> extremely strong, emergent cultural pressure against certain results and certain questions, which has been holding back a wide range of fields and ensuring pursuit of severely one sided science for decades.
Your comment:
> Once you start trying to attack climate change, you lose all your credibility
I am a firm believer in climate science, but this reaction suggests that the post you're replying to is correct.
Sorry, there are things in this world called facts. There are things in this world that are empirically correct. As far as science can determine, climate change is factual and real. If that isn't your position, you really don't believe in climate science. And I'm calling you out on it--this isn't a "truthiness" zone.
The climate politics, aka what should be done about it, is a very different problem and falls under social and economic "science".
No amount of supporting evidence renders a topic exempt from scrutiny.
Climate science is solid, to my knowledge. And while I think most of the people who want to see it pulled down from the pedestal are wackos, intellectual humility demands that they be allowed to continue to try. Not with the same tired tactics – they shouldn't be able to DDoS debate with the same old crap. But to the extent that people can come up with novel, testable angles.. the question shouldn't be forbidden.
There's subjectivity here. IMO there are good faith and bad faith attempts to challenge eg climate science. The overwhelming majority are in bad faith. But the good faith versions of the question should not only go unpunished, but be encouraged.
It doesn't seem to go that way in practice. Certain lines of inquiry are de-facto forbidden in science, at least informally.
As for climate modeling, there are WILD differences in projections.
This is why there are constant "X years until point of no return!" articles in tabloid media, which are all different and usually incorrect.
Immediately shooting people down for being anti-science for suggesting the impact is on the lower end of the prediction spectrum is not scientific.
Further strengthening your denialist status is the fact that you in a separate post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22050842) try to pass off state censorship of criticism to its (suggested) policies as suppression of research disproving climate change.
Also, insisting the wildfires are caused more by arson than exceptional drought and heat is also unambigiously mainstream denialism.
If you are serious about going into the climate change discussion, you obviously have some reading to do about the status of the research, and more importantly the over 30 years of organised and well funded attempts to discredit and suppress climate research.
What will happen as a result of those changes and how it will impact us are models. The application of those models fed by assumptions for the trends/changes in the parameters are forecasts. Forecasts and models aren't facts.
So are you defending the facts? Or are you calling your favorite models/forecasts facts and saying no one can question them?
Seems to me that science education is as much an issue as the taboos...
