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0 pointsgjm1116y ago0 comments

Either you have misunderstood my point about peer review and being-paid-to-confirm, or I have misunderstood what you mean about being "paid to confirm AGW". I would only say that someone is paid to do X if they understand that their job depends on their doing X. A secretly rigged process would not have that effect.

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.

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anamax16y ago· 2 in thread

> Either you have misunderstood my point about peer review

You're "forgetting" that the AGW folks fixed the peer review system. I know that that's an "inconvient truth", but ....

> AGW is not as settled as evolution, but it's still pretty damn settled.

Then you're not paying attention. The tree data "trick" means that the "before thermometers" estimates by the AGW folks are wrong, which guts the trend argument. The "no warming since 2000" means that the models are wrong. The accounting for how temperature stations were moved is broken. The AGW folks mis-represented the Russian data. It goes on and on.

> I would only say that someone is paid to do X if they understand that their job depends on their doing X.

Since one can get the desired effect without doing that, that's an absurd standard. You pick people based on whether you think that they've bought in and are not going to rock the boat. You never have to say anything.

That's part of why I mentioned "true believers".

> 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 didn't say that it was "responsible", I said that it constituted much of the supposed consensus. The amount of research that actually concerns AGW is fairly small. However, there's lots of research where it can seem relevant. Since AGW is "hot", there's a huge temptation to just throw in a "consistent with AGW" comment that isn't actually supported by the research being reported.

This happens all the time in every field. Making a tenuous connection to a hot topic is a common way to jazz up a paper.

gjm11OP16y ago

No, I am not '"forgetting" that the AGW folks fixed the peer review system', I am explaining why even if that's true it doesn't mean that AGW people are "paid to confirm AGW". Also, so far as I can tell it isn't true for any sensible meaning of "fixed". But, no doubt, if you repeat the claim often enough without providing any evidence, it will become true.

The tree data trick does not mean what you say it does; see http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/09/02/0805721105.full... (key finding from conclusions section: "We find that the hemispheric-scale warmth of the past decade for the [Northern Hemisphere] is likely anomalous ... This conclusion appears to hold for at least the past 1,300 years ... from reconstructions that do not use tree-ring proxies, and are therefore not subject to the associated additional caveats."). Temperatures vary a lot on a timescale of a few years, so the much-ballyhooed "no warming since 2000" doesn't in the least mean that the models are wrong; see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/a-warm... and also figure 4 in http://www.columbia.edu/%7Ejeh1/mailings/2009/20091216_Tempe... (and the text below that figure). Your claim about "accounting for how temperature stations were moved" is too vague to respond to. The AGW folks did not "misrepresent the Russian data" so far as I can tell; see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1000732.

Do you have any actual evidence that climate scientists "pick people based on whether [they] think that they've bought in and are not going to rock the boat"?

I simply do not believe your claim that throwaway "this is consistent with AGW" remarks in papers on other topics "constitute[s] much of the supposed consensus". Are you suggesting, e.g., that a large fraction of the papers in Oreskes's study were really about other topics and had only throwaway references to AGW (it sure doesn't seem like it from her description), and that if those papers were excluded then the study would find much less acceptance of AGW (it sure doesn't seem like it from her description)?

I'd like to point out that you have a nice two-way argument here. If papers by climate scientists support AGW, that's because climate scientists are all "true believers" who have been picked based on whether they've bought in and aren't going to rock the boat. If papers by other people also support AGW, that's because they've just slapped brief pro-AGW remarks onto papers about other things. So, I wonder, is there anything the peer-reviewed literature could contain that you would regard as good evidence that careful scientific study supports AGW?

anamax16y ago

> I am explaining why even if that's true it doesn't mean that AGW people are "paid to confirm AGW".

What part of "you get grants for peer-reviewed publications" don't you understand?

> Also, so far as I can tell it isn't true for any sensible meaning of "fixed".

The folks who wrote the "ClimateGate" e-mails disagree, but then they did the fixing.

> So, I wonder, is there anything the peer-reviewed literature could contain that you would regard as good evidence that careful scientific study supports AGW?

This fixation on "peer-review" is interesting. You claim that the "peer"s all agree, so their review is subject to all that that implies. You might remember http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_accept_defeat/ .

The climate people have threw away raw data, so we can't know whether "normalization" was actually reasonable. They're still saying "trust us" even though every time someone finds an error in their work, the error goes the same direction....

BTW - Scientific truth isn't defined by consensus.

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