What you are saying is technically not wrong, but misleading, as it omits the fact the dams broke due to a natural disaster, Storm Daniel, which previously also "affected Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey with extensive flooding.".
No kidding, but to say that climate change did this when hurricanes have been on the decline the last thirty years is misleading. This is weather and engineering failures.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24268-5
> No kidding, but to say that climate change did this when hurricanes have been on the decline the last thirty years is misleading. This is weather and engineering failures.
This HN user categorically and obsessively has their own opinion on climate change, and how it is influenced by humans.
Their "evidence research" is taking the first Google search result that they believe to support their position in the discussion at hand - even if it doesn't make sense (hurricanes in North America versus Mediterranean).
If they don't invest in such sloppy research, their arguments hit rock-bottom Tiktok factoid niveau. one can better just assume nonsense/randomizing/lying and ignore this user for anything climate-related.
Use the drop down and look at accumulated cyclone energy. There's no trend in 42 years and last year was the third lowest total tropical cyclone energy for earth in the last 42 years. This year seems on track to be very low for cyclone energy too.
Do you understand how creepy it is of you to go digging into other users comment history and posting about it when there's a disagreement on a topic? Maybe let the arguments speak for themselves? We're not supposed to be some kind of commissars looking for dissidents or witch hunters looking for heretics.
Well I guess I'm guilty of posting my own opinion on various aspects of climate change along with links from time to time. Is that evil in your books, should I be banned? I think you can go back to every post I've ever made and not find any cases of ad hominem attacks. I'm satisfied with that.
> And why should commenting and posting history count any less than a specific comment?
Because the user/writer is completely unimportant in an endless flowing sea of anonymous text. Whatever one of us writes in a comment, somebody else could as easily have written, that's why only the argument itself is interesting. It is misguided effort to care about any "reputation" of an anonymous user on an anonymous discussion platform, unless you're moderating said platform.
Because the user/writer is completely unimportant in an endless flowing sea of anonymous text.
I reject both of those assertions.
Authorship matters. Comments are not anonymous, but optionally pseudonymous, where reputation (karma) is explicitly tracked.
The significant point of karma tracking isn't the accuracy of that karma, but the tracking of it. Other measures, such as flags and moderator admonishments, are also presumably tracked, at least by mods.
All imply that reputation is an integral element of Hacker News participation.
The very concept of science is a revolution against the idea that author matters more than content. What you propose is how the world used to work, and still does in many aspects and places, ie that something is to be judged not by what is said, but by who said it. If a nobody or disreputable person says something it is to be considered false, and if a reputable and honored person says something it is to be considered true. But that's backwards and hurts both science and justice. Instead we must dare to take arguments at face value in order to move forward.
Studying court cases, I've seen too many instances of people who initially weren't believed or just dismissed, because they weren't considered the right "who", but in the end were proven to be completely right. Studying the history of science, there are many such famous cases.
As for the science of meteorology, it shouldn't be treated as an ideological war, where people go after each other's characters – even pseudonymously. It's the study of elements that don't care what humans think of them.
Apart fromt this, you seem to confuse moderating with discussing. Wether somebody or somebody's comments are subject to moderator actions have nothing to do with the truthfulness of what they wrote.
Nullis in verba means that the authority of no person should be the basis of belief. It was born out of a tradition in which authority, particularly religious authority, was paramount, and notions such as papal infallibility reigned.
The reputation and credibility of speakers may, however, count against a consideration of what it is that they have to say. If someone is known to have been an unreliable guide in the past, or violated other precepts of dialectical discussion, they deserve little consideration, or at best might be offered reserved judgement until a more reliable narrator appears or independent verification can be provided.
You are confusing a positive claim of authority against a negative claim of credibility.
The notion of empirical evidence does not mean that every last fact or claim must be verified. It relies profoundly on the credibility of the messenger, witness, and/or experimenter. Expertise in field lies both in specific knowledge of a domain as well as credibility in relating that knowledge. Experience without credibility is charlatanism. Lacking both credibility and experience is the foolish fraud.
In the specific domain of weather, it's those with an axe to grind against credible impartial experts from an overwhelming number of independent disciplines and organisations who'd launched character assassinations, as is exceedingly well documented. Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway's Merchants of Doubts is only one of many accounts of this. Oreskes is interesting herself as a historian of science, who's specifically studied another instance in which heterodoxy became not only orthodoxy but the central organising principle of an entire scientific study: the development of plate tectonics theory as the foundation of geology. That revolution occurred over the course of about 50 years, in which, again, evidence from many independent individuals, disciplines, and institutions provided overwhelming justification for a new model of understanding. Those include the discovery of radioactivity, the use of radiometric dating, the fossil record, gathering and dating of extraterrestrial rock samples from asteroids and the Moon, ocean core data, magnetic field history revealed in those cores, bathymetry, volcanology, seismology, and others.
Science does occasionally make hasty judgements; the ideal of empirical validation runs up against fallible humans and human institutions. Ultimately, however, it corrects itself, which is the one thing ideologically-motivated reasoning cannot do. Alfred Wegener's initial hypothesis proved to be in the right direction, but of itself lacked sufficient evidence for the theory to be accepted on its own. Over the course of a half century, and despite quite strong resistance within and outside the scientific community, that evidence was gathered, however, and a theory based on the broad outlines proposed by Wegener was all but certain by the mid-1950s and was eventually accepted in 1965.
The ideology in climate science comes largely from commercial interests who would be gravely harmed should the full implications and conclusions of what is now the overwhelmingly supported scientific consensus be adopted and realised. Upton Sinclair is validated yet again.
