I wouldn’t be the first to point out that the medium is the message.

Kudos for those guys for trying to tell the story differently in a hope to reach a broader audience.

I think they choose the right medium for the message.

This is a tech forum, not a climate news forum.

I wasn't suggesting that all topics must focus on tech, but that the majority of Hacker News users come from tech, and may therefore have an interest in the technical presentation of the submission.

My apologies if this was not clear.

I think that if users find technical aspects of an article a more interesting topic of discussion than the content, they should be free to discuss it in this forum.

I do not think that the guidelines should be updated to prohibit "off topic" criticism, as the parent comment suggested.

We're inundated with articles pointing out small unimportant changes and unquantified waffle about serious future changes. But never any actual predictions of global disaster. What's the expected cost in money or lives? Nobody has a clue beyond "catastrophe", whatever that means. I saw one estimate for the economic cost to Canada but it was so low that the citizens could actually just pay it as an additional tax and carry on with life hardly affected at all. Alarmists were actually critical of that data being published because they were afraid it might support people's belief that it's not very serious. Maybe because it's not?

So if you're going to say global warming is serious, can you also quantify what you mean? Otherwise you're only conveying your personal subjective feeling.

Well that can’t be right; it would turn the entire topic of climate change on its head.