Item — HN Reader

When Al Gore said in 1998 that California would be under water by 2005, he was exaggerating for politics. A lot of climate change data was cherry picked and exaggerated to scare people into taking action.

Climate change is used as a bat to hit poor people in the head politically. The politics come from the left.

6 comments

This is a cheap attempt to co-opt an argument "Climate Change" that is factual and not political, into political direction "Person X said Z" and "Fact X was stated by political side S".

Climate change has nothing to do with right or left, or any other way people use to paint things black and white.

> Climate change is used as a bat to hit poor people in the head politically

I am sure the poor people who are suffering through the droughts in Europe, floods in Pakistan, increased erosion in Senegal and the hottest ever temperatures in Death Valley would disagree.

Climate change is happening and the science has been ignored for far too long.

I could list 1000 places that are experiencing more moderate conditions than usual right now.

My point is, anecdotal evidence is not meaningful for something as multifaceted as world climate.

No one has ever claimed that climate change would not benefit some areas.

The point is that the costs to adapt to this change will be in the trillions and be disproportionally felt by the poorest in our society.

Hence it is a change we should avoid where possible.

> No one has ever claimed that climate change would not benefit some areas.

False. Some people are saying the world will end and humanity will be wiped away.

> "Some people are saying the world will end and humanity will be wiped away."

I personally believe there may be more truth to that statement than many wish to believe, but not as a direct result of climate change itself. Rather, it's much more likely that the growing stupidity and political polarization surrounding climate change (and many other "hot-button" topics) will drive humanity to the ultimate stupidity of another World War, which these days can absolutely be a life-ending (on a planetary scale) path to go down, considering the types of "mass destruction" weapons the mad-men in power these days have access to.

There is also a chance that we manage to kill most phytoplankton. That would make the planet very unpleasant for a while.

I'm pretty sure we could get that far if we really wanted but it would take some determination.

And that's why science doesn't usually happen in HN comments. That doesn't change anything about the overwhelming body of evidence that we have collected in the last fifty years or so and the predictions we're able to make from it.

Yes, we could have solved it with nuclear power in the 1960s.

We still can, but we could have too.

People can push nuclear as much as they like.

But right now cost wise it's massively uncompetitive with solar/wind + storage.

>solar/wind + storage.

Then why are energy prices rising in every grid the more renewables it uses?

Electricity is a fungible resource and most of it is generated from fossil fuels. The price of natural gas is way up, so electricity prices generally are up. Not to mention, hydroelectric production is down in some places (Hoover dam for instance), some nuclear plants are running below capacity because rivers are too low and/or too warm (France) and there's a major land war in Europe right now.

It's also possible that some investments in renewables will take time to pay off, like any investment in new infrastructure. I'd expect the same thing if some area built a brand new coal plant. (Ideally these costs are buffered out by some kind of financial instrument so rate-payers don't get hit by it all at once.)

Solar power is actually quite cheap. Storage can be cheap or expensive depending on whether it's done with pumped hydro (where geography allows) or chemical batteries.

It's not unless you have evidence to the contrary.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-14/renewable...

Exactly. There is objective proof of collusion to falsify climate data.

Look no further than the 2008 Hadley CRU "climategate" leak.

Edit: The leak actually happened in November 2009. The file you're looking for is "FOI2009.zip".

Climategate was not the smoking gun people claimed it was

Further reading:

https://www.newsweek.com/factcheck-climategate-doesnt-refute...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_c...

https://science.slashdot.org/story/10/07/02/1433246/climateg...

https://www.factcheck.org/2010/04/some-climategate-conclusio...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann#Controversy_ov...

https://skepticalscience.com/Kevin-Trenberth-travesty-cant-a...

Reading the Wikipedia article is not very confidence inspiring considering the criticisms of “lack of transparency”, “lack of sharing code and raw data”, “heavy reliance on statistics but no inclusion of trained statistician”.

The only encouraging finding was “no outright scientific fraud”.

I thought "Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.[17] The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged throughout the investigations.[18]" to be encouraging.

I haven't read all the reports yet, but it was good to see all of them ended up at that same conclusion. I'm sure there are people who would complain about the amount of time, money, and effort that went into investigating, but I'm glad there was so much scrutiny from so many different eyes.

Why do you think that academics investigating themselves carries any weight? Of course they'll conclude there was no problem. If you want a writeup that takes a rather different view on what happened you need it to be written by outsiders. Try this one:

https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/climat...

I'd have hoped that those outsiders would still involve climatologists, but it appears in this case the paper you linked was written by a economist affiliated with a conservative think tank and a man who spent his entire career working for mining and fossil fuel industries. These are clear conflicts of interest, which doesn't bode well for the paper. It'll still be interesting to see how what they say compares with the reports by actual experts working at places like the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the National Science Foundation, and the EPA, but I'm not expecting much to be honest.

Please consider the following questions.

1. How could a climatologist be an outsider? Climatologists are by definition not outsiders when criticizing climatology.

2. Why is working for a conservative think tank a conflict of interest? There are no such conflicts. If you think there are then, well, academia is well known to be dominated by people on the left, is that also a conflict of interest? If so then you have to write off most of climatology.

3. The whole problem climategate exposed is that "actual experts" are manipulating the scientific process to ensure that anyone who disagrees with their claims can't get published, and therefore gets labelled as "not an expert" and kicked out of the institutions. That's why the only people who can properly actually openly criticize that edifice are those entirely outside the sphere of government run science - but that fact is then used to write off anything they have to say. Do you therefore recognize that the argument you're making here is a circular one?

