As crass as it may sound, I really wish Hacker News would talk about all the money that can be made by building startups that aim at mitigating the effects of climate change, about the routes to renewable, sustainable energy sources (also worth untold trillions of dollars), etc.
Instead, HN seems to mostly be composed of climate change deniers.
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Edit: HN tells me I'm not allowed to reply to rsync's comment below. Here's my reply:
> You don't have to be a "denier" to be annoyed by hearing that the "most (X) ever" is based on ~150 years of observations.
The post author was not expressing annoyance. They expressed that the climate is not changing due to human activity:
> Since we are coming out of an ice age a mere (on the geologic time scale) 12,000 years ago, we should expect increasingly warm temperatures.
That is not "a reasonable comment and a reasonable sentiment." It's an extremely damaging falsehood that does not have a place here on HN.
You don't have to be a "denier" to be annoyed by hearing that the "most (X) ever" is based on ~150 years of observations.
Plenty of well meaning, properly liberal, progressive thinkers that you would (presumably) approve of are also annoyed by this.
It's a reasonable comment and a reasonable sentiment.
Don't let your emotional attachment to the "us vs. them" narrative or your addiction to righteous indignation blind you to the simple (and obvious, non-controversial) objection (the parent) has.
One poster says it's the rate of temperature growth that is important. Agreed, however, that is not in the article.
What really disturbs me is your use of the pejorative "denier". Is a denier anyone who is skeptical of your dogma? Galileo was a heretical "denier" for his theory that the sun was the center of the solar system. Denying a theory is a necessary step in the scientific method.
Plus, it would help undecided people like myself have more data points and logical arguments to consider on both sides.
> Since we are coming out of an ice age a mere (on the geologic time scale) 12,000 years ago, we should expect increasingly warm temperatures.
No we shouldn't expect this kind of temperature rise. Not like this. This quote is entirely nonsensical, it has no logical backing at all. The rates of temperature rise we are seeing right now are not to be expected based on our last ice age receding. The fallacy here is "made shit up and pretended it was truth".
> Also, the "record" in this case only goes back 130 years, and the earth is 4.5 billion years old
The record is a real record. Putting it in quotes implies that it isn't a record. That's false. Also, this implies that the age of the earth is relevant to how we act today. Does NYC or SF care about the temperature of the Earth during the formation of our solar system? No. It's not relevant.
> so to try and make some sort of global warming generalization based on .00000000028% of the evidence is fallacious.
Nobody is making that generalization, or using that scale of evidence. This is a fallacy because the post author has pretended that the IBM article quoted said that they (Weather Underground) used .00000000028% of available evidence to draw their conclusion. Again, this is false.
Also, noting the fact that the record only goes back 130 years is merely pointing out how little statistical significance climate models based on "the record" have.
Your post is rank with hypocrisy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_England_temperature
Beyond that, people have attempted reconstruction from other evidence. For instance I found an attempt at a 2000 year reconstruction using tree ring data here: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/moberg2005/moberg2005.ht...
Assuming this reconstruction and others is sound, it is apparent that there definitely is a fair bit of natural temperature variability. But the recent temperature rise in the last 50 years certainly seem like aberration, in terms of rate of change.
This violates the HN guidelines, which we warned you about once already. We ban accounts that do this, so please stop doing it.
Please let the people willing to do the work work, and put in some effort to educate yourself if you want to get involved.
Also, the reality of climate change isn't a "point of view" any more than saying that "the earth orbits the sun" is a point of view.
So while it's true that you can work the equation from either reference frame defining each as orbiting the other, the center of mass will more than likely lie in or closer to one or the other, and with that you can define which is orbiting the other canonically.
Whereas "the sun and the planets all orbit the earth" has astonishingly little predictive power.
Not a geocentrist myself, but it did have good predictive power.
