7 ms·

As a lay-bystander to the climate debate, I get a little spooked when I see comments like this. Like 99.9% of people, the science of complex climate systems is

As a lay-bystander to the climate debate, I get a little spooked when I see comments like this. Like 99.9% of people, the science of complex climate systems is beyond me as are the de facto black box models that project climate change. Instead I use “appears in a credible journal” as a basis for trusting the apparent direction of travel and I’m disconcerted when I see that proxy challenged. I also, I am somewhat sorry to say, likely to discount anonymous comments as credible as there is so much propaganda in this space. That’s not to say I don’t understand the challenge of modeling complex systems, but want to point out that one of the most frustrating things about the climate debate is that the battling sides require us to take on trust what they tell us for some very big changes. It’s difficult. Question for the community: how does one navigate such uncertainty?

sigspec 3y ago
Bourbon
- Biologist123 3y ago
  Nice :-)
oceanthrowaway 3y ago
To me this is the great utility of the IPCC reports. If you look at the full report you can find subsections on many aspects of climate change and a discussion of the state of the field complete with citations compiled by an expert.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  How would a layperson like myself judge what's in the IPCC report? The predictions are so dramatic that we have to act now and can't wait and see how it turns out. How is it different from this submission here?
  - oceanthrowaway 3y ago
    I think if you read the full IPCC report you will see they are far from dramatic. Often news articles on the reports include calls to action (which I am all for given the path we are on). I believe the IPCC may also issue a statement about the report as a whole on release. However, if you read subsections of the full report you will see each domain specialist assign low medium or high confidence to each potential climate outcome. They also include useful descriptions of the physical mechanisms behind many climate phenomenon
  - refulgentis 3y ago
    When you frame it that way, your question is "how can $NONEXPERTS confirm $EXPERTS" First and foremost: read. Second: don't demand certitude and table the idea that there's a universal judgement. Think: am I asking for an up/down vote on a conversation, or on an assertion? Uncertainty can't always be driven down to 0. People usually expect this from other fields and yet understand when it is silly in their own field. (imagine: climate scientist forum noting cosmic rays, asking how any system can possibly be secure given memory safety causes security issues, and cosmic rays can flip memory bits, then hand-wringing about how they can even figure out what software research to trust) This thread is itself a good example: OP has no issue with the research, or type of research, or anything, just is concerned how laypeople might believe it is certain and confirmed because it is in Nature. The paper itself makes no such claim, as the OP goes to great lengths to explain (c.f. it is statistical model)
  - mikub 3y ago
    There is a great podcast that goes through the whole IPCC report in something like 70 episodes. It's in german though, so not quiet sure how helpfull it could be for you, but maybee there is something similar in english. The podcast mentioned is "https://dasklima.podigee.io/ https://dasklima.podigee.io/" . Discussion about IPCC goes on until episode 77, after that they discuss some broader topics.
    - barbazoo 3y ago
      I happen to speak German, thank you!
- timmg 3y ago
  Speaking of which, I recently saw this: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-ipcc-actually-says-about https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-ipcc-actually-... which is kinda a review of what IPCC report says about "extreme weather". For me, this summary is a lot different than the way I see this aspect talked about in the media (and on Twitter, etc) even by climate scientists.
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    This article isn't great. He says "the IPCC says we won't see extreme weather until 2100.... (except for extreme heat and cold which the IPCC says is already here)" Okay? A lot of the discourse is explicitly about the heat and cold.
    - Auracle 3y ago
      But every hurricane season we hear it, it’s been talked about with the Canadian wildfires, locally in Minnesota they’ve been blaming our recent droughts on it, etc. It wasn’t all that long ago that interviewed climate scientists would say that you couldn’t attribute individual events to climate change. Now they constantly do. I feel like I hear it every other time I tune in to NPR.
      - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
        I'm definitely not an expert, but my understanding is that it is impossible to point to one single event and say climate change is responsible for that event. Weather is dynamic, you know? But climate change does account for there being more events (more hurricanes, more days of record breaking temperatures, more wildfires, etc). And as someone on the west coast who now assumes there will be at least one or two weeks of miserable wildfire smoke every summer, I think that impact is worth taking seriously today.
      - tremon 3y ago
        you couldn’t attribute individual events to climate change. Now they constantly do "constantly"? It's ironic that you put these two statements together like they somehow prove your point, while you're actually undermining your own position. Here's what the climate scientists have been saying: "you can't attribute individual weather events directly to climate change. However, climate change will increase the likelihood of extreme weather events occurring". So, if the media (note, not scientists) is "constantly" talking about extreme weather events, that does seem to prove that extreme weather events are happening more often, right? Which kinda confirms what the scientists were predicting all along? It's not the individual events that prove climate change: it is the pattern of "constant" extreme weather events.
