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Nornagest comments on [QUESTION]: What are your views on climate change, and how did you form them? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm no expert, but I've read the IPCC reports, and they're (to their credit) about as dry and anti-alarmist as it's possible to be while making the predictions they do. Are you talking about informal predictions? If so, which?
I believe he means that the IPCC reports are in agreement with some people who you may classify as "alarmist". Or you can read it to mean that while the tone of the reports is not alarming, the actual contents are.
edit: That'll teach me to reply to a post without refreshing the page.
By "alarmist", I meant making dire predictions, not sounding panicked when they do or something like that. I assumed Daniel_Burfoot meant the same.
If you don't mind, I would like to probe your usage of this term...
What distinction do you draw between "alarmist" and "alarming"?
If the hypothetical situation is such that the truth really is properly dire, are accurate reports of this dire truth best classified as "alarmist"?
How should you react when, one night in the laboratory, you make an alarming discovery with fairly high confidence? After having them independently verified, would you consider yourself an "alarmist" for reporting your own findings?
Maybe I should have avoided the term "alarmist" in that context, since it often implies unjustified predictions of danger, which I obviously did not mean to imply. I'm not interested in arguing over definitions.
Good, I just wanted to be clear. In my experience that "alarmist" usually does strongly imply that the predictions of danger are unjustified, and that interpretation (which I presume most readers default to) risks changing the intended meaning of your statement that "climate scientists[...] are often quite alarmist."
Now that I re-read your top-level post knowing what you meant, I think I understand much better what you are saying.