"To summarize, Ptolemy devised a system that was compatible with Aristotelian philosophy and managed to track actual observations and predict future movement mostly to within the limits of the next 1000 years of observations. The observed motions and his mechanisms for explaining them include:"[0]
Obviously not as good as current models, but it's a bit of historical rewriting to say that geocentrism wasn't a good model for the time, which is one part of why there was push back for heliocentrism. With the tools of the time, the heliocentric model had similar predictive power. Geocentrism at the time wasn't just about god, it actually had predictive power.
"He also argued that his system was more elegant than the traditional geocentric system. However, the predictive power of his model was not substantially better than its competition."[1]
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocentric_model
[1] - http://astronomy.nmsu.edu/tharriso/ast105/Ast105week04.html
Had Jupiter's moons been visible to them, their motion would have confounded their model entirely.
Also, "The change from circular orbits to elliptical planetary paths dramatically improved the accuracy of celestial observations and predictions." Your own link says the predictive power was "dramatically improved."
The problem we are facing is that in the last 100 years the temperature have constantly been rising, and the rise seems to even speed up. The consequences of this is at minimum a major shift of the ecological systems. If we are unlucky, even the collapse of some.
In any case we are facing severe consequences for human civilization as we know it. Even if we "just" lose cities like New York it would be bad, but whole countries like Bangladesh with over 100 Million of population are facing flooding.
I know, I know - I'm the life of the party.
I tried to explain, "I can't speak for all environmentalists, but I want to protect the environment so that it's habitable and enjoyable FOR HUMANS."
I apparently blew his mind - he'd never considered that as a reason to be an environmentalist.
There are predictions that global warming will cause droughts, floods, water and food shortages, mass migrations of dangerous species, ocean acidification, and sea level changes that threaten millions of people.
So, documenting the fact that every year the Earth is getting warmer should remind us all that we should come up with SOME ways to act to protect ourselves and our fellow man from those problems.
SOME people advocate fighting global warming directly. Whether or not they believe it's caused by mankind in the first place.
But you "really don't see the point" in discussing... ANYTHING... about global warming?
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-...
Before it was the warmest March on record it was the warmest February:
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/february-smashe...
Oh, and it was the warmest January:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/02/17/january_...
Oh and 2015 was the warmest year on record:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-2015-became-the-hott...
Chart of temps from 1880:
http://www.skepticalscience.com//pics/2c-2016-02.png
CO2 is at 408ppm and climbing as it nears it's seasonal peak.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/weekly.html
This is a level not seen in the past 15 million years
https://robertscribbler.com/2016/04/11/hothouse-gas-spikes-t...
Here's a chart that looks at some other greenhouse gases, such as methane.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/02/debunking_the_97...
[0] http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/0240... [1] http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
United Nations IPCC http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/index.htm
Exxon Mobile http://corporate.exxonmobil.com/en/current-issues/climate-po...
American Meteorological Society https://www.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/about-ams/ams-statemen...
NOAA http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html
EPA https://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/
National Center for Atmospheric Research http://eo.ucar.edu/basics/cc_1.html
Royal Society of the United Kingdom https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/climate-evid...
Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society http://www.cmos.ca/site/ps_pos_statements?a=7
Science Council of Japan, Russian Academy of Science, Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Royal Society of Canada, Chinese Academy of Sciences, French Academy of Sciences, German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, Indian National Science Academy, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy), Royal Society (UK) (PDF File) http://nationalacademies.org/onpi/06072005.pdf
Maybe the consensus number is only 95%, or 93%, but it's pretty clear that there is broad scientific agreement. Even that 'debunking' only claims that the papers do not explicitly take a position, while virtually every major scientific body who have taken a position say that human-caused climate change is a major issue. There is pretty undeniable evidence now that the world is getting warmer (example: http://www.crystalcruises.com/OfferDetail.aspx?OG=220). So the shift in thinking should be away from "is there anyone who doesn't think this is happening" to "who has the best ideas for how to limit this".