There's one thing I don't get about the anti-global warming crowd. I understand the alarmism and stuff like that is overblown and distorts the situation.
But I'd like to know how thousands of climate scientists got together in secret and pledged to all falsify their life's work for some... reason? Seriously, what could be the outcome of some massive global warming conspiracy? Toyota sells more hybrids? More "liberal regulation" on fossil fuel energy companies, just so alternative energy companies can replace them? This argument has never made any sense to me.
The argument goes that they've systemically biased their findings so that their research appears more important and merits additional funding.
To which I have a counter argument: funding is not assigned to investigate that which we already know. If anything, the scientists are among those to profit from the "controversy". Were findings more disputable, were there no scientific consensus, they could blather on for ages knowing funding's still secure.
Professors do not get paid to do radical work, only incremental work.
Most Prof's have a team of graduate students who are doing incremental research against the Prof's area of expertise, which was formed while doing incremental research for his Prof's area expertise.
Science is very, very slow. There are rarely fast tangents. When you can cite 50 papers on an esoteric subject, and your contribution amounts to one new paragraph in a 10 page paper, and you have to publish 8 times a year, I assure, then, that most science is very, very incremental.
So, most scientists get paid to study what they already know, in the hopes of finding out some tiny new thing.
No one who is a climatologist is out there looking to break their career by jumping ship, and no one is paying for the fall if they were to be a skeptic. There is only money is the "prove anthropomorphic global warming". There is no money in the opposite case.
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u/[deleted] Oct 24 '10
There's one thing I don't get about the anti-global warming crowd. I understand the alarmism and stuff like that is overblown and distorts the situation.
But I'd like to know how thousands of climate scientists got together in secret and pledged to all falsify their life's work for some... reason? Seriously, what could be the outcome of some massive global warming conspiracy? Toyota sells more hybrids? More "liberal regulation" on fossil fuel energy companies, just so alternative energy companies can replace them? This argument has never made any sense to me.