anonporridge 5y ago
Except that the consensus on the science has been growing, in defiance of the consensus of politics and the public, which has been slow to get on board. Your analogy doesn't work.
- Leparamour 5y ago
  >Except that the consensus on the science has been growing, in defiance of the consensus of politics and the public, which has been slow to get on board. The consensus on man-made climate change has grown following the rise of aggressive identity politics and "social justice warrior" cancel culture on social media.
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    Alternatively, aggressive identity politics and "social justice warrior" cancel culture regarding climate change has grown following the rising scientific consensus that we have a disastrous future ahead of us. Looking at another political/scientific issue, abortion, that is also steeped in aggressive identity politics and "social justice warrior" cancel culture which instead of growing in consensus that it is bad seems to be declining, I would argue that politics and social power follow rational thinking, not the other way around. At least on long enough time scales.
WalterGR 5y ago
“Consensus” in this context does not mean that all the authors of those 3,000 papers got together in a room, debated it out, and released a statement. Re. Newtonian physics, the scientific method demonstrated otherwise. That’s how it works. Your point simply means that anthropogenic climate change may be incorrect. However, currently, it’s far and away the most likely explanation.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  I find it baffling how the "bayesian reasoning is best reasoning" style of thinking promoted by lesswrong and others has fully spread into online tech communities for every topic except science. As soon as you say "it is thoroughly reasonable to go with the conclusions of the bulk of professionals who competitively analyze a particular field" then people leap out of the woodwork with maximally rigid views of the function of science and largely argue that we cannot hold any view with sufficient confidence to ever act.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
adrianN 5y ago
And if you made your politics based on the Newtonian consensus you'd make exactly the right politics in all fields concerning mechanics that don't involve extreme proximity to very heavy objects, speeds not attainable by objects we care about in our corner of the galaxy, or extremely precise clocks. Heck, the same is true to a somewhat lesser degree if you based your celestial politics on the consensus before Kepler, the epicycle models weren't half bad either at predicting celestial movement.
- headsoup 5y ago
  Alright, make it simpler then. There was once broad consensus the earth was flat. I believe the OP's point was around consensus as truth, rather than which example is used to demonstrate...
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Asimov wrote a nice essay about this topic: https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm https://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.ht... The point is that unless you're omniscient, using the best knowledge available at your time to choose which policies to apply is the best course of action. Of course it might later turn out to be wrong, but you don't know in which way it might turn out to be wrong.
    - headsoup 5y ago
      Of course, my thoughts are that's fine so long as those proposing or supporting alternatives may still do so, rather than be silenced entirely. This based on where political interference abuses the scientific consensus or manipulates it. As the OP said, there's a difference between science and consensus (not saying I disagree with the climate change consensus, I think it's absolutely an anthropogenic issue)
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        > This based on where political interference abuses the scientific consensus or manipulates it. Funny how this standard is never applied to oil companies. You know, the ones that figured out half a century ago that climate change was a problem, and have been running an interference campaign since then? Given the state of energy consumption today, the idea that it’s the green side that’s abusing the political process to get what it wants is downright laughable. Meanwhile congress is openly bought by fossil fuel interests, and we can’t even stop burning coal. > not saying I disagree with the climate change consensus, I think it's absolutely an anthropogenic issue Ahh, the anti-anti position, how annoying. You’re convinced that climate change is real, but you’re going to waste a lot of time making bad arguments about consensus and scientific change because…? For someone who thinks it’s “absolutely” an anthropogenic issue, you sure are trying to muddy the water a lot.
headsoup 5y ago
Indeed. And while we can confidently agree with an outcome and believe evidence as we please, it is dangerous when we decide that consensus means we should no longer consider other opinions and then worse, actively shut them down to prevent speaking. For instance we can disagree with and admonish others' views without silencing and removal through the 'disinformation' label. worrying times seeing this grow.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
brink 5y ago
Right, Galileo was sentenced to prison because the consensus about the solar system in the 1600's was geocentric. Just because the mob is with you doesn't make you right.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Galileo was sentenced to prison because the consensus about the solar system in the 1600's was geocentric Except that he wasn't sentenced to prison, and what he was sentenced to was not for that reason, either in the superficial sense (that wasn't the nominal offense) or the substantive one (that wasn't the thing that changed between the time when the same people wanted him punished where he wasn't and when he was.)
- SquareWheel 5y ago
  That was a view from the church which wasn't arrived at scientifically. Using it as a criticism of science thus seems unfounded. Besides, modern climate scientists are hardly a mob. They collate data and come to their own conclusions. Those conclusions happen to agree, indicating a very strong position.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > Galileo was sentenced to prison because the consensus about the solar system in the 1600's was geocentric That was not the scientific consensus. > Just because the mob is with you doesn't make you right. Science is not a mob. What basis do you have, other than the mob with you?
- malloryerik 5y ago
  If I understand correctly he was given life imprisonment by the Church, not by other scientists vying for turf in the department.
- tzs 5y ago
  Galileo got in trouble for a combination of reasons. 1. His heliocentric theory wasn't noticeably better at explaining or predicting the motion of heavenly bodies than the geocentric theories such as the Ptolemaic system. Galileo, like the Church, believed in a universe that was intelligently designed by an all-powerful God, and he believed that the laws of physics that such a God would choose would be mathematically beautiful and elegant. If observation did not match beautiful and elegant rules, then he would dismiss the observation as error or optical illusion. The Church's position was that God made the universe, and if empirical evidence from observing the universe showed it clearly working in ways that didn't fit what the Church believed the Bible said the mistake must be in the Church's interpretation of the Bible. 2. He had a big ego. His genius brought him fame. He became a celebrity who was regularly invited to hang out with the rich and famous and powerful. His big ego really loved that. 3. He was an asshole. He was rude and intolerant to those he saw as rivals or that he saw as his inferiors (which due to his big ego included pretty much everyone). 4. He had a poor sense of politics. He failed to realize that some of those rivals or inferiors that he was a major asshole towards either had way more political power than he did or they had good connections to such people, and that they could wield that power to make his life miserable if he kept being a major asshole to them.
