
Why Climate Skeptics Are Wrong - malkia
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-climate-skeptics-are-wrong/
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lcuff
It is distressing to see the post flagged, and only get 36 upvotes as of 6
June, when the article on Alex Honnold is currently going through the roof
(473 and counting). It makes me wonder if people have read the posting
guidelines at all. Mainstream media is going to be all over Alex Honnold, and
it's fun, but ultimately fluff.

After going to University in the '70s when global cooling was a concern, and
after seeing Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", I undertook a journey: I was
willing to be persuaded either way. I read pro and con media, and followed the
links to their cited scientific articles. The evidence is overwhelming, as the
Scientific American article says. But many intelligent people don't "believe"
in global warming. This by itself is a hideously dangerous and perplexing
problem.

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jriot
Part of me believes what really is causing the most issues are the proposed
solutions to fix climate change. Most of the recommendations I have read
insist on raising taxes. I will never vote yes on any tax increase, as I don't
trust our politicians enough to see them utilizing the extra tax revenue
wisely e.g., R&D for renewable energy etc... Climate change is real, but we
can't tax our way to a solution.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
You don't really need to raise taxes, just shift them around, so you take some
tax away from income and move it to carbon for instance.

The difficulty is you need to do this in a coordinated way otherwise you just
end up shifting your carbon intensive industries overseas. This is why
reaching a global agreement is so important.

The R&D thing is a red herring, business will respond to the economic
situation it finds itself in.

~~~
Sunset
Have fun convincing China to commit economic suicide.

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pirocks
I fail to see what this article adds beside "climate skeptics are wrong", in
paragraph form. Am I missing something?

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PhilWright
The point of the article is that is more than one path to the mainstream
beliefs on climate change.

If you have a single path of research that leads to a conclusion then you have
a valid but relatively weak conclusion. But if you have five separate paths of
research all leading to the same conclusion then you have a much stronger
case. The article claims there are many such independent paths to the
mainstream conclusions on climate change. It also concludes that the skeptics
do not have even a single path of research that leads to position of the
skeptics.

It is like evolution. You can conclude evolution from just comparative
biology. But you can also get the same conclusion from genetics. They are
independent of each other as research paths but give the same answer. That
increases confidence in the conclusion.

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Fej
Neat little article, preaching to the choir unfortunately. I wonder if there's
a single climate denier around here.

Useful to send to others, though.

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aaron695
I am a climate denier.

Happy to agree with AGW but this is NOT what climate denial is about.

This is why this article is fake.

What global warming is about, not the religious babble in articles like this,
is how bad is it? and how bad is dealing with it?

Then as a scientist and logical person go down the best route.

And the evidence to me is clear, the best route is to not deal with it. Hence
we once again start a religious war in threads like this.

How to deal with these religious wars is unclear, but if you want to really
help the world, solving this would be an amazing start.

A large part of the population will always be religious, be it about the gods
or GMO's or Global warming. How does one solve these issues? This is really
where it's at.

~~~
polotics
On HN you really get the hard edge of denialism, probably well financed
shills, very interesting.

Clearly the massive non-sequitur in the statement below is super interesting
obfuscation: the article states that global warming is real, so how can you
call it fake if you agree that it is real?

(quote) "Happy to agree with AGW but this is NOT what climate denial is about.
This is why this article is fake." (end quote)

As I understand it this sleight of words is used just for the confusion,
trying to get readers into fast-thinking less rational mode.

Then the money shot, delivered with no analysis, no model, and crucially, no
evidence:

(quote) "And the evidence to me is clear, the best route is to not deal with
it." (end quote)

We are not talking about climate warming, but its direct consequence which is
climate disruption, a few degrees warming leading to much higher likelihood of
extreme weather events, this has not been news since at least Katrina and the
california drought & fires.

Not dealing with it is not an option when your house is burning. Implictly
there is the hope that somebody else's house or lake gets hit, but for the US
it's no dice, there are massive fragilities everywhere. (Jersey, NYC subway,
...)

Carbon gets gigantic subsidies, not just direct but also in military
budgetting for oil supply protection.

Please go to www.realclimate.org

~~~
pale-hands
You addressed the substance (or not) of aaron695's post far better than I did,
but I'm prepared to believe that the post is sincere, absent any actual
evidence of shilling. (See also, Trump's repeated insinuation that protestors
must be paid).

I don't doubt that there is a shit-ton of political trolling, which degrades
discourse even if it does not persuade.

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singularity2001
I thought this discussion was settled long ago. But then people thought
Germans were 'cultured' in 1933.