4. Given that, do you agree that climatologists are by definition conflicted - if they were to admit they had been manipulating the scientific process as was shown by the climategate emails, they would lose status, power, influence and quite possibly open themselves up to prosecution. They will obviously never do that.

uh, I did, and I think you might wanna take another look at "climategate", cause it sounds like a bunch of nutjobs flailing about snippets of text taken wildly out of context.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email...

I wish it would have worked and people had been scared into taking action. Now we're looking at serious ecological devastation and hundreds of millions of climate refugees (look at the recent heat wave in India and flooding in Pakistan).

Plenty of people were scared into taking action, but sadly the people with the power to make meaningful change were taking bribes from industry to continue ignoring the issue. The rest of us spent our energy taking shorter showers, separating our trash, buying things advertised as "green", and all the other largely pointless rituals they gave us to keep us calm and make us feel better while they continued to make money hand over fist destroying the future for our children.

And then there were those of us who weren't even scared, and just took all those actions simply because it was the right thing to do. Now of course, we're just as screwed as everyone, all because more money for a few that already have too much of it is far more important than "doing the right thing" or "human life" (or any life, apparently). More money for the already filthy rich is by far the most important thing in the entire Universe.

Al Gore literally never said that

His prediction was that Manhattan would be under water, before the year 2026.

> When co-anchor Katie Couric asked Al Gore on the May 24, 2006 Today show “What do you see happening in 15 to 20 years if nothing changes?…Even Manhattan would be in deep water”, he replied: “Yes, in fact the World Trade Center Memorial site would be underwater.”

> Weekend flooding left cars submerged in New York ... ( 19 July 2022 )

> New York City is highly vulnerable to flooding from coastal storms due to its intensively used waterfront and its extensive coastal geography. Floods have the potential to destroy homes and businesses, impair infrastructure, and threaten human safety. With climate change and sea level rise, these risks are expected to increase in the future, but will most adversely affect low-lying neighborhoods.

- https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/plans-stud...

Looks like he was correct about the increased risks from storm surges et al as a result of climate change.

I mean New York has had big storms multiple times in its history - that is nothing new and I certainly don't interpret that as being what he intended:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1893_New_York_hurricane

https://www.weather.gov/okx/1938HurricaneHome

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/08/10/archives/hurricane-donna-...

etc etc etc

If we are that generous in interpreting him everything he says then becomes non-falsifiable.

And people wonder why there are climate deniers.

Trying to talk your way out an prediction that was clearly false just makes it look even worse.

You appear to arguing against a post that supports your position? Al Gore's prediction is likely wrong (we'll know in 2026), but it did have an important qualifier: "if nothing changes". That to me implies BAU and emissions continuing to steadily rise over that intervening 15-20 year period. In fact they did start to level off not long after that prediction was made though it's a stretch to claim for certain that's the reason the WTC memorial is not, in fact, now underwater. If he had made the prediction for, say, the year 2076 it may have had more scientific merit (but arguably little ability to convince anyone of the urgency of the situation).

Ex post facto rationalization.

If his prediction does come true and someone says “but you said BAU but we actually cut emissions”, everyone will wave hands around saying “that doesn’t really matter the prediction was accurate”.

Heads you win, tails you win.

That's in no way what he said.

You are being dishonest.

He's a US politician .. hardly a climate expert.

He was relaying his understanding of the general predictions he'd been told and took things a little too literally on an accelerated time scale.

Increasingly underwater increasingly frequently as storm surges increase and mean water levels increase leading to greater extremes is a complicated sound bite.

"New York will be underwater" is simpler and turned out to be true in a literal sense.

I literally have zero knowledge of what he has said, I'm not in the US, I didn't watch his film, and I wouldn't watch a US political figure for an explaination of anything technical when there are better and more primary sources.

Al Gore received a nobel peace prize for his climate work.

Even if he had, Al Gore isn't a scientist. X person said Y is a distraction because people can say anything. There are countless people and organizations that twist statistics or misrepresent science to suit their political ends, but it doesn't necessarily make the science flawed. Sometimes it's just misinterpreted, or cherry picked, or outright invented to support a political opinion, but that's not a problem with science as much as it is a problem with politics.

It's a lot more worrisome when you have scientists taking money to falsify data or faking results to push their own political agenda. We expect politicians to lie to us, but when science does it that risks setting back our collective understanding of the world we live in and can keep us from the truth for a very long time.

He did claim that the peak Mt. Kilimanjaro would be permanently snow-free by like 2016 and yet it is still plenty snowy on top 6 years later still.

He is a liar and also a sexual predator, but he some how escaped #MeToo.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2010/07/why-the-masseuse-s-...

"Plenty of snow" is subjective, in truth there is less and less and less as time goes on.

https://tunza.eco-generation.org/file/kilimanjaro-melting.jp...

Al Gore was directionally correct, which is better than the climate change deniers on the right that point in the opposite direction to reality. Moreover, Al Gore was a political actor, not a climatologist.

Let's face it, both the left and the right politicize science. The left sometimes does it when it comes to biological sex (conflating gender and sex), intelligence testing (saying they're next to useless), genetic determinism (saying all outcomes are environmental), GMOs, nuclear energy safety, sociology (denying impact of culture on outcomes). The right can do it when it comes to gender identity, GMOs, climate change, stem cells, intelligence testing (race realism), sociology (thinking it's all culture and not racism), creationism, anti-vax and public health.

Nobody has a monopoly on politicization of science. The problem is that the right's politicization is, in the current moment, more dangerous. Covid denial and social acceptance of vaccine hesitancy has killed hundreds of thousands. Climate change denial threatens the entire world.