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by TangoTrotFox
2968 days ago
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I think your framing of the question is very fair and absolutely how the topic should be considered. But at the same time, I think you're assuming much more from the average person than is realistic when you state that whether Earth (and implicitly humanity) will survive or not, is not the question. People are becoming radicalized in everything. And radicalism tends to be intrinsically connected with ignorance. See the top of this thread (well currently at least) for a line of discussion where somebody not only thinks climate will imminently lead to earth becoming uninhabitable but wondering how and where people could survive [away from Earth] until the planet does become habitable again. Or consider the fact that the comment you're responding to, though factually accurate and contextually relevant, is being downvoted for stating facts that mitigate this sort of hysteria. Sure, it's a sample of one - but I'm sure a survey of the views in this thread will show the question is indeed far more elementary than the nuanced and accurate view you're discussing! |
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I think people can handle nuance just fine. Since everyone's gotten it into their heads that policing online discussions is exactly the same as censorship and limiting free speech, it's up to us, the participants, to restrain ourselves from the radicalizing shouting matches that usually happen on so many topics.
> See the top of this thread (well currently at least) for a line of discussion where somebody not only thinks climate will imminently lead to earth becoming uninhabitable but wondering how and where people could survive [away from Earth] until the planet does become habitable again.
I'm not seeing that anywhere in the comments on this article. Can you link to it?
> Or consider the fact that the comment you're responding to, though factually accurate and contextually relevant, is being downvoted for stating facts that mitigate this sort of hysteria.
Well, no. I disagree that it's relevant, and hope at least some of the downvotes are for that reason alone. "Stating facts" doesn't automatically make something relevant; good statements of relevant facts would have been, "the researchers didn't take ____ into account during the 800,000 period they're talking about", or, "there's another paper by respected researchers that disagrees with this one", or, "I know a lot about this field and I think I see an error in their methodology", or, "this is all correct but there's no cause for alarm because [body of evidence that global warming is somehow beneficial]" (it's not).
It's also not mitigating hysteria. There are good reasons to be extremely alarmed for our future generations. That's not a hysterical position. Some people may be couching it in alarmist statements, but given the opposing number of people who still believe that all of this data is an outright lie anyway [+], that's sort of unavoidable for political topics.
[+]: Including HN, during the CRU email breach a few years ago, where the popular opinion was that climate researchers were fabricating data so that they could get more money for further research.