What do you think that rigging the peer-review process accomplished?
> it's because evolution is, in fact, correct, and studying enough biology to get paid for doing it usually leads people to realise this. So you'd need to rule out that sort of explanation in the case of climate science.
Are you asserting that AGW is as "settled" as evolution? If not, the analogy doesn't hold and neither does the conclusion that you'd like to impose.
Climate researchers outside of CRU are acknowledging that the thumb was on the scale. Is denying that really the hill that you want to defend?
In science, being a "good person" doesn't count as evidence. Neither does "the folks who disagree are bad people". AGW may turn out to be real (although that's looking unlikely), but it will take us much longer to find that out because "good people" behaved badly and did cargo cult science. Which reminds me - why do we consider them good people?
In addition to rigging peer review and trying to stack grant committees, it's pretty much SOP to add some blather about "consistent with AGW" to almost anything these days, in part because that's how the money flows. Of course, this isn't new. We saw the same thing with AI and "computers".
No, I am not asserting that AGW is as settled as evolution. I'm pointing out that "everyone being paid to work on this agrees with X, which shows that you can't get on in the field without agreeing with X, which shows that there's a bias against non-X" is a lousy argument, because in the case X=evolution it produces a result that is (to reasonable people) not credible. Note for the avoidance of doubt: I was attempting to pre-empt that argument, not accusing you of having made it.
(The cases X=evolution and X=AGW are somewhat parallel, though certainly not identical. In both cases there is a robust scientific consensus challenged by a minority. In both cases at least some of the challenging minority have an obvious reason for making the challenge that doesn't have much to do with truth. In both cases the challenging minority has strong ties to a particular political group -- the same group in both cases, as it happens. In both cases the challenging minority accuses the majority of having similarly non-truth-directed motivations, and in both cases it's not terribly clear what those are really supposed to be.)
I don't know what non-CRU people you are referring to, nor what acknowledgement they've made that "the thumb was on the scale", so I can't comment on your statement about that.
The stuff about "good people" and "bad people" is a red herring; neither I nor anyone upthread made any claim even slightly resembling "these people are Good and those are Bad, therefore these are Right and those are Wrong". Eschenbach has a clear incentive to do whatever it takes to make AGW look less likely; that's true whether he's a good person, a bad person, or (like maybe 99.9% or so of the human race) a mixture of the two. And, unless he is an incorruptible saint concerned with nothing but truth, it is rational to apply some discount to things he says that make AGW look less likely: not because he is a bad person and bad people never tell the truth, but because he is a (probably quite rational) person with a strong incentive to say such things even if they are wrong or misleading.
Similarly, no one (I hope) is saying that mainstream climate scientists must be right because they are good people and good people never say false things. But I will happily make the following argument: Imagine someone in the field of climate science who is inclined to put his or her own interests ahead of truth, and who doesn't mind doing bad or dishonest science for that purpose. Do you think that person is more likely to turn to Shell or the AEI or the Republican party, or to Greenpeace or Al Gore? Where is the readier flow of money likely to be found?
Is your last paragraph just vague handwaving, or is there an actual argument there? On the face of it it looks almost like you're suggesting that the reason why climate scientists almost all defend AGW is that people writing papers on other subjects tend to say "and by the way this is consistent with AGW" whether it is or not, but every part of that looks very silly so you probably have something more sensible in mind.
Not at all. Peer-reviewed publications lead to grants. Shut off the former and you strongly influence the latter.
> No, I am not asserting that AGW is as settled as evolution.
If AGW is not settled, the funding disparity is "interesting". There's clearly a bias, the only question is its reason. Since it isn't science....
> The stuff about "good people" and "bad people" is a red herring; neither I nor anyone upthread made any claim even slightly resembling "these people are Good and those are Bad, therefore these are Right and those are Wrong".
Good people vs bad people not a red herring. It's the basis for much of the climategate defense. "Those good scientists were beset by bad people, so naturally/it's okay that they did bad things."