godelski 5y ago
Einstein writes hypothesis. Hypothesis gets submitted to peer review. Peer review passes and grows in acceptance. Peers challenge the idea and try to poke holes, better proving the hypothesis stands. Peers test implications of hypothesis. Eventually this becomes a theory and consensus is born. That's science working in action. Science depends on consensus. Consensus doesn't mean you're right, but it does mean that no one can find a serious flaw.
- b215826 5y ago
  > Consensus doesn't mean you're right, but it does mean that no one can find a serious flaw. This assumes a very naive view that the average university researcher is trying to challenge prevailing theories on a daily basis. The reality is that challenging prevailing theories of science is near impossible in today's grant-chasing arena called academia. Do you really think a grant proposal that questions some of the prevailing views in climate science is going to get funded? And even if does get funded, good luck getting it published in any mainstream journal.
  - addicted 5y ago
    This is hilarious considering there’s trillions of dollars invested in assuming climate change doesn’t exist.
    - slt2021 5y ago
      If you think that the market is wrong, you are free to bet your money in an opposite side and get rich from being right about climate change. Put your money where your beliefs are, so to speak
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Do you have solid evidence of these claims?
    - tasogare 5y ago
      Anybody who had a feet for more than 5 minutes in a lab know he's right. Heck I can't even challenge my own supervisors when they make swallow statements that are in fact contradicted by a bunch of papers, how could I get funding from external entities by submitting socially unpopular ideas? Impossible, especially in highly politicized fields.
hotpockets 5y ago
It is the oil companies who are speaking truth. Yes, that is it.
wolverine876 5y ago
> Consensus is the currency of politics, not science. What is that based on? Scientists use the concept, including in this scientific paper and many others. > Before Einstein there was > 99% consensus that Newtonian gravity was ultimate description of gravitational force. Certainly not: They knew there was a lot unknown about gravity; they just didn't have the answers. And after Einstein, there was plenty scientists were aware was unknown, such as the mechanism for mass - the Higgs Boson wasn't discovered until 2012. There's a lot unknown now; no scientist will tell you that we have the ultimate description; for example, we can't reconcile gravity yet with other fundamental forces. Newton's predictions are accurate to this day, except in the narrow circumstances described by Einstein. And what does it have to do with climate change? If the predictions are as accurate as Newton, we aren't going to get much more certain information. What alternative theory is a better bet?
- throwaway69123 5y ago
  hypothesis and repeatable experimentation
  - addicted 5y ago
    Repeatable experimentation to what end? What does repeatable experimentation prove? For that matter, what about the Apple falls to the ground experiment disproved Newton’s theory?
addicted 5y ago
This is hilariously wrong.
mgraczyk 5y ago
This isn't true in general, and your specific example isn't true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Perihelion_precession_of_Mercury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_general_relativity#Pe... For nearly 50 years, the "consensus" was "Newton's theory explains most things but doesn't explain this one big thing". The same could have been true of climate change, but there is no "precession of Mercury" for human-caused climate change. The data is clear, and the theory matches the data close enough to justify overwhelming consensus.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
First off: the main opponents of action to address climate change - the coal and oil industries - found the science behind human-activity-induced-climate-change to be sound more than fifty years ago, according to their own internal documents: https://www.sciencealert.com/coal-industry-knew-about-climate-change-in-the-60s-damning-revelations-show https://www.sciencealert.com/coal-industry-knew-about-climat... > Consensus is the currency of politics, not science No. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_consensus "Scientific consensus is the collective judgment, position, and opinion of the community of scientists in a particular field of study. Consensus generally implies agreement of the supermajority, though not necessarily unanimity.[1] Consensus is achieved through scholarly communication at conferences, the publication process, replication of reproducible results by others, scholarly debate,[2][3][4][5] and peer review." > Before Einstein there was > 99% consensus that Newtonian gravity was ultimate description of gravitational force. Again, no. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_relativity "Albert Einstein published the theory of special relativity in 1905, building on many theoretical results and empirical findings obtained by Albert A. Michelson, Hendrik Lorentz, Henri Poincaré and others. Max Planck, Hermann Minkowski and others did subsequent work. Einstein developed general relativity between 1907 and 1915, with contributions by many others after 1915. The final form of general relativity was published in 1916." ...but it's worth noting two things. The first is that Newton himself found his own theory, to put it colloquially, fucking absurd, and said that anyone who believed him was out of their goddamn gourd. He was never able to experimentally show the cause of gravity. Second: you have a strange basis for your criticism of science, given the scientific community tossed a centuries-old theory about motherfucking gravity out the window pretty rapidly once there was experimental evidence to back the new theory. To this day, we're still finding all sorts of new evidence that Einstein was right. Just like we keep finding new ways to verify almost every aspect of human-induced climate change theory. We have exhaustive amounts of evidence around CO2 levels, climate change, and sources of said CO2. The state of science is such that we've been able to figure out CO2 levels on earth going back 400 million years, with ice cores alone providing evidence of CO2 levels going back 800,000 years. Some of the evidence and experiments around CO2 date back more than a hundred years. "We're causing the climate to change" was something that scientists theorized several centuries ago. Almost every day, as science keeps gets better, we keep confirming that centuries old core theory. https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_scie...
jlebar 5y ago
I do "love" how a wrong, one-sentence comment spawns so much argument. So many person-hours spent arguing this point online. So much of our lives. I'm as guilty as anyone. Yes, "someone's wrong on the Internet", haha. But really. This guy isn't arguing in good faith. Frankly at this point nobody arguing online that climate change is not real is arguing in good faith. Can we find a way to channel our collective energy towards productive climate action? Serious question.
Xixi 5y ago
It's important to first note the obvious: physics didn't change when Einstein came up with his theory of relativity. Where classical mechanics had proven to be very accurate, Einstein's relativity had to be in agreement. It could not have been otherwise. It's only where classical mechanics had not been tested (or not been tested with much success) that relativity could diverge. This is something that is often misunderstood by those who dismiss scientific knowledge: accumulated observations and experiments don't end up in the trash. Any new breakthrough theory is first going to have to be in agreement with all of them. That's why classical mechanics is still not only taught at school, but also widely used by engineers to this day: it's extremely accurate (within some bounds).

