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0 pointsnvm0n22y ago0 comments

I think modern science rides off the back of the good reputation developed by earlier researchers. In modern fields of "science" it's common to find failure to replicate rates of more than 50%, or even higher. Other fields don't even accept that replicability matters at all, or they blatantly misrepresent their own findings. So yeah, modern science (as opposed to say, pre-WW2 science) is more like a barrel of bad apples with a few good ones, rather than the other way around. People have started noticing in recent years.

We can't trust peer review, correct. Climate peer review isn't run by generic disinterested scientists, it's run by climatologists specifically - the very people whose income and influence directly depends on the perception that it's a very important field. If they were to be exaggerating as a group, how would the peer review process fix that? It wouldn't, which is why the many scientists and engineers who have peer reviewed climate science and think it's no good have to resort to public declarations.

That's like saying we can't trust medical diagnoses because they're made by doctors.

That's a major critique of the entire US medical system isn't it? That doctors over-medicalize things because they're financially incentivized to do so. We can debate to what extent that's true but you're depicting this as an obviously absurd idea when it's actually taken pretty seriously by lots of people, partly because there have been cases in the past where doctors appear to have (accidentally) created fake epidemics, like the wave of multiple personality disorder diagnoses that appeared and then disappeared within the last 50 years.

a "known climate change denier" who's not actually denying climate change

Right! In fact nobody given that label actually denies that the climate changes, which is why it's a slur. The climate has always changed. Yet as Hausfather discovered, the monster they've given birth to doesn't care about minor details like that. You're either a doomer or a denier and there's nothing in between.

The people signing this declaration are saying that there is warming, but it's caused by both natural and artificial factors. They don't even deny humans create warming. But they criticize specific claims made by climatologists, and thus get described by people who haven't read the document - and by you - as "denying anthropogenic climate change".

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myshpa2y ago· 2 in thread

Your argument touches on several points, each of which deserves a nuanced response. So let's dive in.

First, about the decline of science's "good reputation" and the issue of replicability: Failure to replicate is an inherent part of the scientific process that helps it self-correct. While it's true that some modern scientific fields face replication crises, using that to dismiss entire disciplines, especially well-established ones like climatology, is a broad brush that does more to muddy the waters than clarify them.

As for peer review being flawed because it's "run by climatologists" — experts in the field being criticized — your argument sounds perilously close to a conspiracy theory. The idea that all climatologists are financially and professionally incentivized to uphold a false narrative is not just cynical; it misunderstands how academic tenure and prestige work. Scientists gain notoriety and respect by overturning existing paradigms, not by conforming to them.

You're right that challenges like over-prescription of opioids continue to be serious issues within the medical system. However, these issues are met with ongoing scrutiny, calls for reform, and targeted actions to address the problem, rather than a dismissal of the entire field of medicine. The existence of flaws doesn't invalidate the enterprise; it emphasizes the need for continuous oversight and adjustment. Just as we wouldn't discard the entire medical field because of specific issues, it's reductive to discredit the bulk of climate science due to criticisms of the peer-review process or other perceived shortcomings.

As for the "doomer or denier" binary, you've created a false dichotomy. There is a wide range of opinion within climate science, from the degree of human influence to the best methods of mitigation. But the majority opinion, backed by empirical data, leans toward significant anthropogenic impact.

Lastly, the "climate changes naturally" argument. While it's a factual statement, it's also an incomplete one when discussing the current situation. The speed and impact of recent changes are what concern climatologists, and numerous studies attribute this to human activity.

You seem to want room for nuance and complexity in this discussion, which is commendable. But you can't then turn around and use sweeping generalizations to dismiss the bulk of scientific consensus.

EDIT:

I think that all points from that document are thoroughly debunked and explained at skepticalscience.com. I suggest spending some time there instead.

nvm0n2OP2y ago

Thank you for the reasonable discussion.