whalesalad 3y ago
critical thinking skills, don't believe everything that you see, perform your own independent investigation of truth.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  > critical thinking skills, don't believe everything that you see, perform your own independent investigation of truth. How would one possibly do that here?
  - boondoggle16 3y ago
    Personally, I just use my instincts. If my instincts are wrong, well, there's always another lifeform that will evolve someday, even if that's billions of years from now. Hopefully they will be smarter than myself. If not, a few billion more years and we may get another shot...
  - ke88y 3y ago
    Indeed. Even with an adjacent PhD and a decade of adjacent research experience, it took me years to learn the very basics of climate modeling. And there's no way I can keep up with the literature. Also, I don't have access to a supercomputer (ok, well, I do, but I can't both keep my day job and also use it for re-running climate models when I have a question I want to ask myself about them). People say "critical thinking" and "do your own research" a lot, and I always wonder what the fuck they think "research" means. Apparently not what I think it means! Or perhaps they do not need sleep, do not have to work for a living, do not have family, have access to huge teams of assistants, and own a world-class supercomputer to help satiate their skepticism, in which case, good for them :)
jacquesm 3y ago
Like you would any other thing that is outside your circle of influence: kick it out of your circle of concern because you aren't realistically speaking geared up to move yourself into a position where you do have influence. If you don't you end up with the global equivalent of a burn-out and it might start to affect your ability to make decisions about things that you do have influence over because it is paralyzing to be confronted with such overwhelming looking possible catastrophe in your life time. Treat it like the weather prediction for next month, if it happens it happens and then you can react. If it starts to show up in the weather prediction for tomorrow it is time to factor it into your present day decisions.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway290 3y ago
  As always I disagree... This is the attitude that "people in charge will do something for you, and if they don't I guess we'll cope" that is undemocratic and breeds passivity. if you are concerned about something it does not mean you must be non stop stressed or forever abandon your life for single cause. You can be concerned and act in constructive ways (lead by example, talk about it, raise the issue, vote, etc), making strategic sacrifices but also living life. In fact you will probably be more satisfied this way than if you just felt you can't do anything and tried to not think about the white elephant. And it is the only way things change...
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    No, it is not that attitude at all. It is simply recognizing that there are some things that you will not be able to influence directly. The only time when you have a fractional input on this is at the voting booth and even there the chance is that climate change will not be expressly put on the ballot but you get a mixture of components that you will be able to locally influence. But that sort of mechanism isn't well suited to deal with global problems. Global problems require global coordination and for everybody to play ball. For a variety of reasons (some good, some bad) this isn't going to happen. Climate change is fact. The consequences of climate change are already visible all over the globe. And yet: as long as there is money to be made by industry, wars rage all over the place and various possible checkpoints are passed no single individual that is wondering what they can personally do about it is going to make a shred of a difference by worrying about it to the point that it affects their day-to-day affairs. Let me be blunt: the time to tackle climate change for real was when we first became aware of it. But all of the above inertia pretty much guaranteed and continues to guarantee that we will not act on a scale where it does matter until it is much, much too late. This year many people will die as a result of climate change. They have no voice but they are affected in the most drastic way possible. Next year it will be more and so on. Until the developed part of the world, and in particular the people in power in the developed part of the world are going to be personally and inescapably affected you're along for the ride. If this particular thing concerns you and you are not non-stop stressed that only means that you haven't understood it yet.
refulgentis 3y ago
Welcoming nuance, reading the whole thing, and not venturing conclusions as a laymen. This thread is a good example: the person you're replying to isn't saying it's bad work, or that the work claims certitude. In fact, it disclaims it, it's a statistical model. It's just that pop "scientists" may overestimate it its in Nature and people don't read.
godelski 3y ago