iExploder 5y ago

during inquisition in 17th century there was 99% consensus on geocentric model of our solar system among scientists. remaining 1% was excommunicated and possibly burned at a cross. this seem vaguely familiar.

anonporridge 5y ago
No it doesn't.
- iExploder 5y ago
  Yes it does, and my original post being flagged and downvoted is proof of it. But you can't argue with ideologues... tribal hindbrain working double shifts

chmod600 5y ago

Is there consensus on what to do about it?

jandrese 5y ago
Step 1: Stop burning fossil fuels.
- fareesh 5y ago
  i.e. stop the backbone of everything in the world with no practical replacement. Probably not the best step 1
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    But even so it might be better than the alternative in the longer term.
    - lovecg 5y ago
      Better for whom? Burning fossil fuels literally lifted billions out of poverty, what you’re proposing if not done carefully will quickly reverse that.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    There are practical replacements. Switching to them is expensive.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    Step 2 is sequester the excess carbon out of the atmosphere. There is no step 3.
- chmod600 5y ago
  If there were consensus on something so simple, it would already be done. I think what you mean is that there's consensus on "Everyone else stop burning fossil fuels, and I'll get around to it as soon as it's convenient for me. By the way, no nuclear, it's scary. And make sure to keep my AC running, it gets stuffy here. And my current car needs gas, so buy me a Tesla instead. And my jet rides around the world don't count, because travel is a culturally enriching experience so it's exempt."

BurningPenguin 5y ago

Anyone wants some popcorn for the comment section?

frogpelt 5y ago

Slightly tangential: if any of these 99% are still using fossil fuel transportation I would question whether they believe their own research.

charcircuit 5y ago
It's possibile to believe that humans are causing climate change but not care about it. I know potato chips are unhealthy, but I still eat them because they taste good.
Sebguer 5y ago
This isn't slightly tangential, it's a ridiculous assertion. Fossil fuel transportation is, for most people, the sole accessible mechanism of transportation. Because someone believes in human-driven climate change, they shouldn't have accessible transit?
nmz 5y ago
Given this logic, The web and windows are infallible tools because they are the ones most people have to use.
vegetablepotpie 5y ago
I hope someone is paying you to post this stuff. If not, you’re working for free.
michaelmrose 5y ago
The changes needed to meaningfully change our trajectory of our society are massive and systemic. The entire present fleet of electric cars isn't going to have a substantial effect let alone one scientist doing so. People in many parts of the US especially can't afford to give up driving and keep cars for 10 plus years. Buying one will set you back 30k+ now and EV have only recently got so "affordable" along with infrastructure becoming slightly more prevalent. One would therefore expect those scientists making enough money to afford an EV to be more likely to choose an EV as they naturally upgraded as opposed to the ridiculous hypothesis that anyone who believed in their research ought to have them.

gotoeleven 5y ago

I dunno at some point if you have "99%" consensus isn't that like Kim Jong Un getting 99% of the vote in North Korea? It doesn't sound like a very healthy scientific community. The climate is a complex, dynamic, non-stationary system so isn't this level of certainty too high?

all_factz 5y ago
No? There is over 99% certainly for many hypotheses - doesn’t mean they’re false.
zamalek 5y ago
The weather is a dynamic, non-stationary system, that is hard to predict. Climate works on 30 year cycles. There is some stuff we are uncertain about: Californian wildfires as one example: are they natural, are they manmade (for climate or forestry reasons), or a combination. We'll know for sure in maybe 60 years. For the very significant vast majority, we know for an absolute and utter fact. https://www.livescience.com/siberian-wildfire-smoke-reaches-north-pole.html https://www.livescience.com/siberian-wildfire-smoke-reaches-...
- cryptoegorophy 5y ago
  There are cycles within cycles as well. history of sea ice in the arctic https://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/jbg/Pubs/Polyak%20etal%20seaice%20QSR10%20inpress.pdf https://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/jbg/Pubs/Polyak%20etal%20s...
- adamrezich 5y ago
  > Climate works on 30 year cycles. without having any standing at all in the field, I can't imagine that such a simple, reductive statement could possibly be generally true about something as physically massive and chaotic and infinitely, fractally complex as the planet's climate.
  - zamalek 5y ago
    https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_weather.html https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/noaa-n/climate/climate_we...