To clarify, there's no need to tip-toe around politely. I am absolutely asserting a conspiracy! This assertion is on strong ground because academics get caught so frequently putting in writing that they're engaged in a conspiracy to pervert peer review. I'm not sure whether this is stupidity (hopefully) or cynical awareness that they can get away with anything and it won't matter (more likely). We already mentioned the famous ClimateGate email where a CRU member said specifically he'd keep skeptical papers out "even if I have to redefine what peer review means to do it", but then there's also incidents like this one, where an invited IPCC reviewer was blocked specifically because he was trying to actually review papers carefully and was asking for data i.e. wasn't one of "the team", as climatologists like to call it.

https://climateaudit.org/2007/03/28/accessing-hegerl-data/

I’ve mentioned in passing on a number of occasions that, when I sought to obtain supporting data for then unpublished articles, IPCC threatened to expel me as a reviewer.

Go read the whole article, it's extremely damaging to the credibility of the IPCC. This stuff is no surprise because "The idea that all climatologists are financially and professionally incentivized to uphold a false narrative is not just cynical", it's also true. The idea that scientists celebrate and pop the bubbly when they get proven wrong is academic propaganda. Yes, if the overturning of a paradigm isn't too embarrassing to the old guard and creates lots of new potential papers for the next generation then they'll get over it and get on with it (ex. quantum physics). But far more common is an overturning that goes like this:

1. All your answers are based on a shoddy pseudo-scientific paradigm and should be retracted.

2. But we don't know the answers either, so there is no new paradigm.

In other words, science is invalidated but there's no new direction to go in that lets something be salvaged from the ruins. Academia very visibly cannot handle this. Nor will it ever be able to handle this, it's inherent to the incentive structure. The signatories to this declaration are outsiders, so what climatologists do next when their paradigm is overturned just isn't their problem. They don't care, all they care about is that science as a whole isn't seen to be exaggerating or lying. But climatologists very much do care because if their current paradigm is overturned then they have nowhere to go, no new paradigm to reorient around. Their careers would lie in ruins with no way to rebuild. So, they fight.

This dynamic exists in all fields of course which is one of the root causes of the replication crisis. It's why it's called a "crisis" even by academic insiders, not just annoying online critics. Sure, if papers were being routinely replicated as part of the normal scientific process, and sure, if replication failure was rare, then your argument would hold water. But neither of those is correct: replication efforts are unusual one off events, and the failure rate is so high that just assuming everything said by these fields is wrong would be a perfectly rational reaction. That's clearly not normal or an intended part of the process. Moreover many papers fail to replicate for highly suspicious reasons indicative of fraud.

Climatology is in an even worse state: it's one of those fields that just systematically rejects the whole idea that its work should be replicable! Consider these two links:

1. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=glob...

2. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2015.17700

The first link yields about 50,000 results for me, most of them papers discussing the long pause or haitus in global warming that kicked off the millenium. That's a lot of papers! The second link is where the climatologists who maintain the historical temperature databases decided that no such pause ever happened, it was all just measurement error. They release a new version of history and at a stroke, all those papers are now non-replicable! So they retracted all 50,000 papers that were built on bad data right? Ha ... ha ... <gasp> ... <splutter> ... ha. No. Climatologists pull this kind of stunt because they've done so before and got away with it. Go read any of the papers that deal with global cooling before 1975 or so. They will discuss the long term cooling trend in the 20th century and present graphs of temperatures going down. Now go check those same graphs today and no cooling is visible. Again, climatologists decided their data had been bad and rewrote it from scratch (N.B. this is considered fraud in other fields). Again, none of those papers were ever retracted.

What do you even do with a field that routinely invalidates whole decades of its own research, making their findings totally non-replicable unless you somehow find old copies of temperature datasets, and does so with no retractions at all? Real scientists reject it!

myshpa2y ago

> Thank you for the reasonable discussion. To clarify, there's no need to tip-toe around politely. I am absolutely asserting a conspiracy!

Asserting a conspiracy among climate scientists requires extraordinary evidence. Multiple independent reviews have found no substantial misconduct in the issues you've mentioned. Science advances through rigorous debate and data analysis, and the consensus on climate change is grounded in extensive, peer-reviewed research.

Again, that's how science is supposed to work.

If you want to find real problems, focus on why everybody's concentrating solely on climate change, when the real issue is overshoot - comprising climate change, biodiversity loss, overfishing, deforestation, soil degradation, freshwater scarcity ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries#Nine_boun...

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