> Question for the community: how does one navigate such uncertainty? Not climate scientist, but researcher in ML (another highly hyped and arguably more noisy field). After Bourbon, the hard truth is expertise + don't. Unfortunately journals/conferences/venues are an extremely noisy mechanism which in general aren't realistically much better than arxiv (at least over here). Peer review isn't journals/conferences, it is peers reading and evaluating the works. Reviewers are doing a service and often not giving a work significant time as they got other stuff to do. The only real way to know if a paper is valid or not is to be an expert in the subject matter (more focused than the field) and to read it __and the code__. All too often it is a nuanced point that is the crux of a paper, and would be entirely missed if you're not deep in that subcommunity. I know this answer sucks, but that's what it is. Fwiw, I wouldn't realistically change your strategy as a layman. It's probably the best you got. Maybe only thing is don't think "journal publication == 100% true" but rather "journal publication == probably right." The process is noisy and there's no way around this.
- refulgentis 3y ago
  Can you explain what Bourbon is? People are making one-off references to it but I can't find a search query that results in anything relevant to climate or scientific scandals
  - ke88y 3y ago
    He's saying to pour yourself a stiff drink ;-)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - elSidCampeador 3y ago
      Is the hard truth different before bourbon, then? (tongue firmly in cheek)
      - godelski 3y ago
vkou 3y ago
> Instead I use “appears in a credible journal” as a basis for trusting the apparent direction of travel Using that is like using 'Someone raised a concern in a meeting' as a basis for believing something. Anyone can raise a concern, or publish a paper. What matters is whether or not other people are convinced by the paper. Consensus. Use 'scientific consensus' as your weather-vane. (PS. The scientific consensus on climate change is 'things aren't looking great, we need to turn the bus around, we aren't turning the bus around'.) ... Or go learn and become an expert in the field for yourself. It should only take ~20,000 hours of making a lot of mistakes along the way.
bjourne 3y ago
Look at it this way. The link to the article appeared on HN 15:59:54. braaannigan's comment appeared on 17:07:56. Thus, it took this HN user not more than 60 minutes to conclude that this article is of low quality and should not have been published in Nature. Nature's editors, the article's authors, and its peer reviewers disagree. braaannigan is anonymous and do not put their reputation on the line. Nature's editors and the article's authors do. If appeal to authority is a valid argument then I believe one side wins this debate in a landslide.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Liam may be anonymous to you but he's not to me, he's also not anonymous on HN (he posts under a very close and obvious variation of his real name here) but apparently doesn't go out of his way to 'build a brand' or 'attract a following'. He really is what he says he is. Maybe tone it down a bit, especially because you are anonymous and apparently believe that is important?
- ke88y 3y ago
  The article was posted to arxiv in April. Believe it or not, >99% of the time I see a paper from my field on HN I've read it months before it's posted, and sometimes been aware of the research for up to a year before it's posted. Also, the criticism is primarily a comment on methods (stats vs physical models) which can be based on lots of consideration and experience outside the context of any particular paper. E.g. I can tell you that you've probably used the wrong optimization algorithm for particular task without spending much more than an hour glancing through your problem formulation and results. Doing that without the benefit of decades of experience would require weeks or months, but with experience I can make that determination quite quickly given a detailed write-up. (FWIW: I think dynamical physics-based models are probably over-emphasized in climate science consensus, but I'm admittedly a complete novice whose opinion you shouldn't trust.)
- DanHulton 3y ago
  > If appeal to authority is a valid argument Well, thankfully it is not. There's no need for one side or the other to "win," especially at this point. Instead, likely, debate will continue until a more-nuanced view is better understood and accurately disseminated. (Not necessarily a view "in the middle." Sometimes one side is just Right, Full Stop. But a more-nuanced view when there's strong disagreement on both sides is usually helpful for more people to understand _why_ there's disagreement.)
ke88y 3y ago
FWIW and IME: not by trying to reduce the uncertainty through study. I spent a few years studying climate models. I have lots of background in mathematical modeling and numerics, but not climate per se, so this was a big undertaking but possible. I have to admit that -- although I can now read and understand papers better -- it hasn't been particularly illuminating. The global climate is changing. The long-term impact of these changes is difficult to know, particularly because there are many plausible bifurcation points. Beyond some basics, the TL;DR is "we just don't know exactly what will or won't happen, or when, but it's probably not going to be good for most people on the planet and things are probably going to start getting bad within 1-2 hundred years". In my mind it's really just a case where being a conservative is the best approach.
- chimprich 3y ago
  > things are probably going to start getting bad within 1-2 hundred years That's a very strange take when we're seeing serious consequences of climate change now.
7952 3y ago
Never convinced that models are a good basis for this kind of debate. It just presents a world in which we don't have agency over the climate.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  We collectively do, we individually hardly.
chiefalchemist 3y ago
> Question for the community: how does one navigate such uncertainty? This is one of the key reasons I come to HN. Yes, for the news, obviously ;) But mostly for the various insights on that news.

