My source of climate skepticisms is based on the following:
1) We know that the Earth was much warmer in the past, including the Medieval Warming Period. We know that the Alps were warm enough so that the Iceman could pass through them without protection from the cold, and yet he was found encased in ice.
2) We know that the Earth is cooler now than in the past. And it's also hotter than it was in the past.
3) We know that previous historical temperatures had nothing to do with human-produced CO2.
Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before, I'm going to believe that temperature will moderate and cool, just like it did in the past.
I live in California, where we were experienced a ~10 year drought. These same scientists claimed this was the "new normal" and everyone was in a panic. Then we had 2 years of rain and everything was back to normal for the last 4 years. In fact, it's better than normal. We are almost in summer, and there isn't a single area of California that is in drought conditions.
More importantly, no one is mentioning the "new normal" anymore. No one declared "we were wrong, sorry!" instead everyone is acting as if it never happened or that it's going to go back to drought conditions. The reaction is not scientific. It appears that climate science is driven by science fiction and ideology rather than actual science. And I'm quite sure there will be many people who comment "Just you wait and see!" but that's driven by ideology and not science. I prefer to follow actual science, and science to me suggests that climate will always continue to oscillate, on geological timeframes.
> Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before, I'm going to believe that temperature will moderate and cool, just like it did in the past.
Have you considered that one of the reasons it's not the same as before is because it's rising at a faster rate than before? It's not just that the temperature is changing but how fast it changes. If it happens slowly enough everything has time to adapt. If the rate of temperature increase happens faster than everything has time to adapt, there's problems.
> 1) We know that the Earth was much warmer in the past, including the Medieval Warming Period. We know that the Alps were warm enough so that the Iceman could pass through them without protection from the cold, and yet he was found encased in ice.
While true that the Alps were much warmer during the Medieval Warming Period, that was a regional weather change, not a global event, the change we're seeing now is global, and sustained, not just in one regional area.
Also, I'd recommend doing some additional research on Ötzi, the Iceman you're likely talking about. First, he died much earlier than the Medieval Warming Period, so they aren't even related. Also, I don't think very many people would describe him as found without protection from the cold, considering he was found with many different animal skin coats to protect him from the cold. And the fact that he died, frozen and encased in ice, further shows how it was indeed actually cold enough to be very dangerous.
> I live in California, where we were experienced a ~10 year drought. These same scientists claimed this was the "new normal" and everyone was in a panic. Then we had 2 years of rain and everything was back to normal for the last 4 years. In fact, it's better than normal. We are almost in summer, and there isn't a single area of California that is in drought conditions.
It totally is annoying how the drought conditions have been communicated to the public, for sure! However, California having a drought for 10 years and then being fine for 4 years is exactly the kind of weather whiplash and volatility that is intensifying due to climate change.
- the warming in the Medieval Warming Period is modest compared to projected modern warming
- The Alps are currently "warm enough" to be crossed without special gear much of the year. Otzi was found wearing multiple layers of hides and furs that would have provided good protection against the elements and is supposed to have been killed in late spring/early summer, not the depths of winter. Glaciers are active things and where he was found could be some distance from where he died.
- Yes the earth has been warmer and colder in the past, climate scientists are aware of these facts, it can also be true that climate is changing quickly in ways that may be very inconvenient for many modern humans.
- Regarding California climate, I don't know who "these same scientists" were, and popular press about climate change is often misleading and superficial. I have lived here for ~35 years and we have had a handful of very wet years but most of that period has been classified as "drought". Yes at the moment we are not but this was a very poor water year and we've benefited from carryover storage from last year. As far as I know, the scientific consensus is still that California is getting warmer and drier on average, and the large year to year fluctuations do not nullify that trend.
Nothing you wrote refutes anything that I said. Comparing actual historical temperatures to speculative temperatures where no models have been accurate isn't science.
> Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before, I'm going to believe that temperature will moderate and cool, just like it did in the past.
