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Warning. Opinion piece. Just give me my downvotes. Climate Change is a religion first. Science second. We are coming out of an ice age. People don't seem to u

Warning. Opinion piece. Just give me my downvotes. Climate Change is a religion first. Science second. We are coming out of an ice age. People don't seem to understand that. The real concern is at what rate things are changing because of human. Not are things changing. Sea level rose 420 feet before people were doing much. People like Al Gore have gotten rich peddling garbage for decades. By now we should all be dead. The famous hockey stick graph that never happened. If someone is willing to talk nuclear power then are serious and worth listening to. Everyone else is either trying to get rich, or has no critical thinking skills.

mturmon 4y ago
OK, well, here’s a good summary of the science part: https://science2017.globalchange.gov/ https://science2017.globalchange.gov/ It really doesn’t seem religious to me. I know a few people who work in this area and they are just normal physical scientists. Most of them do have some disappointment as people resist seeing this problem. I’ve seen more lectures over the last few years where your basic crusty old atmospheric scientist is saying, “people, we have to pay attention to this one.”
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > It really doesn’t seem religious to me. Here's a personal opinion, hopefully clearly presented. Scientists performing science use the scientific method to give humans the best available objective knowledge about the natural world. This aspect of science is not religious in nature and I think ~99% of HN would agree with this up to here. What science cannot do is use data to make decisions. Science cannot perform risk-management and cost-benefit analysis. You can use scientific data to perform risk-management and make a decision, but there's no objective outcome to any decision. Science qua science cannot decide which course of action is the scientifically accurate one: that concept doesn't exist. This decision-making is the aspect of reality that has become religious in nature, and that has become wrongly conflated with science. To illustrate that science is not the same thing as decision making, I'd point out that we've had plenty of occasions in real life where the American FDA and the European Medicines Agency have had different opinions on drug approvals with the same exact data. Who is following the science and who isn't following the science when they disagree on a drug approval? You can't answer that, because they both are using science, just making different decisions. Science and decision making are two different things, yet in today's world, they are often treated the same by some of the loudest and dumbest people. People in today's world scream "Trust the science" as if that's the end to the argument if you disagree with their proposed solution to some problem like climate change or taking a medication. This belief in science is what takes the form of a religious belief. There is no science that can tell humans what the right course of action is to some problem. That's an entirely different thing, yet people shout down rational skeptics about something by saying things like "the science says we must do X" as if that concept is inarguable. Intelligent, well-meaning, and rational people can agree with objective facts about climate change and still reasonably think that the economic devastation and human misery caused by trying to cut emissions as quickly as possible is not the best course of action to take. > I know a few people who work in this area and they are just normal physical scientists. For the most part, most humans working in this field are normal scientists doing normal science things, as best as possible. However, it should be noted that scientists are also people, and the financial survival instinct for them exists. Scientists are smart enough to understand the political zeitgeist and what butters their bread. Just like journalists have an incentive towards news that get the most clicks, scientists also have an incentive to veer towards research and conclusions that gets them the funding they need to live and work.
  - mturmon 4y ago
    The reason I linked the NCA above is to clarify that we have data on the severity of this problem. Everything you said above about Science versus Policy is true, as a generic matter. Problem is (as you can see in the GP comment that sparked my own comment) that a lot of HN commenters seem to view the Science piece fundamentally un-settled. And another problem with your statements above is, as I was gently pointing out, that very well-informed and deliberative scientists -- I'm talking about people who have done geophysics their whole life, and are not temperamentally given to alarm -- have become very alarmed indeed about the our lack of responsive Policy around this. So generic comments like yours (that could apply to any interface of Science and Policy, including cigarette smoking or leaded gasoline) that don't address the specifics of this particular problem come off as, well, pretty low-information. And this is not "rational skepticism", just a boring kind of generic contrarian stubbornness.
    - logicalmonster 4y ago
      > So generic comments like yours (that could apply to any interface of Science and Policy, including cigarette smoking or leaded gasoline) that don't address the specifics of this particular problem come off as, well, pretty low-information. It seems like you misread the main point of making that comment. I wasn't trying to refute the entirety of climate change in that post. The point was to try and provide one personal opinion on why climate change feels like a religion using a fairly clear understanding of the difference between the scientific method and what is not science. If climate change is too loaded of a topic for you, think in terms of Covid and what we've dealt with the past 2 years. There are smart rational people who are shouted out down for "not trusting the science" when they merely disagree with imposing a particular risk-management decision on young healthy people who face almost zero risk from Covid. Science doesn't tell anybody to take any particular medication: science merely gives us the tool to understand the possible risks and benefits to human actions. If that's a boring, low-information, generic comment, well ok then.
      - mturmon 4y ago
        I’m afraid it is such a comment. HN is over-provisioned with “just asking questions” climate skeptics who use these points. Your objections and hypotheticals are generic and do not reckon with what we do know about the specific problem of climate change. And note, despite saying you aren’t trying to question the science, the last paragraphs in your original do just that (“the financial survival instinct for them exists”).
Brometheus 4y ago
https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/
t0bia_s 4y ago
Rising average temperature around 1°C is science. Rising because of people... well, that could be religion, hypothesis, alarmism, lobby... You name it.