> Imagine someone in the field of climate science who is inclined to put his or her own interests ahead of truth, and who doesn't mind doing bad or dishonest science for that purpose.
You assume that money is the only interesting motivation, and that's simply not true. It isn't even the dominant motivation among folks doing bad science - true belief is.
> Do you think that person is more likely to turn to Shell or the AEI or the Republican party, or to Greenpeace or Al Gore? Where is the readier flow of money likely to be found?
Al Gore and Greenpeace don't fund research and neither does the Republican Party. However, the folks that do have spent far more funding AGW than anything else.
So, if you're purely motivated by money, you'd have gone with "AGW is happening" because that's where the money is, as you agreed upstream. (You only argued about why that's where the money is.)
> you're suggesting that the reason why climate scientists almost all defend AGW
"almost all" turns out to be way too strong. Moreover, the basis for their support is often data from other fields where many of the folks involved disagree with that interpretation.
However, my point was that much of of the "AGW is happening" literature consists of quips in other fields where the connection is tenuous at best. They're studying something else and threw in an AGW comment because that's an easy way to get some points. (I'm ignoring the bogus cases like the islands off India that have been sinking pretty since anyone started paying attention.)
As I wrote, we see this all the time. When something looks like a winning story, folks adopt it. Remember "turbo"?
AGW is not as settled as evolution, but it's still pretty damn settled. I think that is sufficient to account for the disparity in publications. (As for disparity in funding: disparity in total funding is a consequence of the fact that the great majority of climate scientists are AGW believers; if there's a disparity in funding per person then I haven't heard of it, and I'd rather suspect it's in the wrong direction for your argument.)
I don't believe I have ever heard anyone defending the CRU people, or the climate science community in general, or the proposition that the climate is warning and much of that is the result of human activity, say anything like "Those good scientists were beset by bad people, so naturally/it's ok that they did bad things". I have heard "Those scientists were being harassed, so naturally they did bad things", but that isn't a claim about good people or bad people. In any case, the discussion here wasn't (last time I looked) about Things People Have Said About The CRU Emails, but about whether it's correct to say that climate scientists are "paid to confirm AGW".
I do not assume, or believe, that money is the only interesting motivation. The question was whether climate scientists are "paid to confirm AGW"; I was not the person who framed the matter in terms of money. I do think, though, that money is an extremely common motivator for dishonest work, and that when people claiming some kind of AGW fraud conspiracy actually deign to suggest why there would be one it's usually money that they suggest.
The question about funding wasn't "who funds research on this stuff?", but "who would fund unscrupulous research on this stuff?". If it's easier to get your dishonest research paid for by one side than the other, then that's the side that will likely attract a higher proportion of dishonest research.
(So, drawing together two of the above points: what determines which way an unscrupulous person who cares only about the money will jump is not the total amount of funding obtained by people on each side, but the amount of funding per person available to unscrupulous people on each side. I don't see any reason to think that that disparity works in favour of AGW; I suspect it works strongly in the other direction, but that's just a guess.)
I dispute your claim that "almost all" is way too strong. See, e.g., http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf which surveyed a bunch of earth scientists and found ~90% agreement among the whole population and ~97% agreement among those who (1) list climate science as their area of specialization and (2) have climate change as the subject of more than half their recently published papers. (I don't know where those criteria came from, and therefore can't rule out the possibility that they were dishonestly chosen to get the result the authors wanted; but I have no reason to think they were.) Or http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/Oreskes2007.pdf which looks at the abstracts of 928 papers found by searching the literature for "global climate change".
I'm afraid I still don't really understand your point about "quips in other fields". Maybe it's because I don't spend much of my time reading scientific literature from randomly chosen fields (and the fields I'm competent to read scientific literature in aren't terribly close to climate science) that I haven't seen this alleged torrent of quips that (it seems like you're saying) is somehow responsible for climate scientists' belief in AGW. I really don't see how that could work, but perhaps I'm being dim.
I don't remember anything called "turbo" that illustrates that "when something looks like a winning story, folks adopt it"; sorry.
