Should Climate Change Have Its Own Subforum in Earth Sciences?

[Sherwood Botsford]

For some sensitive issues that have a political component in addition to a physics ones, would there be merit in creating sub-forums -- e.g. climate change as a sub-forum of Earth Sciences.

 

[DaveC426913]

There was one. There isn't any more.

Of all the "Tried it, bad idea" forum topics on PF, I think Climate Change is at the top.

Not only is there no forum, it was (is?) a banned topic anywhere on the forum. (Or is that just climate change politics?)

 

[fresh_42]

For some sensitive issues that have a political component in addition to a physics ones, would there be merit in creating sub-forums -- e.g. climate change as a sub-forum of Earth Sciences.

The consequences would unfortunately be too negative if we did this. The subject is too loaded by misinformation, political goals, and ignorance. Furthermore it touches phenomena like psychology, sociology and similar fields which provide reasons to explain human behavior, again causes of non scientific responses.

We do not discuss it politically for the same reason we do not discuss philosophy, religion or politics in general: a lack of expertise, but even more the knowledge that such threads always end up people arguing in an unpleasant manner defending positions which are not backed by evidence, although hardly to dismantle. Those discussions will sooner or later arrive at a point, where ideologies come into play, and that is the point at which you cannot reason anymore. It would be ugly. And it would be as senseless as it would be unsolvable.

Go into any public room and look for discussions about vaccination. It makes no sense.

 

[berkeman]

One other issue that we struggled with back when we still allowed wide-ranging Climate Change threads: We figured out that we really needed a subject matter expert on the Mentor staff to handle those discussions in the same way that we can with the other technical forums.

We have great subject matter experts in our Mentor and SA ranks for all of our technical forums, but we couldn't find such a person to take over Mentoring a Climate Change forum. Once we realized that fundamental issue, it became clear that we could only support narrow discussions of Climate Change that are discussions of the published science only.