mturmon 4y ago

OK, well, here’s a good summary of the science part: https://science2017.globalchange.gov/ https://science2017.globalchange.gov/ It really doesn’t seem religious to me. I know a few people who work in this area and they are just normal physical scientists. Most of them do have some disappointment as people resist seeing this problem. I’ve seen more lectures over the last few years where your basic crusty old atmospheric scientist is saying, “people, we have to pay attention to this one.”

logicalmonster 4y ago
> It really doesn’t seem religious to me. Here's a personal opinion, hopefully clearly presented. Scientists performing science use the scientific method to give humans the best available objective knowledge about the natural world. This aspect of science is not religious in nature and I think ~99% of HN would agree with this up to here. What science cannot do is use data to make decisions. Science cannot perform risk-management and cost-benefit analysis. You can use scientific data to perform risk-management and make a decision, but there's no objective outcome to any decision. Science qua science cannot decide which course of action is the scientifically accurate one: that concept doesn't exist. This decision-making is the aspect of reality that has become religious in nature, and that has become wrongly conflated with science. To illustrate that science is not the same thing as decision making, I'd point out that we've had plenty of occasions in real life where the American FDA and the European Medicines Agency have had different opinions on drug approvals with the same exact data. Who is following the science and who isn't following the science when they disagree on a drug approval? You can't answer that, because they both are using science, just making different decisions. Science and decision making are two different things, yet in today's world, they are often treated the same by some of the loudest and dumbest people. People in today's world scream "Trust the science" as if that's the end to the argument if you disagree with their proposed solution to some problem like climate change or taking a medication. This belief in science is what takes the form of a religious belief. There is no science that can tell humans what the right course of action is to some problem. That's an entirely different thing, yet people shout down rational skeptics about something by saying things like "the science says we must do X" as if that concept is inarguable. Intelligent, well-meaning, and rational people can agree with objective facts about climate change and still reasonably think that the economic devastation and human misery caused by trying to cut emissions as quickly as possible is not the best course of action to take. > I know a few people who work in this area and they are just normal physical scientists. For the most part, most humans working in this field are normal scientists doing normal science things, as best as possible. However, it should be noted that scientists are also people, and the financial survival instinct for them exists. Scientists are smart enough to understand the political zeitgeist and what butters their bread. Just like journalists have an incentive towards news that get the most clicks, scientists also have an incentive to veer towards research and conclusions that gets them the funding they need to live and work.
- mturmon 4y ago
  The reason I linked the NCA above is to clarify that we have data on the severity of this problem. Everything you said above about Science versus Policy is true, as a generic matter. Problem is (as you can see in the GP comment that sparked my own comment) that a lot of HN commenters seem to view the Science piece fundamentally un-settled. And another problem with your statements above is, as I was gently pointing out, that very well-informed and deliberative scientists -- I'm talking about people who have done geophysics their whole life, and are not temperamentally given to alarm -- have become very alarmed indeed about the our lack of responsive Policy around this. So generic comments like yours (that could apply to any interface of Science and Policy, including cigarette smoking or leaded gasoline) that don't address the specifics of this particular problem come off as, well, pretty low-information. And this is not "rational skepticism", just a boring kind of generic contrarian stubbornness.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    > So generic comments like yours (that could apply to any interface of Science and Policy, including cigarette smoking or leaded gasoline) that don't address the specifics of this particular problem come off as, well, pretty low-information. It seems like you misread the main point of making that comment. I wasn't trying to refute the entirety of climate change in that post. The point was to try and provide one personal opinion on why climate change feels like a religion using a fairly clear understanding of the difference between the scientific method and what is not science. If climate change is too loaded of a topic for you, think in terms of Covid and what we've dealt with the past 2 years. There are smart rational people who are shouted out down for "not trusting the science" when they merely disagree with imposing a particular risk-management decision on young healthy people who face almost zero risk from Covid. Science doesn't tell anybody to take any particular medication: science merely gives us the tool to understand the possible risks and benefits to human actions. If that's a boring, low-information, generic comment, well ok then.
    - mturmon 4y ago
      I’m afraid it is such a comment. HN is over-provisioned with “just asking questions” climate skeptics who use these points. Your objections and hypotheticals are generic and do not reckon with what we do know about the specific problem of climate change. And note, despite saying you aren’t trying to question the science, the last paragraphs in your original do just that (“the financial survival instinct for them exists”).

Brometheus 4y ago

https://xkcd.com/1732/ https://xkcd.com/1732/

t0bia_s 4y ago

Rising average temperature around 1°C is science. Rising because of people... well, that could be religion, hypothesis, alarmism, lobby... You name it.