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> I fear that if there were valid criticism to be heard, it would at best only fall on deaf ears. I'm not closed to this point of view, but it sure seems to be a rare case indeed. If you look at it from the reverse perspective, climate scientists have been explaining /basic/ material and conclusions to deniers for decades now. If you want to criticize, I don't think there should be a peer-review barrier but you sure should at least be familiar with the body of work you're criticizing. Or else, how could you possibly contribute anything of substance? Go read the IPCC reports, or /something/. That's just common sense. A lot of criticism fails to meet that minimum bar, and also has usually been addressed beforehand. I'm not a climate scientist, but right now I'm taking a graduate level class in databases and data systems. We're reading a lot of papers, some from academia and some from industry. But what I'm realizing is how lacking in nuance and content the discussions on even highly technical places like HN can be at times. Like when I see stuff like "NoSQL is bad for joins", it's like "really? on what system? under what conditions?". The ease with which laymen can assert conclusive-sounding statements on a whim is terrifying. The more you learn, the more you get the opposite instinct - to withhold judgement until something seems very clear. This destroys conversation dynamics when scientists are pitted against climate deniers. And a lot of times, I suspect that the arguments made fall in the "not even wrong" category. Then, the people who make the assertions aren't even willing to listen to the counterargument because it's "too technical". As if everything has a pithy one-liner response. In the end, this results in a massive amount of frustration on the part of the scientists, which leads us to the pickle we're in today. Anyway, this discussion reminds me of the whole discussion in the 50s/60s about the health effects of smoking, and how it took forever for doctors and scientists to convince people that this was real. All the tobacco industry had to do was to criticize specific bits and pieces, discredit specific researchers, call things "inconclusive", and suddenly their criticism was as legitimate as a huge body of research. That's the dangerous bit here. Take a look: http://www.who.int/tobacco/media/en/TobaccoExplained.pdf |