replies(3):
Almost all the marks hit. "Quine", as we say.
Never mind. Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
No surprise coming from climate change deniers.
Hacker News always had a pretty high number of such people (and an even higher number of climate change sceptics) amongst its users. I think it's due to a prevalent ideological proximity with the American right, which has been (and still is) the main driver for this propaganda.
Hoover dam to be a 'dry hole by 2021': From the MSNBC documentary, Future Earth 2025, quote: "As water levels drop, by 2017 hoover dam will no longer provide drinking water to Las Vegas, Tucson, and San Diego. And it stops generating electricity to Los Angeles. And if nothing is done, the reservoir will be a dry hole by 2021".
This site calls it an unsuccessful prediction, yet there have been tons of water conservation efforts around Lake mead (more specifically the Colorado River). In other words "if we don't do something X will happen" followed by us putting a ton of work into preventing X apparently means the original prediction was wrong.
Other predictions like X could happen in "as little as 50 years" (establishing a lower, but no upper bound), are now marked incorrect 50 years later.
- misinterprets statements like "we have X years to do Y or we will have set something in motion that later causes Z" as if that means "Z will happen on January 1st CurrentYear+X";
- misinterprets the words "may" and "could", which typically indicate an extreme but possible scenario, since that's what the media wants to quote, not what they actually expect to happen;
- does not take into account when a behavioral change lead to it not coming true (see ozone layer); and
- exclusively shows unlikely claims, at least since the greenhouse gas emission problem became known in the ~90s, rather than looking at a legit prediction from any scientific paper in the last decades for example.
Page footer:
> A project of the #LearnToCode Initiative.
I suppose that settles the debate of whether we should teach everyone to code. Or maybe we didn't teach them enough, as CurrentYear+X != Z is too hard to understand still
1C per decade and 4C per decade are different. They’re both warming.
I’m skeptic of how hyperbolic we lay out global warming to be - Extinction in a few decades.
But a believer that it will be painful for a large amount of population on the planet. Very painful.
What I call climate change skeptics are people playing into the well-known playbook of industries being attacked by research into the harm to inflict on society: tobacco, "forever chemicals", etc, and today also climate change.
The science behind climate change is generally sound, even if we have unknowns and things yet to research, we know two important things: climate is changing, and human activities are causing it.
Some people however are ideologically biased against questioning the status quo. The industry put into question is at the core of our models, it's impacting every facet of modern life in developed countries.
Some political parties are counting on this, so you have had propaganda for 20 years in the US ridiculing environmental efforts, highlighting the most unhinged voices to disparage the effort as a whole, and people generally well educated that should know better, are following suite. The website posted by the OP of this thread is a literal example of such rhetoric.
I see this on Hacker News at least, so many people seemingly too afraid of words like 'degrowth' not to conjure scary strawmans (going back to the dark ages), instead of asking the tough questions of how we are going to get through this.
I just find ridiculous how so many people are too happy to lean into their bias, I find it cowardly and unreasonable.