6 ms·

> Probably, but also a quick google finds dozens of supporting papers and articles. Disclaimer: I _believe_ in antropogenic warming, but i'm not qualified to j

> Probably, but also a quick google finds dozens of supporting papers and articles. Disclaimer: I _believe_ in antropogenic warming, but i'm not qualified to judge One of the arguments that I find compelling, from individuals who would advocate for a less dramatic reading of the climate news, is that there's A LOT MORE MONEY available for researchers to find out how bad the situation is & not a lot of money (or encouragement from peers) available for folks who consistently find that there's less reason for alarm. Bit of a confirmation bias, there? Maybe.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
There's a lot more money in climate research than from the fossil fuel and other companies seeking to maintain the status quo? Colour me unconvinced. I suspect the Koch funded foundations and think tanks alone could eclipse most nation's science budgets.
- repolfx 7y ago
  The government is a firehose of money, and only government (academic) research gets reported on by the media. So yes it's entirely possible for private sector research to simply disappear, relative to the output of academia, whose papers utterly dominate the conversation. How often do you see private sector studies be cited by the media? The sort of people who become journalists are the sort of people who immediately write off any study funded by industry without even bothering to read it. I can't actually remember the last time I saw an industry or thinktank funded study being cited in US media, other than maybe by Breitbart. These studies do exist: go read any climate skeptic blog and you'll find quite detailed surveys, meta-analyses and the sort of content you'd find in a published paper if these people were the sorts of people who published in academic journals (they're not). But the press normally just ignores them, and on the rare occasions they don't, it's only to paint them as science-hating bogeymen. For instance, I linked in another comment to a study on ocean acidification by Patrick Moore, who has a PhD in ecology and used to be a regional leader of Greepeace. This paper has all the same things you'd expect to find in a normal academic paper: citations, data and it says it was subject to double-blind peer review prior to publication. https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20Ocean%20Acidification%20Alarmism.pdf https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20O... And here's the Guardian commenting on Moore's work: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2015/apr/16/ask-the-real-experts-about-ocean-acidification-not-climate-science-deniers https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2015/apr/1... The piece is titled "Ask the real experts" and starts with 9 paragraphs of hate-filled invective that compares Moore and the scientists who support him to UFO believers, Elvis spotters, calls them "crazyballs", claims they're "blinded by beliefs and ideology", states that their views should never be allowed into national newspapers, falsely claims Moore has not written any peer reviewed publications (but e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128045886000136?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012804...), and then cites as evidence three "actual experts" who, of course, all work in universities. The Guardian is a particularly extreme enclave of hard-left journalists who think only government-funded academics can understand a scientific topic, but the rest of the industry has similar biases. As another example, here's a rather detailed replication and peer review of Al Gore's famous CO2 in a bottle experiment: https://wattsupwiththat.com/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-a-simple-co2-experiment/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-... It discovers that the original experiment was fraudulent (this isn't stated to mean anything beyond Al Gore being a fraud; the author fully accepts that CO2 is a greenhouse gas).
  - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Well if we're going to talk about people being frauds... Patrick Moore burnt every last atom of his remaining credibility in his now famous Canal+ Glyphosate interview. Not that he had much being a paid PR consultant to various logging corporations and the nuclear industry, trying to leverage his former Greenpeace role for money. They "falsely" claim Moore has published no papers in a mid 2015 Guardian article? Yet you link to a chapter in a year later 2016 book, not a paper as proof. WUWT has NO credibility being one of the most well known deniers on the planet, putting out endless FUD, and infamously the instigators of the appalling shitshow that was Climategate. That was looked into in great detail, and a series of independent investigations showed that the scientists did no wrong. Note, those investigations were UK and US, including the Science Select Committee, a Public Inquiry, the NSF and the EPA among others. All of them cleared the scientists. It took years for the damage WUWT did with Climategate to settle. Inadvertently I'm sure, with Moore you provide anecdotal evidence for my point. :)
    - repolfx 7y ago
      Actually, I think you're the one illustrating my point, inadvertently I'm sure. Yet you link to a chapter in a year later 2016 book, not a paper as proof. The book is a journal published by Elsevier, a major academic publisher. You know, academic papers are frequently published in books. You're right about the date though, I hadn't noticed that. The claim may have been true at the time, but no longer is. The rest still stands. The journalist in question was never going to take anything written by a non-academic seriously. Now, the core point you've missed yet are making for me is very important: you have to understand that most climate change skeptics (which I am not, btw) aren't really skeptical about climate change per se. They're really better described as science skeptics or more accurately still, academia skeptics. If you really engage with their arguments, which I get the feeling most people here never have done, you'll notice that what they're actually talking about is the problems of the scientific establishment. A lot of their arguments could transfer just as well to e.g. the healthcare industry, or academic psychology. And often what they're reacting to is not lobbyists or PR spending but what they see as over-credulous belief in the moral and intellectual purity of academics. Your post is an excellent illustration of this: • Shoot the messenger, ignoring his arguments because he isn't paid by the government. • Shoot another messenger, because they're "well known deniers". This is a circular argument. You're saying "anyone who disagrees with what I believe has no credibility" which is a vacuous statement. • Assert that a bunch of government funded environmental scientists investigated a bunch of government funded environment scientists and concluded it's all legit. The latter part is really highlighting the underlying understanding gaps here. If you truly understand why Climategate created a whole lot of newly minted skeptics, then you'll understand that it was due to apparent duplicity and collusion in the scientific establishment, the possibility/likelihood of which is a major plank of climate skepticism. Thus saying those scientists were cleared by other scientists just like them won't convince anyone of anything, as it misses the point by a mile. And BTW the Climategate guys weren't exactly cleared. For instance the Muir Russel review, in the words of the Guardian, concluded: "It found the scientists had not fudged their results or silenced critics. But it found serious shortcomings in the openness with which they worked, posing a risk to the credibility of UK climate science and indicating a transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century." And it was apparent that the scientists in question had been deliberately and illegally frustrating attempts to check their work via FOIA requests: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/09/freedom-of-information-hacked-emails https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/09/freedom-... The dust from that never really settled, and it wasn't some random blog causing trouble. The behaviour exposed by Climategate was covered in all the major newspapers at the time. It did rather strengthen the basic skeptics case but only in the same way that the replication crisis in psychology and medicine strengthened the case of other kinds of "expert skeptics".
ehnto 7y ago
Oh, I'm certain reporting is often very dramatic, especially for climate change. It seems to be a trait of much modern journalism. In this case we are seeing coral reefs die in real time in front of us. Maybe they end up being more resilient than we anticipate, to which reporting that the end is nigh will seem a bit silly. But it's somewhat too late for citations and debate on whether or not they are being harmed.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago

There's a lot more money in climate research than from the fossil fuel and other companies seeking to maintain the status quo? Colour me unconvinced. I suspect the Koch funded foundations and think tanks alone could eclipse most nation's science budgets.

repolfx 7y ago
The government is a firehose of money, and only government (academic) research gets reported on by the media. So yes it's entirely possible for private sector research to simply disappear, relative to the output of academia, whose papers utterly dominate the conversation. How often do you see private sector studies be cited by the media? The sort of people who become journalists are the sort of people who immediately write off any study funded by industry without even bothering to read it. I can't actually remember the last time I saw an industry or thinktank funded study being cited in US media, other than maybe by Breitbart. These studies do exist: go read any climate skeptic blog and you'll find quite detailed surveys, meta-analyses and the sort of content you'd find in a published paper if these people were the sorts of people who published in academic journals (they're not). But the press normally just ignores them, and on the rare occasions they don't, it's only to paint them as science-hating bogeymen. For instance, I linked in another comment to a study on ocean acidification by Patrick Moore, who has a PhD in ecology and used to be a regional leader of Greepeace. This paper has all the same things you'd expect to find in a normal academic paper: citations, data and it says it was subject to double-blind peer review prior to publication. https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20Ocean%20Acidification%20Alarmism.pdf https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20O... And here's the Guardian commenting on Moore's work: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2015/apr/16/ask-the-real-experts-about-ocean-acidification-not-climate-science-deniers https://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2015/apr/1... The piece is titled "Ask the real experts" and starts with 9 paragraphs of hate-filled invective that compares Moore and the scientists who support him to UFO believers, Elvis spotters, calls them "crazyballs", claims they're "blinded by beliefs and ideology", states that their views should never be allowed into national newspapers, falsely claims Moore has not written any peer reviewed publications (but e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128045886000136?via%3Dihub https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012804...), and then cites as evidence three "actual experts" who, of course, all work in universities. The Guardian is a particularly extreme enclave of hard-left journalists who think only government-funded academics can understand a scientific topic, but the rest of the industry has similar biases. As another example, here's a rather detailed replication and peer review of Al Gore's famous CO2 in a bottle experiment: https://wattsupwiththat.com/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-a-simple-co2-experiment/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/gore-and-bill-nye-fail-at-doing-... It discovers that the original experiment was fraudulent (this isn't stated to mean anything beyond Al Gore being a fraud; the author fully accepts that CO2 is a greenhouse gas).
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Well if we're going to talk about people being frauds... Patrick Moore burnt every last atom of his remaining credibility in his now famous Canal+ Glyphosate interview. Not that he had much being a paid PR consultant to various logging corporations and the nuclear industry, trying to leverage his former Greenpeace role for money. They "falsely" claim Moore has published no papers in a mid 2015 Guardian article? Yet you link to a chapter in a year later 2016 book, not a paper as proof. WUWT has NO credibility being one of the most well known deniers on the planet, putting out endless FUD, and infamously the instigators of the appalling shitshow that was Climategate. That was looked into in great detail, and a series of independent investigations showed that the scientists did no wrong. Note, those investigations were UK and US, including the Science Select Committee, a Public Inquiry, the NSF and the EPA among others. All of them cleared the scientists. It took years for the damage WUWT did with Climategate to settle. Inadvertently I'm sure, with Moore you provide anecdotal evidence for my point. :)
  - repolfx 7y ago
    Actually, I think you're the one illustrating my point, inadvertently I'm sure. Yet you link to a chapter in a year later 2016 book, not a paper as proof. The book is a journal published by Elsevier, a major academic publisher. You know, academic papers are frequently published in books. You're right about the date though, I hadn't noticed that. The claim may have been true at the time, but no longer is. The rest still stands. The journalist in question was never going to take anything written by a non-academic seriously. Now, the core point you've missed yet are making for me is very important: you have to understand that most climate change skeptics (which I am not, btw) aren't really skeptical about climate change per se. They're really better described as science skeptics or more accurately still, academia skeptics. If you really engage with their arguments, which I get the feeling most people here never have done, you'll notice that what they're actually talking about is the problems of the scientific establishment. A lot of their arguments could transfer just as well to e.g. the healthcare industry, or academic psychology. And often what they're reacting to is not lobbyists or PR spending but what they see as over-credulous belief in the moral and intellectual purity of academics. Your post is an excellent illustration of this: • Shoot the messenger, ignoring his arguments because he isn't paid by the government. • Shoot another messenger, because they're "well known deniers". This is a circular argument. You're saying "anyone who disagrees with what I believe has no credibility" which is a vacuous statement. • Assert that a bunch of government funded environmental scientists investigated a bunch of government funded environment scientists and concluded it's all legit. The latter part is really highlighting the underlying understanding gaps here. If you truly understand why Climategate created a whole lot of newly minted skeptics, then you'll understand that it was due to apparent duplicity and collusion in the scientific establishment, the possibility/likelihood of which is a major plank of climate skepticism. Thus saying those scientists were cleared by other scientists just like them won't convince anyone of anything, as it misses the point by a mile. And BTW the Climategate guys weren't exactly cleared. For instance the Muir Russel review, in the words of the Guardian, concluded: "It found the scientists had not fudged their results or silenced critics. But it found serious shortcomings in the openness with which they worked, posing a risk to the credibility of UK climate science and indicating a transformation in the way science has to be conducted in this century." And it was apparent that the scientists in question had been deliberately and illegally frustrating attempts to check their work via FOIA requests: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/09/freedom-of-information-hacked-emails https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/09/freedom-... The dust from that never really settled, and it wasn't some random blog causing trouble. The behaviour exposed by Climategate was covered in all the major newspapers at the time. It did rather strengthen the basic skeptics case but only in the same way that the replication crisis in psychology and medicine strengthened the case of other kinds of "expert skeptics".

ehnto 7y ago

Oh, I'm certain reporting is often very dramatic, especially for climate change. It seems to be a trait of much modern journalism. In this case we are seeing coral reefs die in real time in front of us. Maybe they end up being more resilient than we anticipate, to which reporting that the end is nigh will seem a bit silly. But it's somewhat too late for citations and debate on whether or not they are being harmed.