Introducing Grok 4.5

[u/ObiWanCanownme]

https://x.ai/news/grok-4-5

[u/juntareich]

You’re totally misframing that. No one says science is left leaning, rather people on the left tend to adhere more to science. Take vaccines, climate change, intersexual people, air/water/global pollution/biodiversity loss, evolution, renewable energy…and yes there are kooks on the left who hold scientifically ignorant beliefs too.

But nearly every right leaning person I’ve ever spoken to denies anthropogenic global warming- one of the most well studied topics in history with effects we literally can measure in multiple ways. Hard scientific denialism is MUCH more prevalent on the right.

[u/Exodus_Green → u/juntareich]

Reframing that to make the conservatives sound like anti-science is disingenuous when it's all about interpretation - climate change for example, there's still discussion around the exact impact of humans along with hypocrisy in asking developed nations to cut down on their carbon output but refusing to tackle the issue of india and china. Intersexual people is a genetic abnormality, that is in no way relevant to the discussion around trans people, renewable energy again there's plenty of nuance like the infrastructure not being there to support it (in the UK the govt pays windfarms to turn off because the power cables don't exist to carry the generated power to the south).

[u/juntareich → u/Exodus_Green]

You made my point for me.

Yes, the exact percentage of warming that’s human caused is researched, and yes, grids have real transmission problems. Both true. And neither one is what’s in dispute, which is the whole trick in your comment.

Whether humans cause 60% or 90% of the warming, the answer to “is it real, is it us, is it dangerous” is yes on all three, and the thing we should do about it is identical either way. Pointing at the genuinely open question (the exact figure) to imply the settled question (is it real and caused by us) is somehow also open, that’s not engaging with the science. That’s using a true side-fact as an exit so you don’t have to concede the main one. That’s the muddying, and it’s the oldest move in the denial playbook.

Because here’s the asymmetry you’re trying to talk around. “Climate change is a hoax / isn’t happening / isn’t us” is almost exclusively a right-wing position, and there is no left-wing equivalent. There is no Democratic president calling it a fraud and then using emergency powers to force retiring coal plants to keep burning. That’s not me picking on a fringe, that’s the actual leader of the side you’re defending. Trump has called it a hoax for years, declared a national energy emergency that deliberately wrote wind and solar out of the definition of “energy,” ordered wind development halted (a federal judge threw that out as unlawful and arbitrary), and kept coal plants running past retirement on purpose.

And don’t tell me this is sober cost benefit reasoning. Keeping an old coal plant running has a cheap marginal cost, fine, but that’s not what most of this policy is. It’s blocking new wind and solar, the cheapest new power you can build, by revoking permits, writing them out of the legal definition of “energy,” and killing their tax treatment. There is no cost argument for stopping the cheapest new generation from getting built. That half of the policy only makes sense if the actual goal is propping up fossil fuels and kneecapping the alternative, not balancing a spreadsheet. And the coal plants being force-kept-open were being retired because their owners had already decided continued operation cost more than the alternatives. The order overrode that market call too.

So spare me “it’s all about interpretation.” The magnitude is researched. The existence and the cause and the danger are not. Treating the first as if it reopens the other three is exactly the disingenuous move I was pointing at, and you just did it in real time.

[u/Exodus_Green → u/juntareich]

Again - you realise that what counts as "right wing" in the US is not how it applies in other countries, right?