[andrewescott]

I am increasingly of the view that we need publications for a lay audience that focus on debate between experts. While an opinion piece can seem reasonable on its own, it may be full of errors that are easily highlighted by an expert. However, popular publications today focus on publishing the opinions of well-known figures, and if there is scrutiny of their views it typically appears in a different publication. While this approach gives the non-expert reader a warm and fuzzy feeling of being informed, they may worse off than if they had read nothing at all.

[knowtheory]

Unfortunately one of the skills experts develop is the ability to detect bullshit arguments. It is difficult to convey skepticism to a lay audience.

One of the red flags this Rutan thing immediately sets off is that it is INCREDIBLY long, and despite that, doesn't provide any sense of what the structure of the argument it is providing will be.

Does he dispute the data that scientists have collected? Does he dispute the analyses? On what basis? Can he attribute the effects the scientists are pointing to to other causes? Does he simply think that the effects don't matter?

The main thing that's clear from all of his graphs is that he thinks that there's a lot of "scare tactics" going on.

But the fact that this thing is 100 pages long and doesn't appear to have any structure should trigger alarm bells by itself.

[cowbell]

It does have some structure to it. It seems he leads with an introduction to try to give himself some credibility (engineer, done solar farms, energy efficient housing, drove an ev). If you go to page 11, he has a list of 5 points he goes through and refutes.

I thought it was interesting that he leads with a 150ppm argument. He basically states that increasing CO2 saved us from certain doom.

Interestingly, I don't hear anyone here refuting his primary point so it must be too new for realclimate.org to have a page giving marching orders to the drones. Mostly all I see is sarcasm and name calling... ie. Quality comments in league with Yahoo news and YouTube.

I'm glad this didn't make it to the front page. It's pretty off topic for this site. It doesn't really belong on hacker news.

[phkahler]

OP here. I'm kinda glad it didn't make the front page too, but some stuff from the other side has made it there so I figured what the heck. I find the comments here on HN interesting - attack on him for length of presentation, failure to address ocean acidity, not being a climate scientist (not in the club, so screw him) and such are mostly what you get anywhere else. The guy presents data, but nobody talks about the data - as usual. I would say the HN comments are better than the internet at at large, but not as much better as I had hoped.