mrslave 5y ago

Considering how any public disagreement with the official story resulted in being labelled a Denier and career cancellation, how meaningful is this?

dontreact 5y ago
Considering any disagreement with the idea that gravity is a force would end your academic career in physics and an over 99% agreement with that idea, how meaningful is that?
- Drybones 5y ago
  1. The existence of gravity and it's proofs are vastly different than this topic and not comparable. 2. What gravity even is at a technical is still unknown and debated right now between a few theories. The question here isn't about if humans affect climate to any degree, because that would be an easy agreement, but is it actually significant and what percentage of the changes we measure, which so far are quite minute over the past century, are human vs natural changes.
- rdtsc 5y ago
  > Considering any disagreement with the idea that gravity is a force would end your academic career Gravity is not a force. So thinking it is a force would end one’s academic career. See, even scientists can live in their own “bubbles” once things get complicated enough :-) Gravity is the effect of masses moving along geodesic lines in curved space-time. Edit: Since you probably don’t believe me https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XRr1kaXKBsU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XRr1kaXKBsU
  - ars 5y ago
    That video is not persuasive - every single thing described there would apply to a charged object in an electrical field. So why is charge a force and gravity not?
    - rdtsc 5y ago

philliphaydon 5y ago

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-climate-scientists-agree-is-100-wrong/?sh=2e0910fe3f9f https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexepstein/2015/01/06/97-of-cl... Reminds me of this: The 97 percent claim is a deliberate misrepresentation designed to intimidate the public—and numerous scientists whose papers were classified by Cook protested: “Cook survey included 10 of my 122 eligible papers. 5/10 were rated incorrectly. 4/5 were rated as endorse rather than neutral.” —Dr. Richard Tol “That is not an accurate representation of my paper . . .” —Dr. Craig Idso “Nope . . . it is not an accurate representation.” —Dr. Nir Shaviv “Cook et al. (2013) is based on a strawman argument . . .” —Dr. Nicola Scafetta

woodruffw 5y ago
That article was written in 2015, and the claims about a climate plateau have not aged well[1]. [1]: http://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-temperature http://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/c...
- refurb 5y ago
  What happened to the global warming "pause"? The one that Nature devoted an entire edition of their journal to? We went from significant consensus that a pause or at least slowdown happened to "there was no pause". It's now being "debunked" as a myth which is amazing because that means some climate scientists are actively "debunking" other ones. And maybe someone can explain why we don't have a reliable way to measure the temperature change? Apparently the new models say there was no pause, but why is that model correct and the old one wrong?
  - woodruffw 5y ago
    > What happened to the global warming "pause"? The one that Nature devoted an entire edition of their journal to? It seems to have received attention and was entertained seriously by climate scientists. Ultimately, confidence in the models that predict a sustained pause diminished, and all current research shows that the data from that period fits into our improved climate models[1]. In other words, science "worked" exactly the way it was supposed to. There was no "debunking" -- climate scientists took the best models and information they had at the time and drew conclusions from them, and those conclusions have been (and will continue to be) revised as the data and models improve. And, for what it's worth: the new models don't say that there wasn't a pause. They account for the pause using our improved understanding of global weather patterns. The page I linked about goes into some detail about it. [1]: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/why-did-earth%E2%80%99s-surface-temperature-stop-rising-past-decade https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/why-did-ear...

TedShiller 5y ago

Science by definition does not require a consensus. If there is such a thing as "scientific consensus" then it's not actually scientific at all.

phreeza 5y ago
While it's true that science internally does not need or want a consensus, there must be some mechanism to convert science back into action recommendations for non-scientific life, unless we want science to be an entirely hermetic activity with no outputs. Observing if there is a (close) consensus among scientists seems like one way of achieving this, wouldn't you agree?
woodruffw 5y ago
“Consensus” is not itself a scientific object. It’s a social object describing the shared views of a bunch of scientists, which is exactly what TFA says.
ALittleLight 5y ago
Is there scientific consensus that the Earth orbits the sun?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- TedShiller 5y ago
  There may be but there shouldn’t have to be
UncleMeat 5y ago
But engineering does. We make decisions based on the best available understanding at the time, and the best available understanding right now is that greenhouse gas emissions must be dramatically reduced or else the planet will experience temperatures high enough to cause extreme disruption to critical human systems. Is it possible that everybody has missed something and the field is totally wrong? In theory, yes. But that is almost entirely irrelevant to whether we should act. This whinging over the nature of science is just a distraction tactic.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aritmo 5y ago

Even without any scientific background, you can see that the denialism is really fishy. The denialism stinks. Those that are antivaxx, are also climate deniers. To the core.

adamrezich 5y ago
I find it interesting that you correlate these two things and that your instinctual reaction to those who hold such beliefs is suspicion, distrust, and a general negative value judgement on the individual, as opposed to understanding, empathy, and acceptance of worldviews other than your own. this kind of behavior seems increasingly common and downright socially acceptable with regards to these topics and a few key others—it's a fascinating phenomenon to witness. most people are mostly good people, regardless of whether they agree with you on things such as these. it probably wouldn't hurt to reflect on where such dogmatic negative generalizations about large swaths of people you've never met stem from internally, because it's not a very productive lens to view the world through (again, despite being increasingly common and socially accepted (or even expected in some cases!)).
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  It's because blatant ignorance or motivate thinking are the only possible reasons to be anti-vaxx or a climate denier in 2021. Furthermore, these ignorant or motivated beliefs are causing very direct harm to millions today and billions tomorrow. So no, there is no reason to be kind to people spreading anti-vaxx or anti-climate change propaganda. That's not to say that they should be harmed or anything like that, but it's necessary to silence and combat their "arguments" and not allow them to spew their propaganda anywhere unimpeded. Writing from a country where anti-vaxx idiots are partly responsible for the worst death toll from the 4th wave of Covid.
  - adamrezich 5y ago
    has there ever been a period of human history before where faith in scientific consensus has reached this level of widespread overt ideological zealotry? I'm racking my brain trying to think of any but I'm no historian. absolutely fascinating times to live in.