sigspec 3y ago

Bourbon

Biologist123 3y ago
Nice :-)

oceanthrowaway 3y ago

To me this is the great utility of the IPCC reports. If you look at the full report you can find subsections on many aspects of climate change and a discussion of the state of the field complete with citations compiled by an expert.

barbazoo 3y ago
How would a layperson like myself judge what's in the IPCC report? The predictions are so dramatic that we have to act now and can't wait and see how it turns out. How is it different from this submission here?
- oceanthrowaway 3y ago
  I think if you read the full IPCC report you will see they are far from dramatic. Often news articles on the reports include calls to action (which I am all for given the path we are on). I believe the IPCC may also issue a statement about the report as a whole on release. However, if you read subsections of the full report you will see each domain specialist assign low medium or high confidence to each potential climate outcome. They also include useful descriptions of the physical mechanisms behind many climate phenomenon
- refulgentis 3y ago
  When you frame it that way, your question is "how can $NONEXPERTS confirm $EXPERTS" First and foremost: read. Second: don't demand certitude and table the idea that there's a universal judgement. Think: am I asking for an up/down vote on a conversation, or on an assertion? Uncertainty can't always be driven down to 0. People usually expect this from other fields and yet understand when it is silly in their own field. (imagine: climate scientist forum noting cosmic rays, asking how any system can possibly be secure given memory safety causes security issues, and cosmic rays can flip memory bits, then hand-wringing about how they can even figure out what software research to trust) This thread is itself a good example: OP has no issue with the research, or type of research, or anything, just is concerned how laypeople might believe it is certain and confirmed because it is in Nature. The paper itself makes no such claim, as the OP goes to great lengths to explain (c.f. it is statistical model)
- mikub 3y ago
  There is a great podcast that goes through the whole IPCC report in something like 70 episodes. It's in german though, so not quiet sure how helpfull it could be for you, but maybee there is something similar in english. The podcast mentioned is "https://dasklima.podigee.io/ https://dasklima.podigee.io/" . Discussion about IPCC goes on until episode 77, after that they discuss some broader topics.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    I happen to speak German, thank you!
timmg 3y ago
Speaking of which, I recently saw this: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-ipcc-actually-says-about https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-ipcc-actually-... which is kinda a review of what IPCC report says about "extreme weather". For me, this summary is a lot different than the way I see this aspect talked about in the media (and on Twitter, etc) even by climate scientists.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  This article isn't great. He says "the IPCC says we won't see extreme weather until 2100.... (except for extreme heat and cold which the IPCC says is already here)" Okay? A lot of the discourse is explicitly about the heat and cold.
  - Auracle 3y ago
    But every hurricane season we hear it, it’s been talked about with the Canadian wildfires, locally in Minnesota they’ve been blaming our recent droughts on it, etc. It wasn’t all that long ago that interviewed climate scientists would say that you couldn’t attribute individual events to climate change. Now they constantly do. I feel like I hear it every other time I tune in to NPR.
    - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
      I'm definitely not an expert, but my understanding is that it is impossible to point to one single event and say climate change is responsible for that event. Weather is dynamic, you know? But climate change does account for there being more events (more hurricanes, more days of record breaking temperatures, more wildfires, etc). And as someone on the west coast who now assumes there will be at least one or two weeks of miserable wildfire smoke every summer, I think that impact is worth taking seriously today.
    - tremon 3y ago
      you couldn’t attribute individual events to climate change. Now they constantly do "constantly"? It's ironic that you put these two statements together like they somehow prove your point, while you're actually undermining your own position. Here's what the climate scientists have been saying: "you can't attribute individual weather events directly to climate change. However, climate change will increase the likelihood of extreme weather events occurring". So, if the media (note, not scientists) is "constantly" talking about extreme weather events, that does seem to prove that extreme weather events are happening more often, right? Which kinda confirms what the scientists were predicting all along? It's not the individual events that prove climate change: it is the pattern of "constant" extreme weather events.