Would you indulge me and see if this one chart might change your mind? It includes each of your data points.
The journal articles the chart is based on are referenced in light grey on the side, if you prefer to view the same data in a peer reviewed article format with a more serious font.
> Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before
This has literally been done, you're just ignorant
There is a lawsuit against xAI about those datacenters. They have a strong case that Musk is clearly flouting environmental laws. If they are able to get a preliminary injunction against the datacenters, then they are dead in the water. That's the only reason why they build them so quickly.
"Search" is a ridiculous thing to be doing post-2022. Imagine going to a doctor and asking them a question, and they give you 5 printouts for your to read through to synthesize your own answer. Imagine you asked your spouse a question and they responded "Here's 10 links for you to check out!"
We have AI now and it's doing a mostly incredible job getting us ANSWERS, not SEARCH LINKS. Trying to pretend that links are better is just trying to copy with rapid change.
Quite honestly I'm shocked that Google keeps making more money with search ads because I don't search anymore, I get answers directly from it or ChatGPT without clicking on any links.
> We have AI now and it's doing a mostly incredible job getting us ANSWERS, not SEARCH LINKS. Trying to pretend that links are better is just trying to copy with rapid change.
If you feel that it's better, you are free to use it. Leave the rest of us, who think AI is bad at finding information and want to search, in peace so we can work the way we like. I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation: you can work the way you like, and I can work the way I like.
I have gotten so many fake recruiter contacts, it's not funny. At this point I don't know who is real and who is fake. I talked to real recruiters at Big Tech companies and they said their entire profiles have been fraudulently copied to steal candidate information or to get them to pay to get "favorable attention" during the interview process.
LinkedIn is doing nothing to stop the fraud at this point. There's almost no way to tell if you're talking to a real person unless you meet with them personally at their office.
I dont get a ton of spam from posting - the only thing I can think of is my email address isn't in the comment and instead I direct people to my resume. Maybe the scraping is lazy and grabs what's on the hn page only.
I interviewed at Microsoft in Redmond in 1997 and got zero programming questions. They were all knowledge-based or brain-teaser questions so I don't know if I believe that they gave 4 programming questions in 1994.
They intended to defraud this home owner engaged under contract for their own profit. This wasn't unforeseeable or accidental damage nor due to a misunderstanding on their part.
It's also not a dichotomy. It can be both criminal and civil. Victims always have the right to seek compensation in parallel with criminal punishment.
Another excellent legal statement from The Mafia /s
Aside from the obvious joke, I feel like a lot of people miss that you can pursue BOTH civil and criminal cases for a given crime. If a billionaire murders your spouse you absolutely can sue them for wrongful death. That doesn't preclude them to also going to jail for 20+ years.
It's probably easier to handle as civil negligence. Criminal damage has an intent component. Of course it would hinge on discovery - as soon as you find an email to the effect of "we know this will cause damage, let's test it on someone else's house", that counts as intent.
That's where the scam is. They sell to their pension fund and mutual fund buddies, and in return when they get a really good deal, those funds will be first in line. It's a scratch-my-back-scratch-yours kind of deal that is utterly corrupt but no one seems to care because the losses are papered over by these huge funds.
I'm sorry but is this an article from the late 1990s?
I'm also from Canada and I know tons of Canadians that have come here since the 90s. I even known immigrants to Canada from other countries (mainly China and India) that came to the US via Canada, using the TN1 or H1B visas after getting their Canadian citizenships.
The biggest problem Canada has is that any moderately successful tech worker is going to be dead-set on trying to get into the US because the Canadian tech scene can't compare based on base pay, annual bonus, starting equity or refreshers, etc. I make more money than all my friends combined. One of my friends is a teacher in Toronto and my annual bonus is more than his entire yearly salary.
I'm sure a lot of Canadian tech workers would repatriate and foreign workers would immigrate to Canada if they could lower taxes across the board and make life easier for tech companies and workers. There's literally trillions of dollars in tech ideas that could have been created in Canada but all of the founders left for the US.