endymi0n 5y ago

See, there is still disagreement! Let's teach a balanced viewpoint here. /s "North Carolina GOP lawmakers want to require teaching 'balanced political viewpoints' in schools" — https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/north-carolina-gop-lawmakers-want-to-require-teaching-balanced-political-viewpoints-in-schools/ar-BB1fpaFw https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/north-carolina-gop-lawmake... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance

slt2021 5y ago

this is not science, they just random sampled some research papers and found that they all have consensus opinion on whether humans have effect on climate change. it is not news to anyone who reads news, as almost every week there is a research paper from another PhD student with claims of anthropogenic cause on climate change of somr sort. climate researches really should up their game in research RIGOR. I do understand that garbage like this makes it to HN front due to sensationalist and clickbait title, but so does almost every other climate paper and all of them end up being duds

dumbfoundded 5y ago
It's a literature review. Pretty common.
- slt2021 5y ago
  so they bring nothing new to the field, just rehash and repeat: "he said this, she said that..." Agree, this is pretty common for "climate research" and is one of the reasons why climate research has major credibility problems and deniers - there will be people who deny this garbage level "research" due to lack of rigor
  - skummetmaelk 5y ago
    Considering the statistical overlap between climate change deniers and religiosity, belief in natural medicines, and likelyhood to believe in conspiracy theories. Climate change deniers are not denying it based on the quality of the research. They deny because they want to believe it is false. They want to follow the controversial viewpoint. They want to question the establishment. It's not exactly a scientific endeavour.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    Literature reviews are very common in every field. The number of papers being published in any field is much larger than what researcher can possibly read. Reviews summarizing multiple papers and drawing conclusions are very valuable.

wavesounds 5y ago

If you live in the US I urge you to contact your congressional representatives and ask them to support passing a bipartisan Carbon Tax, which Romney recently said he could support[1], via budget reconciliation. Manchin has blown up the CEPP and he's against a carbon tax (clearly he's against anything that's going to hurt coal), meaning the kind of transformative climate change legislation we desperately need is going to require some republican support. The last time we had a decent chance of passing large climate change legislation was 10 years ago. It's possible we might not have this chance for another 10 years. And by then it might be too late for the planet. 1. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/mitt-romney-leans-in-on-carbon-tax-to-spur-clean-energy-technology-breakthroughs https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/energy/mitt-romney...

jpgvm 5y ago

Man this comments section is a cesspool. The reality is that consensus does play a part in science, this is because intuition also plays a large part - both in guiding experimentation but also in interpreting findings. Consensus is the mechanism used to translate scientific findings into actionable advice/recommendations/engineering. Without it nothing would ever happen. Science is always full of unknowns, consensus allows us to move forward in absence of complete information (because such a thing often doesn't exist). The means by which scientists and engineers reach consensus are very different from politicians and other soft studies. Because of the role peer review plays in the scientific community consensus is built up over time, not through discussion but rather through experimental results and verified data. Consensus is less "we sat around and decided X is true" but rather "there is an overwhelming amount of data that suggests this is true". This is often translated into models which spur further experiments to attempt to verify or disprove these models (for instance the LHC and the Higgs boson as a high profile example). So no. 99% consensus in science isn't that uncommon and no it's generally not a bad thing. A big difference is also that in science it only takes a single very compelling counter-point to significantly disrupt consensus. See here Einstein's photo electric effect or his theory of relativity - both disrupted fairly intrenched consensus. This latter point is very important because unlike scientists soft fields often struggle to break consensus even in the face of overwhelming evidence. Everyone feels like they should get an "opinion" and that scientists are just voicing "opinions". This leads to people equating the voice of relatively uninformed individuals with that of scientists. I don't know this can be resolved but if it could be it would allow society to move forward at a much faster rate.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
> Consensus is the mechanism used to translate scientific findings into actionable advice/recommendations/engineering. Without it nothing would ever happen. Science is always full of unknowns, consensus allows us to move forward in absence of complete information (because such a thing often doesn't exist) FWIW, my experiences have been the precise opposite. My colleagues never seem to have consensus about anything. But companies move forward with our recommendations, both because we're more likely to be right, and if our recommendations happen to serve the company's goals. I'm sure a bunch of people will read into this comment, but I am speaking purely about my experiences as an ML scientist. It would be valid to say that ML represents a very small fraction of the global scientific apparatus, and I certainly don't claim to know what it's like to work at CERN. It surprised me, though, how often you were right -- there often is consensus, in the sense that everyone reads about a certain technique in papers and automatically assumes it's applicable to their own situation. For example, everyone in language modeling almost universally agrees that "lower loss is better," ("loss" is a specific ML term,"). But that's only true for general language models trained on large quantities of data. If you're fine-tuning a language model, you almost never want the steepest loss slope, because it means your learning rate is too high and you'll destroy the existing knowledge. I would say that experience matters, and each situation is different. It's super tricky to make an argument that consensus is both universally common and universally good.