whalesalad 3y ago

critical thinking skills, don't believe everything that you see, perform your own independent investigation of truth.

barbazoo 3y ago
> critical thinking skills, don't believe everything that you see, perform your own independent investigation of truth. How would one possibly do that here?
- boondoggle16 3y ago
  Personally, I just use my instincts. If my instincts are wrong, well, there's always another lifeform that will evolve someday, even if that's billions of years from now. Hopefully they will be smarter than myself. If not, a few billion more years and we may get another shot...
- ke88y 3y ago
  Indeed. Even with an adjacent PhD and a decade of adjacent research experience, it took me years to learn the very basics of climate modeling. And there's no way I can keep up with the literature. Also, I don't have access to a supercomputer (ok, well, I do, but I can't both keep my day job and also use it for re-running climate models when I have a question I want to ask myself about them). People say "critical thinking" and "do your own research" a lot, and I always wonder what the fuck they think "research" means. Apparently not what I think it means! Or perhaps they do not need sleep, do not have to work for a living, do not have family, have access to huge teams of assistants, and own a world-class supercomputer to help satiate their skepticism, in which case, good for them :)

jacquesm 3y ago

Like you would any other thing that is outside your circle of influence: kick it out of your circle of concern because you aren't realistically speaking geared up to move yourself into a position where you do have influence. If you don't you end up with the global equivalent of a burn-out and it might start to affect your ability to make decisions about things that you do have influence over because it is paralyzing to be confronted with such overwhelming looking possible catastrophe in your life time. Treat it like the weather prediction for next month, if it happens it happens and then you can react. If it starts to show up in the weather prediction for tomorrow it is time to factor it into your present day decisions.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throwaway290 3y ago
As always I disagree... This is the attitude that "people in charge will do something for you, and if they don't I guess we'll cope" that is undemocratic and breeds passivity. if you are concerned about something it does not mean you must be non stop stressed or forever abandon your life for single cause. You can be concerned and act in constructive ways (lead by example, talk about it, raise the issue, vote, etc), making strategic sacrifices but also living life. In fact you will probably be more satisfied this way than if you just felt you can't do anything and tried to not think about the white elephant. And it is the only way things change...
- jacquesm 3y ago
  No, it is not that attitude at all. It is simply recognizing that there are some things that you will not be able to influence directly. The only time when you have a fractional input on this is at the voting booth and even there the chance is that climate change will not be expressly put on the ballot but you get a mixture of components that you will be able to locally influence. But that sort of mechanism isn't well suited to deal with global problems. Global problems require global coordination and for everybody to play ball. For a variety of reasons (some good, some bad) this isn't going to happen. Climate change is fact. The consequences of climate change are already visible all over the globe. And yet: as long as there is money to be made by industry, wars rage all over the place and various possible checkpoints are passed no single individual that is wondering what they can personally do about it is going to make a shred of a difference by worrying about it to the point that it affects their day-to-day affairs. Let me be blunt: the time to tackle climate change for real was when we first became aware of it. But all of the above inertia pretty much guaranteed and continues to guarantee that we will not act on a scale where it does matter until it is much, much too late. This year many people will die as a result of climate change. They have no voice but they are affected in the most drastic way possible. Next year it will be more and so on. Until the developed part of the world, and in particular the people in power in the developed part of the world are going to be personally and inescapably affected you're along for the ride. If this particular thing concerns you and you are not non-stop stressed that only means that you haven't understood it yet.

refulgentis 3y ago

Welcoming nuance, reading the whole thing, and not venturing conclusions as a laymen. This thread is a good example: the person you're replying to isn't saying it's bad work, or that the work claims certitude. In fact, it disclaims it, it's a statistical model. It's just that pop "scientists" may overestimate it its in Nature and people don't read.

godelski 3y ago

> Question for the community: how does one navigate such uncertainty? Not climate scientist, but researcher in ML (another highly hyped and arguably more noisy field). After Bourbon, the hard truth is expertise + don't. Unfortunately journals/conferences/venues are an extremely noisy mechanism which in general aren't realistically much better than arxiv (at least over here). Peer review isn't journals/conferences, it is peers reading and evaluating the works. Reviewers are doing a service and often not giving a work significant time as they got other stuff to do. The only real way to know if a paper is valid or not is to be an expert in the subject matter (more focused than the field) and to read it __and the code__. All too often it is a nuanced point that is the crux of a paper, and would be entirely missed if you're not deep in that subcommunity. I know this answer sucks, but that's what it is. Fwiw, I wouldn't realistically change your strategy as a layman. It's probably the best you got. Maybe only thing is don't think "journal publication == 100% true" but rather "journal publication == probably right." The process is noisy and there's no way around this.