Something feels deeply wrong about comparing your tech income to a teacher’s. Especially outside the context of an argument like “teachers should be paid more.”
I did not mean to make a moral judgement. I was too flippant. It is a weird comparison. You compare a salary in an industry where people are known to be paid well to one where people are known to be paid poorly. Of course you make more money regardless of USA or Canada.
My point was that someone I've known for my entire life, I earn more than them through my bonus than they make working an entire year. This is a personal connection. The amount of money I make in Silicon Valley is enormous compared to people I know very well. It should be the same way in Canada and maybe having a solid layer of well-off tech workers will raise everyone's salaries. Experienced teachers in private schools in Silicon Valley make well over $100k, unlike my friend in Toronto so there is something to be said about the trickle down effect (even though I mostly don't believe it).
> I'm sure a lot of Canadian tech workers would repatriate and foreign workers would immigrate to Canada if they could lower taxes across the board and make life easier for tech companies and workers
I'm not sure that Canadian taxes compare that unfavourably to combined California plus federal taxation. A deeper, more structural limitation appears to be the venture capital environment, namely that Canada doesn't have a good one.
Canada's investable capital is dominated by pension funds, insurance companies (i.e. pension funds), and banks (i.e. pensioners). All are risk averse (https://thelogic.co/news/bdc-canadian-venture-capital-report...), which makes it hard for Canadian startups to begin scaling. Without native "unicorns" (https://financialpost.com/technology/why-canada-best-startup...), there's allegedly a failure-to-launch for the entire sector – tech billionaires being some of the most reliable early-stage investors with the greatest risk tolerance.
The porous border works both for and against the sector. On one hand that makes it relatively easy (but not automatic) for a Canadian tech company to enter the US market, but on the other hand it's also relatively easy for Canadian tech workers (founders included) to simply relocate (note the article here). If startups leave for the US's vast fields of venture capital, they're less likely to come back. Note that around the turn of the year Y-Combinator halted investments in Canadian firms (https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/adding-canada-back) because they so frequently relocated to the US.
This venture capital cycle seems to be a deeply-entrenched and very hard problem. If democratically feasible tax incentives could reliably create "the Silicon Valley of X," then we probably would have many more Silicon Valleys both in the US and elsewhere.
> You think tax incentives are what makes VC work in California but not other places in the US let alone Canada?
I believe that my comment above was aligned with your premise here. I say that the tax difference is not sufficient by itself and that Canada reportedly has a very non-SV-like venture capital ecosystem.
Since January, I've been lucky and picking up various used DDR4 memory sticks for cheap-ish. I got a total of 64 GB for $180. I feel like I hit the jackpot!
1) We know that the Earth was much warmer in the past, including the Medieval Warming Period. We know that the Alps were warm enough so that the Iceman could pass through them without protection from the cold, and yet he was found encased in ice.
2) We know that the Earth is cooler now than in the past. And it's also hotter than it was in the past.
3) We know that previous historical temperatures had nothing to do with human-produced CO2.
Until someone can reconcile these facts, and they can say distinctively that the rise in temperature we see right now isn't the same reason as before, I'm going to believe that temperature will moderate and cool, just like it did in the past.
I live in California, where we were experienced a ~10 year drought. These same scientists claimed this was the "new normal" and everyone was in a panic. Then we had 2 years of rain and everything was back to normal for the last 4 years. In fact, it's better than normal. We are almost in summer, and there isn't a single area of California that is in drought conditions.
More importantly, no one is mentioning the "new normal" anymore. No one declared "we were wrong, sorry!" instead everyone is acting as if it never happened or that it's going to go back to drought conditions. The reaction is not scientific. It appears that climate science is driven by science fiction and ideology rather than actual science. And I'm quite sure there will be many people who comment "Just you wait and see!" but that's driven by ideology and not science. I prefer to follow actual science, and science to me suggests that climate will always continue to oscillate, on geological timeframes.
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