hosh 5y ago

Among my friends, we came to the idea that whether or not we each agree that humans caused climate change, we should still take care of the planet. There is a lot more going on than greenhouse emissions. Soil health is in many ways, more vital, and mainstream commercial farming practices degenerate our soil year after year. We make poor use of water. Ocean acidification is problematic. It is impossible to sustainably fish — regenerative kelp and fish farms are a better practice. Diversity is how we can become more resilient, and we have been making it go away because diversity is too complex. Growing and buying local, helping our neighbors will build stronger communities and resilient economies; thinking globally, systemically, and holistically allows each of us to contribute something meaningful for something greater than ourselves. We can take care of the land, of each other, and still get our fair share.

m0zg 5y ago
> thinking globally, systemically, and holistically What does this even mean in practice?
- hosh 5y ago
  See https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51947019-the-regenerative-life https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51947019-the-regenerativ...
  - MemesAndBooze 5y ago
    Nice Order Of The Nine Angeles symbol you have there
    - hosh 5y ago
      I am familiar with that order and what they do, but the symbol on the cover refers to something else and is not the same symbol.
  - m0zg 5y ago
    That's not "practice", that's a book. I'm asking what _you_, _specifically_ do to achieve your stated goal of "thinking globally, systemically, and holistically". Did you give up travel and vacations, perhaps? Get rid of your car? Stopped buying crap you don't need? Switched to locally sourced plant based diet? Moved to a smaller house in a warmer area where it doesn't need to be heated for 6 months in a year? Be as specific as you can. It's not idle curiosity, for two reasons. For one thing I dislike people who just talk about stuff, collect the online brownie points, and then don't really do anything (I'm not saying you're one of them though). For another, I'm trying to modify _my own_ lifestyle to be less carbon heavy, but without ruining my family's quality of life too much.

m0zg 5y ago

You'd literally be lynched by a mob if you were to do research to disprove any of it or in fact even question the means and methods. So I'm not surprised there's "consensus". That's not to say the consensus is incorrect here, that's just to say that it doesn't mean a whole lot. Under the normal circumstances scientists never 99% "agree" on anything.

wolverine876 5y ago
Do you have evidence of that?
- fareesh 5y ago
  I don't think the word literally was meant literally in this case
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Sure, and reading it that way, any evidence?
    - slt2021 5y ago
      such research will never get funding because of ESG mandates for companies' Boards coming from shareholders. Try to get funding for research like this and your career will be cancelled instantly
      - wolverine876 5y ago
        So no evidence.
tsimionescu 5y ago
Stop spreading this misinformation. Climate change has started as a hypothesis like any other, first proved by oil company researchers (the company proceeded to bury the research and force everyone to sign NDAs). There were many competing theories (including the default that no climate change is happening), and climate change has been consistently attacked and belittled by powerful interests for 50 years. Slowly though, the research kept trickling in and became incontrovertible, and alarming. As the question of IF became scientifically settled, funding naturally dried up for the fringe still looking for alternatives - just like funding for flat earth science is pretty dry today. This is normal and good and doesn't show bias, except towards simple scientific truths.

Sebguer 5y ago

So many people in the comments are making the exact same willfully ignorant argument that creationists make about evolution ("see, it's just a theory!") about the term of art "scientific consensus".

_pmf_ 5y ago

Consensus is a bug, not a feature. It makes science better manageable, but makes it less precise and varied.

ashtonkem 5y ago
sigh. But what if the consensus is right? Demanding diversity of opinions for the pure sake of avoiding consensus is a good way to end up producing wrong results too.
gilbetron 5y ago
So how do we make decisions based on science? Especially incredibly complicated science that can't easily be replicated? I mean, there are people who believe the earth is flat, so do we just say, "well, it could be flat, so lets never decide anything based on the idea that it is round!"

p1necone 5y ago

Has Hacker News always been full of USA style right wing cultists?

jacquesm 5y ago
No, this is a thing of the past couple of years, starting ~2016 or so. Before then it was much milder here, it's a very slow trend so easy to miss but if you've been here for a shorter period then it may seem like it has been always so.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  A problem made worse by the fact that it literally does not even require a pulse to have an account on HN. It would take minutes to add even a captcha check for account creation and maybe an hour tops to require email validation before allowing comments. They don't care. I suspect it goes even further - that making it trivial for bots and PR manipulation makes HN look a lot busier than it would be if they put effort into validating accounts.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    That's incorrect afaik. The reason why it does not require an email address is because there have been instances where very valuable information was supplied regarding company internals by 'noob' accounts, so consider that a feature. As for bots and PR manipulation: HN expends a lot of effort to reduce these, so your argument makes no sense. There is no benefit to HN to seeming 'busier', the pay off in HN is that it is a community of people that YC (the parent company of Hacker News) can tap into as the feedstock for each new batch of companies that gets launched out of YC. This means that the community is the pay-off and being 'busy' or looking busier than it really isn't in any way a requirement for that, in fact it is a distraction. The fact that you've been here only for 30 days is telling (though you may have been lurking for much longer), you probably should check your assumptions about what HN is and how it functions until you've been here a bit longer.
ashtonkem 5y ago

SlavikCA 5y ago

I see so much effort to prove, that there is "climate change" consensus, that I'm starting to be suspicious...

vegetablepotpie 5y ago
Well if you weren’t suspicious, would there be any need for the effort? Circular reasoning is fallacious.
Ardren 5y ago
You mean, suspicious of the amount of pushback against overwhelming evidence?
ashtonkem 5y ago
Gonna have to call bullshit on this one. “I believed X until <subject of article> and now I’m skeptical” is a well known bad faith rhetorical trick.

