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."
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.