The reason to include alternative views isn’t for when you’re right (as in climate change), it’s for when you’re wrong (Iraq, Libya). You cannot know in absolute terms when you’re right or wrong, so you have to allow for dissenting views. It makes things more muddied and complicated, but the alternative leads to top down authoritarianism “because we said so!”

There are alternative views and there are disingenuous views. Do you include the ones you believe to be disingenuous as well?

I think

"Climate change is a hoax" - Exxon consultant with a phD in communications

is a lot more useful than

"Climate change is a hoax" - Professor that the media doesn't want you to hear from

If you include disingenuous views, you can counter them, and present your evidence for why you believe them to be disingenuous. If you ignore them, they will simply take their spiel to the next news outlet until one of them gives them a platform.

I fail to see how freedom of speech applies to academia.

What? It’s just as important here. Let’s say we’re looking for a vaccine for a pandemic disease. Do you want people to censor what’s allowed to be published before we know what works and doesn’t?

That is not quite how it works. In fact, major science journals would review submissions and decide which ones are publishable.

Should anybody be able to publish anything, even if it is wrong or outright false, in the same platforms used to spread actual, verifiable, knowledge? I don't think so.

Science journals review articles based on the quality of their methods, not their accuracy. If I do an experiment and find neutrinos moving faster than light, it's almost certainly incorrect, but if none of the reviewers can find an actual issue with the methods, it's still very much publishable. They can't stop something from being published just because they don't like what its saying.

> They can't stop something from being published just because they don't like what its saying.

This is still not an issue with the methodology itself. Science journals do not abide to the general notion of freedom of speech.

Lots of places have restrictions on how you can say something, but still give wide berth to what ideas you can say. Just because I'm not free to express my distaste for The Last Airbender by punching M. Night Shyamalan does not mean I am not free to voice that opinion. Science journals can require your speech to be in a certain form, namely it must be science, but you are not barred from publishing anything because of what you are saying. While some institutions, like the US Federal Government, might be held to higher standards, this is what most people are referring to when talking about freedom of speech on a platform.

There is really nothing novel about climate denial.

If a large portion of the population thinks climate denial is not a good thing climate denial is also an outrage prompter, prompting outrage is good business in 2020.

> prompting outrage is good business in 2020

Yes, in the social media sense. But there's plenty to be outraged about regardless of that.

"Novel" as in less-ordinary compared to what my filter bubble shows me, not as in new

I don't know if this is a US thing. Here in Europe, and as an avid reader of the news and various reporting, I can assure you that climate change activism is as mainstream as it can be (also because it easily inserted itself over a generic green, new age-ish movement that was there much before climate change became the focus of attention).

And I don't know how niche HN is (not much, I'd say, although it's certainly not a generalist forum either) but also here you can see that any comment that can be construed as the vaguest criticism of climate change action is promptly downvoted.

> Here in Europe, and as an avid reader of the news and various reporting, I can assure you that climate change activism is as mainstream as it can be

I'm from Germany, and certainly the situation is different from the US. However I'd argue in large parts we just have a different flavor of climate denial. I.e. "yeah climate change is happening, but [something unrelated that changes nothing about climate change]... let's not do too much".

I mean no european country is on a trajectory of acting on climate change with the speed needed to fulfil even the goals that every country already agreed to.

"climate denial" is a purely polemic, derogatory term with no meaning and sole intent to put skeptics in the same corner as Holocaust deniers.

What makes them different apart from the subject? People saying anthropogenic climate change isn't real are ignoring overwhelming historical evidence, as with Holocaust deniers.

First of all, Holocaust deniers deny that the Holocaust happened, when the Holocaust is an indisputable historical fact with thousands of survivors and millions of relatives of victims and denying that is offensive and malicious. So-called "climate deniers" deny neither the existence of climate, nor climate change, nor anthropogenic climate change (most of them anyway), they are simply not convinced that the magnitude of the effect of human carbon dioxide emissions is represented correctly in the alleged "consensus" (which it provably isn't) of climate scientists. Especially after climate scientists were caught in the act of tampering with data in order to hide past warming periods. So there is a difference regarding the malicious intent, the moral dimension and the legitimacy of claims. As anyone who tries to debate it with an open mind and honest arguments would know.

Well, I don't know what to tell you but CO2 emissions from fossil fuels accumulate in the atmosphere. There is this weird thing happening that since 1960 the CO2 content in the atmosphere has risen from 300ppm to 400ppm. It's up to you to believe whether that is a coincidence. Random googling tells me we emit 36 billion tonnes per co2 per year. Even more random googling tells me there are 3 trillion tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere. It's not hard to put them together and conclude that humanity responsible for growing the CO2 in the atmosphere by 1% every year right now. Now lets say these numbers are complete garbage and inaccurate (which they certainly are) and say they are off by 70% (which they certainly are not) and the a highly conservative number is closer to 0.3%. After 30 years 9% of CO2 in the atmosphere is man made assuming we start off with 0% man made CO2 (obviously not true).

The point of this comment is not to prove that there is a certain percentage of man made CO2 in the atmosphere because I don't have accurate numbers. The point is that humanity is powerful enough to reach an arbitrarily high percentage of man made CO2 in the atmosphere and it is certainly possible for 50% of the CO2 in the atmosphere to be of human origin if we wait long enough and do nothing.

> After 30 years 9% of CO2 in the atmosphere is man made assuming we start off with 0% man made CO2 (obviously not true).

So why do you try to argue something based on assumptions that are by your own admissions obviously not true?

What is the "normal" amount of CO2 in the atmosphere? What amount is optimal? What difference does it make to the atmosphere whether the CO2 is according to us of human origin or not?

Presumably, nobody sane believes we're at historically high levels of CO2 right now, past levels at 1000-4000ppm are not really disputed in the scientific community.

It's the rate of change in CO2 levels that is unprecedented in human history and for a long time in earths history. The effects of that change include ocean acidification and habitat loss for many species. It stands to reason that atmospheric change on a timescale much smaller than what natural selection and species adaptation normally occur at could be very damaging to all sorts of ecosystems.

Ah, I generally don't consider doubts of that nature (merely the magnitude of our effect being questionable) to qualify someone as a "climate denier", at least personally. I reserve it for the ones who call it a hoax, or say that warming trends are completely natural, or one of the many other easily refutable claims.