mjfl 5y ago

Consensus is self-reinforcing, by the rejection of papers that contradict dogmas. It's also relatively rare to go into "Climate Science" as a field. I would expect no more than 1 in 20 physicists becomes a "climate physicist", if that. I also feel that it does select for those who are more convicted that humans are changing the world for the worse. You need motivation, and alarm is a good one. From all this, it would not surprise me if the field is a monoculture, with human caused climate change as the central dogma. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but pretending that the consensus measure is objective in any way is definitely flat wrong.

lanevorockz 5y ago
Indeed, there is also another piece of this puzzle. PhDs became a step in the career now, so people don’t study for ground breaking research or their masterpieces. Give me a subject that has companies interested in, you get scholarships and the companies lobby to get your paper published. You barely have to do any work.
q1w2 5y ago
I find surveys like this to be useful, although I don't think the number 99% is very meaningful. You are correct that there are biases in climate research and in scientist's selection of fields, experiments, and data. ...but even still, it needs to be quantified as well as possible, that the vast majority of published science confirms (or at least does not contradict) human driven climate change.

ashtonkem 5y ago

Yes, but at this point there is no number of nines that’ll convince the skeptics; you can’t argue someone out of a position that they didn’t rationally work themselves into.

vegetablepotpie 5y ago
If your Bayesian prior starts at 0%, no amount of evidence will change that confidence.
cauliflower99 5y ago
You mean there's something wrong with being skeptical? Come one...you can't say you don't believe that 'climate change' is a political bat used to beat opponents with. Anyone who takes this topic seriously understands that the environmental problems we face today are in the 1000s. And the solution to one problem is the producer of another. Environmentalism does not equal climate change does not equal global warming does not equal planet health. This is why it is such a frustrating topic to talk about. Saying I'm skeptical about the political influences and thoughtful about the multi-variate problem means people call you a 'climate denier'. You're right - it doesn't matter how many 9's there are. I'm still going to be skeptical about this and everything else I'm told. For example, I explained my position with my sister in-law that Greta Thunberg is a child who is used by the politicians around her and that she has never had anything thoughtful to say on the subject despite her prowess in the media. Apparently, now I don't care about the environment. It's not the skeptics you need to watch out for who are capable of original thought. It's the ones who treat the term 'climate change' as their dogma and cannot handle any thoughtful debate on the issue.
- crowbahr 5y ago
  Skepticism is only useful inasmuch as it leads to research and action. Being skeptical of the politics around climate change? Totally rational, and digging will show bad faith actors. Being skeptical if the climate is changing? Completely irrational on the level of being skeptical if the Earth is a sphere or if Gravity will work tomorrow. A thought being original doesn't mean it's valuable: just that it's different.

known 5y ago

"Statistics: The only science that enables different experts using the same numbers to draw different conclusions" --Evan Esar (b. 1899)

chronolitus 5y ago

I know this topic usually devolves into flamewar, but I'm used to seeing at least a few interesting comments on climate posts on HN. Here's a few topics that would make sense for hackers to discuss: - Insider knowledge on state of green tech (carbon capture, progress in solar tech, industrial hydrogen, any energy prices analysts here?) - Anything new happening with load-balancing for renewables? Solar has been tomorrow's energy for a while, but what's the best way to store excess and rebalance today? Batteries? - Speaking of batteries: any discussion on batteries devolves into worries about lithium mining / shortages. How big is that problem, quantitatively? - A typical argument is that coal is worse than Nuclear, but everyone accounts for externalities / black swan events differently. Do modern coal plants still pollute as much? Are the claims about coal plants releasing nuclear material into the atmosphere true? - Is nuclear waste as big a problem as we keep hearing? We've been dumping old tires in a 100km2 are of kuwait for years - worse, they've been catching fire and burning away (https://insiderpaper.com/video-worlds-biggest-tire-graveyard-kuwait-fire-sulaibiya/ https://insiderpaper.com/video-worlds-biggest-tire-graveyard...). But it would be unacceptable to condemn a similar area for radioactive waste? Why / why not? - How temperature rise would / wouldn't affect the SV / Europe / Israel / Asia tech scene. Will people move? Why? How much can be mitigated with industrial solution (AC, etc)? - What are energy technologies where the widespread / mainstream / media belief and the reality are not aligned?

orwin 5y ago
> Solar has been tomorrow's energy for a while, but what's the best way to store excess and rebalance today? Reversible barrages. Some innovation in pumped gaz. ----------------- > Speaking of batteries: any discussion on batteries devolves into worries about lithium mining / shortages. How big is that problem, quantitatively? Its an issue for the price and how fast new vehicles can be produced. We will either change our battery tech or try getting lithium/cobalt from less concentrated deposits. The main issue for lithium/cobalt is how destructive it is when the mining is done in unregulated environments. Heavy metal pollution that will kill for millions of years. ---------- > Do modern coal plants still pollute as much? Not the new german one, no. Still worse than any other plant, even oil plants. ------------- > Are the claims about coal plants releasing nuclear material into the atmosphere true? Yes, but it isn't worse than natural radiation in granitic areas. And since its in the air, it wont produce enough radon to kill someone. Not a real issue. -------------- > What are energy technologies where the widespread / mainstream / media belief and the reality are not aligned? I'd guess offshore wind? I've a childhood friend who is working for total, in the NRE department, and the only reason offshore is done is subsidies and "plan" that the mast will stay 20 more years than planned. And that the maintenance crew will get cheaper.

