Your comment is a classic phase-2 voter-upper, which was sitting at the top of the thread until I marked it off topic. Apologies for quoting myself, but: After that first wave of comments, we frequently see a second wave of comments objecting in a reflexive way to the first wave. Although they take the opposing position—defending the article and criticizing the comments—it's the same contrarian dynamic, the same mechanism, driving them. Usually the second wave gets upvoted the most, leading to the paradox of the top comment in a thread expressing how bad the thread is, or the most popular comment expressing how wrong the populace is.
Once this subthread was marked off topic, which lowers it on the page, one sees that the top subthreads are all pretty thoughtful. In other words, once you account for the contrarian dynamic (first wave of dismissive objections, second angry wave dismissing the dismissals and getting voted to the top), HN is doing reasonably well in this case. The contrarian dynamic happens in general; it has nothing to do specifically with climate, any more than with race (which was the context in the thread I just linked to).
Lot's of low effort contrarianism in just about every thread is what's happening.
Genuinely, I think HN is now worse than reddit, only reddit has some actual funny/entertaining comments while HN is just... I don't know low effort tedium pretending to be insight?
Are you serious?? There's no way HN is worse than reddit...the front page of reddit for me has about 1/3 twitter posts, 1/3 memes, and 1/3 teenage-culture references. This is not funny or entertaining...there are maybe 5-10% of posts MAX that I find enjoyable...only if I head to r/aww will I find genuinely worthwhile content.
The worst comments are of the "just asking questions!" type. The asker will preface it with an apology about them being "genuinely curious", and then continue by stating their "concerns" about how the established and agreed upon consensus was reached, and say they "couldn't help but notice" how the "other side" gets "suppressed/censored".
This type of concern-trolling is straight out of grassroots propaganda rulebook (which the asker is either consciously following, or has been a target and victim of themselves), and it's quite depressing how many posters here fall for it and engage the asker in good faith.
I recently learned that some people call these comments and posts "JAQing off"; such a term isn't going to change anyone's mind, but at least there's something to sadly smirk about when I see the same bad-faith questions posted for the umpteenth time.
That doesn't even accurately reflect this current thread. It's just that you're more likely to notice what you dislike.
What's going on here is the afterimage effect. People's general impressions of HN are an afterimage of the things they saw and disliked, which burn deeper into the retina.
Skepticism is healthy and is the essential posture of the Scientific Mind, and is not remotely the same as denial. The cherry picked time series used by the Met are clearly 'bad science' in the name of something 'ostensibly good'. FYI the intellectual authoritarians are much scarier than the skeptics, usually, in the long run. I wonder if this discussion should be more about communications strategies than material science.
"Climate change denialism" is a very broad stroke.
This term is always includes not only actual deniers of climate change (rising average surface temperatures), but a lot of other adjacent things, like "why", and "with what effect", and "effective solutions."
To the casual observer it it looks a "science cult." You either believe and abide by it and all its tenants or you're branded a denier, an unbeliever, a heretic.
Not a healthy way to look at science, especially when inevitabley some one thing is later shown to be incorrect and your faith comes crashing down.
Yes imagine we finally get rid of fossil fuel and live in a future with cleaner air and renewable energy everywhere and it turns out that global warming would have killed only one third of the ecosphere instead of the majority. Would be terrible.
The costs seem to be on the order of single digit percentages of global gdp for twenty or thirty years. That doesn't seem too expensive even if you only give a small chance to the IPCC being remotely right.
Exactly right. There are prophets, child saviors, required beliefs that are not to be questioned. Of course it looks like a religion from the outside! It's almost like this was done on purpose to become a wedge issue for one political side. Not a healthy way to look at science at all!
God forbid someone should say "I don't agree that we have enough information to establish a global tax policy given the inaccuracy of previous economic models" - they must be a denier!
It takes away from the real hard work people do when a Swedish teenager is paraded around with a scowl and a waving finger that points at everyone but China. I think it's a mistake and sets the whole work back, but what do I know!?
When it's really about science and not taxes/power, I think more people will accept the ideas.
They really are hyper triggered by Greta. Remarkable.
You know she's one voice out of literally millions arguing that we should do something about climate change? Technically Peta throwing paint at people and ecoterrorists are "in our camp," does that all detract from the facts of climate change?
If it's only about the science, and the science has been settled for a decade, why do we seem to be getting nowhere? Might there be more than science involved?
> Seems some people simply reject that because the commonly proposed next steps go against their ideology.
It may seem that way, and to some degree it almost certainly is, but what if that isn't an accurate characterization of how it actually is? Might it be worthwhile to consider applying the same intellectual rigor that climate scientists use to the public psychology/discourse aspect of this problem, or is that somehow denialist, or something else? The suggestion always receives downvotes, I'd love to know why.