refulgentis 3y ago
Can you explain what Bourbon is? People are making one-off references to it but I can't find a search query that results in anything relevant to climate or scientific scandals
- ke88y 3y ago
  He's saying to pour yourself a stiff drink ;-)
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - elSidCampeador 3y ago
    Is the hard truth different before bourbon, then? (tongue firmly in cheek)
    - godelski 3y ago

vkou 3y ago

> Instead I use “appears in a credible journal” as a basis for trusting the apparent direction of travel Using that is like using 'Someone raised a concern in a meeting' as a basis for believing something. Anyone can raise a concern, or publish a paper. What matters is whether or not other people are convinced by the paper. Consensus. Use 'scientific consensus' as your weather-vane. (PS. The scientific consensus on climate change is 'things aren't looking great, we need to turn the bus around, we aren't turning the bus around'.) ... Or go learn and become an expert in the field for yourself. It should only take ~20,000 hours of making a lot of mistakes along the way.

bjourne 3y ago

Look at it this way. The link to the article appeared on HN 15:59:54. braaannigan's comment appeared on 17:07:56. Thus, it took this HN user not more than 60 minutes to conclude that this article is of low quality and should not have been published in Nature. Nature's editors, the article's authors, and its peer reviewers disagree. braaannigan is anonymous and do not put their reputation on the line. Nature's editors and the article's authors do. If appeal to authority is a valid argument then I believe one side wins this debate in a landslide.

jacquesm 3y ago
Liam may be anonymous to you but he's not to me, he's also not anonymous on HN (he posts under a very close and obvious variation of his real name here) but apparently doesn't go out of his way to 'build a brand' or 'attract a following'. He really is what he says he is. Maybe tone it down a bit, especially because you are anonymous and apparently believe that is important?
ke88y 3y ago
The article was posted to arxiv in April. Believe it or not, >99% of the time I see a paper from my field on HN I've read it months before it's posted, and sometimes been aware of the research for up to a year before it's posted. Also, the criticism is primarily a comment on methods (stats vs physical models) which can be based on lots of consideration and experience outside the context of any particular paper. E.g. I can tell you that you've probably used the wrong optimization algorithm for particular task without spending much more than an hour glancing through your problem formulation and results. Doing that without the benefit of decades of experience would require weeks or months, but with experience I can make that determination quite quickly given a detailed write-up. (FWIW: I think dynamical physics-based models are probably over-emphasized in climate science consensus, but I'm admittedly a complete novice whose opinion you shouldn't trust.)
DanHulton 3y ago
> If appeal to authority is a valid argument Well, thankfully it is not. There's no need for one side or the other to "win," especially at this point. Instead, likely, debate will continue until a more-nuanced view is better understood and accurately disseminated. (Not necessarily a view "in the middle." Sometimes one side is just Right, Full Stop. But a more-nuanced view when there's strong disagreement on both sides is usually helpful for more people to understand _why_ there's disagreement.)

ke88y 3y ago

FWIW and IME: not by trying to reduce the uncertainty through study. I spent a few years studying climate models. I have lots of background in mathematical modeling and numerics, but not climate per se, so this was a big undertaking but possible. I have to admit that -- although I can now read and understand papers better -- it hasn't been particularly illuminating. The global climate is changing. The long-term impact of these changes is difficult to know, particularly because there are many plausible bifurcation points. Beyond some basics, the TL;DR is "we just don't know exactly what will or won't happen, or when, but it's probably not going to be good for most people on the planet and things are probably going to start getting bad within 1-2 hundred years". In my mind it's really just a case where being a conservative is the best approach.

chimprich 3y ago
> things are probably going to start getting bad within 1-2 hundred years That's a very strange take when we're seeing serious consequences of climate change now.

7952 3y ago

Never convinced that models are a good basis for this kind of debate. It just presents a world in which we don't have agency over the climate.

jacquesm 3y ago
We collectively do, we individually hardly.

chiefalchemist 3y ago

> Question for the community: how does one navigate such uncertainty? This is one of the key reasons I come to HN. Yes, for the news, obviously ;) But mostly for the various insights on that news.