jereze 5y ago

Now that we have a consensus, let's address the discourses justifying inaction or inadequate efforts. I just submitted a resource that I like on this topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941473 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28941473

guilhas 5y ago

Because the money is there to prove it, if the researchers start concluding the opposite from the research, the funds would cease and there would be no paper And in today's environment any professional clamming the opposite would promptly be fired from University or institution There is no more debate, all science has to be approved by the ministry of truth

helloworld11 5y ago

The one necessary thing about science, and especially science in a subject that has been highly politicized and deeply subjected to real world policy initiatives that could affect the lives of billion of people is room for debate and opinion. Yes, some of that opinion will be ignorant, foolish or based on willful lies and conspiracy theories, but much of it won't be. In either case, even the more radical opinions deserve the right to be spoken because they also allow useful debate to slowly evolve. the contrary of this is repressing all but "correct" points of view in a way that also suffocates controversial but intelligent disagreements. The COVID pandemic and its still highly debated science and politics have if anything demonstrated the importance of this even more. (Lab leak theories anyone? Or how about the debate over mask use?). This is all to say that while many denialist points of view about climate change are flatly absurd, there are many others that are also much more nuanced and worthy of entertaining. I personally don't deny that we're changing the world's climate, and that this could have catastrophic consequences down the road. However, what I also accept as possible is that for one thing, politicians will absolutely take advantage of a dramatic scientific topic to hijack its vagaries in favor of their own agendas. Also that scientists are just as fallible and subject to prestige-seeking and ideological bias as anyone else with an opportunity for self-gratification, and that the mix of both of the above can easily lead to certain still ambiguous topics being pushed forward as concrete absolutisms for the sake of specific motives that are less altruistic than they seem at first glance. Will anyone deny that these characteristics are unlikely or impossible? Then of course there are the ideological fixations around proposed solutions too, such as the absolutely anti-nuclear stances of a large number of those who also claim that climate change should be battled. Are they really open to all scientifically/technically valid remedies, or are they selectively choosing those that fit their very personal political dogmas? As for the science itself, I don't know nearly enough about it to claim any expertise, but from everything I have read, it seems extremely dubious to think that the climate isn't being changed by human activity, generally in the direction of a warming trend. However, to what extent this will devastate us down the road, or to what extent we'll be able to counteract it with policies, technologies and social/economic tendencies that we today in 2021 might not even yet be conscious of is something nobody can claim to be certain of. This doesn't mean that concrete safety measures shouldn't be promoted now, based on what we do know, but it also doesn't negate open debate or acknowledging that emotional reasoning also exists among people who fervently believe in inescapable catastrophe over the next few decades of climate change. These people might be wrong, and they certainly can't say with absolute certainty that they're completely correct. Right here on HN i've seen comments that practically go into hysterics about how we're already fucked and that our future is deeply grim because of our climate actions. Can anybody seriously say that they're reasoning soberly and with all the known science on their side? I don't think so. If I were to bet on anything, it's that the world one century from now will be so different from what we know today in so many ways that few of our modern fears, even about climate change, can be considered settled. I'd also bet that by then we will have arrived at solutions to this global climate problem that many of the more extreme fears present today aren't even considering or aware of at all. Consider the major specific extrapolations of thinkers, politicians, scientists and many among the public and media in the year 1900. How many of them have more than minor relevance today? We're no less excempt from such blind spots than they were back then.

trhway 5y ago

Greater than 99% ! That is how Chechens voted couple weeks ago for their beloved President Ramzan Kadyrov. Such numbers always look impressive. (note: i was taught climate change back in middle school in the mid 80ties in USSR, and only coming to US i discovered to my big surprise that there are still people who thinks the other way - notable though that those people are mostly well under influence of the forces/people standing to lose much from public acceptance of climate change. This is how Russia prepares for the climate change for example https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/russiaarcticbuildup_012316e.jpg https://foreignpolicy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/russiaa...)

joelbondurant 5y ago

99% consensus is the scientific standard for a fact.

sinyug 5y ago

All scientific arguments for and against AGW became irrelevant the day the debate became religious and political. The only thing that matters (at least to me) is the weaponization of this consensus by believers in the developed world against the energy infrastructure of the developing world. This phenomenon used to be called "Global Warming" till narrative builders decided that the term was inconvenient and switched over to "Climate Change." You can see Google Trends for the terms over a period of time and even predict with some accuracy as to which party is in power in any given US state based on searches for the two terms in those states.[1] Then you have the nice propagandists at Wikipedia rewrite history by pretending that the article had always been on "Climate Change."[2][3][4][5] This is how you manufacture consent. And consensus. [1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=global%20warming,climate%20change https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=g... [2] Global Warming. 21 August 2020. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_warming&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_warming&ac...) [3] Global Warming. 29 July 2019. (https://web.archive.org/web/20190730111640/https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_warming&action=history https://web.archive.org/web/20190730111640/https://en.wikipe...) [4] Climate Change. Today. (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Climate_change&dir=prev&action=history https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Climate_change&di...) [5] Climate Change. 29 July 2019. (https://web.archive.org/web/20190730191647/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change https://web.archive.org/web/20190730191647/https://en.wikipe...)

complianceowl 5y ago

I see people the politically-correct term, "human-caused". I am a gentleman; feel free to use "woman-caused climate change".

complianceowl 5y ago

fsdfsd

welcome_dragon 5y ago
I concur