We often exhort the public to “follow the science” — but provide no tools to distinguish between good science and bad science. Heck, it looks like even journals and expert reviewers can’t differentiate any more!
The average person is as likely to be convinced by this as any IPCC report. Since the “science” seems “equally strong” on “both sides”, people will just end up picking whatever resonates with their tribe.
Is there a way forward, other than telling people to trust certain experts and distrust others? That fundamentally reduces all debate to a mud fight.
PS: I think this is an important issue worth addressing directly -- with concrete examples -- rather than flagging the link to "sanitize" the front page.
I disagree. This is full of very oriented stuff. The new climate denialism is climate adaptationism. Focus on carrying on with business as usual; until New Zealand's full I guess.
Michael Shellenberger is not a "business as usual" do-nothing denier. This guy's mission has been to push for clean energy solutions (renewable with nuclear base load) and GMO crops to get higher-density, more nutritious food sources. He wants to solve environmental challenges without sacrificing quality of life or condemning the poorest billions to perpetual poverty. This is not the do-nothing "burn coal and export corn" denialism of the Koch brothers et al.
That review goes into detail. The big picture for me is that he misses the systemic effects in favor of low-level, often misdirected, points.
For example, he suggests "As a result of cleaner-burning coal, the transition to natural gas, cleaner vehicles, and other technological changes, the U.S. and other developed nations have seen major improvements in air quality."
Those factors may have contributed, but we exported our manufacturing to places with lower standards. The world's air quality degraded, but he found places it improved and claimed causes he liked without presenting others that contradict his views.
A lot of it reads like what Richard Feynman criticized of the shuttle explosion:
> it was asserted, there was "a safety factor of three." This is a strange use of the engineer's term ,"safety factor." If a bridge is built to withstand a certain load without the beams permanently deforming, cracking, or breaking, it may be designed for the materials used to actually stand up under three times the load. This "safety factor" is to allow for uncertain excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or weaknesses in the material that might have unexpected flaws, etc. If now the expected load comes on to the new bridge and a crack appears in a beam, this is a failure of the design. There was no safety factor at all; even though the bridge did not actually collapse because the crack went only one-third of the way through the beam. The O-rings of the Solid Rocket Boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not something from which safety can be inferred.
Shellenberger sharply disagrees with other environmentalists over the impacts of environmental threats and policies for addressing them. Shellenberger's positions have been called "bad science" and "inaccurate" by environmental scientists and academics.
Very sad, rather than addressing the contents you have to resort to trying to reinforce defamation. This attitude is what destroyed all reasonable conversation in recent years.
Of course not, but let's not play pretend, "this is the guy who back's this stuff" is a typical way to try and discredit a message by discrediting its author.
"In Europe between 1990 and The are covered by forests and 2015,woodlands increased by 90.000 km²" – This alone is pretty interesting. And here I was, convinced by mass media into thinking that we are loosing forest day by day. Nice website, very refreshing and good to balance out all the alarmism we are being bombarded with constantly.
He's intentionally mixing woodlands with commercial/working forests. The EU does want to increase forestry but it's almost entirely for timber production.
This is a fantastic amount of misleading data. To the point that I would call it malicious.
Why doesn't it mention for example that rising temperatures will likely kill thousands and create millions of climate refugees? And how specifically a country like the Maldives will prevent itself from disappearing underwater (hint: "just do what the Netherlands did" is not an answer). Why doesn't it address the fact that we all have microplastics in our bodies and have no idea what the long term effects are? Or that ocean temperatures are making aquatic species go extinct at a rate never before seen?
Yes, it's pretty blatant, particularly the cherry picked facts at the end about polar bears. It's sad people fall for this. We need to teach critical thinking and media analysis skills in schools.
I have no clue if the data in the slides is correct, but scrolling through it, it seems that we can deal with the current issues presented without too much hassle.
Even while I _do_ support a quite drastict enironment-protection stance, this piece does make all the "doomsdayers" look very childish. If I have learnt _one_ thing about predictions, the "doomsday" never comes... even "black swan events" like Covid19, while tragic, does not produce any "statistically significant" (>5%) damage on the world's population.
Can't you see how disconnected these factoids are, can't you see the clear hidden variables, like the one about coal use going down (thanks gas!) The one about less whales being killed now than 1960 (no more whales killed in 2100 I think). Have you read properly written research papers, the way they track down bias, list what work was done to identify any hidden variables, the reference to statistical baselines? Thes slide are the exact opposite of good research, and in the absence of available time to debunk metric tons of bullshit, I propose you just think!
Here's a future-oriented solution to whale killing: if we kill them all now, we won't kill any whales in the following years! Yay for statistics! </sarcasm>
And who the hell would flag this? Seriously, some people cannot even stand the existence of data that might put into question their views. These days you can and will get flagged, scolded and banned anywhere you try to dare and present a narrative that opposes the mainstream one.
Not speaking for or against flagging this, but… this is the reality of the HN flag system. The only way anything remotely controversial stays on the front page is if one of the admins vouches for it. Most articles around sexism, racism, etc get flag killed pretty quickly.
The average person is as likely to be convinced by this as any IPCC report. Since the “science” seems “equally strong” on “both sides”, people will just end up picking whatever resonates with their tribe.
See https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
Is there a way forward, other than telling people to trust certain experts and distrust others? That fundamentally reduces all debate to a mud fight.
PS: I think this is an important issue worth addressing directly -- with concrete examples -- rather than flagging the link to "sanitize" the front page.