Your comment is a classic phase-2 voter-upper, which was sitting at the top of the thread until I marked it off topic. Apologies for quoting myself, but: After that first wave of comments, we frequently see a second wave of comments objecting in a reflexive way to the first wave. Although they take the opposing position—defending the article and criticizing the comments—it's the same contrarian dynamic, the same mechanism, driving them. Usually the second wave gets upvoted the most, leading to the paradox of the top comment in a thread expressing how bad the thread is, or the most popular comment expressing how wrong the populace is.
Once this subthread was marked off topic, which lowers it on the page, one sees that the top subthreads are all pretty thoughtful. In other words, once you account for the contrarian dynamic (first wave of dismissive objections, second angry wave dismissing the dismissals and getting voted to the top), HN is doing reasonably well in this case. The contrarian dynamic happens in general; it has nothing to do specifically with climate, any more than with race (which was the context in the thread I just linked to).
Your comment is a classic phase-2 voter-upper, which was sitting at the top of the thread until I marked it off topic. Apologies for quoting myself, but: After that first wave of comments, we frequently see a second wave of comments objecting in a reflexive way to the first wave. Although they take the opposing position—defending the article and criticizing the comments—it's the same contrarian dynamic, the same mechanism, driving them. Usually the second wave gets upvoted the most, leading to the paradox of the top comment in a thread expressing how bad the thread is, or the most popular comment expressing how wrong the populace is.
Once this subthread was marked off topic, which lowers it on the page, one sees that the top subthreads are all pretty thoughtful. In other words, once you account for the contrarian dynamic (first wave of dismissive objections, second angry wave dismissing the dismissals and getting voted to the top), HN is doing reasonably well in this case. The contrarian dynamic happens in general; it has nothing to do specifically with climate, any more than with race (which was the context in the thread I just linked to).