MSimon wrote:And BTW the "science" is not separate from the politics. Lysenkoism.
Yup. The money made available to pro-CAGW researchers and boosters has been MASSIVE. Hundreds of billions of dollars disbursed by multiple state entities across the entire Western world, not just in research but in "socially responsible" subsidized Green Energy Industries, financial-regulatory power grabs like the attempt at creating Carbon Markets, the emotional payoff of being a participant in "saving the planet," and so on. That is a huge and widespread motivation for rational self-interest in shading the truth.
TDPerk wrote:From MSimon
" In 10 years or so sociologists of science will be discussing "how could it happen?""
I know technically aware, competent people who still haven't heard of the Milliken oil drop fiasco.
Unwinding the influence of those now emotionally committed to taking the fraud seriously will take multiple decades.
Agreed.
TDPerk wrote:The kindest thing I can wish for tomclarke is that he is a very old man, and won't live to see irrefutable proof of the nature of what he put his faith into.
Unkind and unjustified. Certainly the likes of Mann, Hansen and Jones will never admit their knowing culpability - for them the promotion of CAGW is "The Cause," and there are no holds barred in their 1968-Neverending "war" to save the planet. But well-read people who are knowledgeable albeit deceived like tom? They are a separate issue, and tend to "click" when the weight of the evidence passes the tipping point and can no longer be denied. That is no different than a paradigm standing until it can't anymore. Its only been five years since Climategate 1; the accelerating collapse of CAGW is palpable, but not all the way there yet.
tomclarke wrote:Of course scientists are human, the scientific process is not perfect. That applies to both sides of this debate, except the wuwt posters you seem to think likely correct do not have the discipline of exposure to scrutiny and correction from 1000s of other scientists with different ideas that the mainstream guys do.
There is no aspect of this debate where you do not find variability in the published science, with a range of views. Over time the ones that fit facts better predominate.
That does not look like Lysenkoism to me.
So - yes scientists are imperfect, published science is imperfect.
But, no, it is not state controlled like Lysenkoism, there is variation and room for mavericks, as well as strong debate about key issues with different people pulling in different directions.
See Dr. Richard Muller's critique of "The Team" in the aftermath of the 2009 Climategate leak.
Five minute synopsis:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk
Fifty two minute full presentation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbR0EPWgkEI&src
Muller remains a committed Warmist, and is trying to salvage the Warmist case through Berkeley Earth nee "BEST" database.
And even Muller is trying to read "The Team" out of Establishment Climatology as a threat to the field's credibility.
What "The Team" did was subvert the scientific process by trying to deny publication to your above-cited "mavericks," destroy the world's longest continuous instrumental land temperature record (the UK) leaving only their "adjusted" records in its place, and commit academic fraud by knowingly biasing their results in the manner Muller identifies above. They also created a peer-review round robin that made top-tier papers in IPCC climatology very incestuous and as a result TAINTED.
And "The Team" remain to this day the headliner researchers involved in the IPCC and "mainstream" climatological research.
There aren't thousands of top-tier "scientists" pushing CAGW Tom, there are somewhere between 20 and 50, all very well dug into academia. Everyone else is tacking the phrase "climate change" onto their grant applications to study the purple squirrel and self-castrating amphibious wombat, because they know the grant is more likely to be approved with that religious code phrase added onto the grant application.
tomclarke wrote:Finally - the quality of the published science is far superior to the typical WUWT offering which is under-researched, over-speculative, and often just egregiously wrong. (I'm not saying every single post on WUWT is that, but many are, and where a decent paper is referenced the WUWT poster typically egregiously misunderstands its meaning).
WUWT takes some deep pleasure at times in skewering scholar-frauds, as well they should. Knaves should be held up for frequent and extensive humiliation; it is the just fate of knaves.
tomclarke wrote:But I do not believe you have evidence for how much of the science has been right and wrong over the years, or how much is changed by the recent hiatus. It is easy to highlight every apparent (or sometimes real) change in understanding as "getting it wrong and ignore all that has been got right.
Basic gedankenexperiment.
If the Earth's climate is dominated by positive feedback mechanisms, why are we here to debate it?
If dangerous "run away" positive feedbacks dominate the Earth's climate, the Earth should've gone the route of either Venus or a permanent Icehouse Earth LONG before the dinosaurs.
If anything, the Earth has "run away" toward the COLD for the last 2.6 million years. And even in that, it has in fact maintained a generally stable global temperature range, +- 10 degC or so between Glacials and Interglacials. Even the Eocene Optimum of 65 Mya was at most 12 degC above the IPCC baseline. That is REMARKABLE stability, and strongly indicates that any climatological hypothesis which rests on positive as opposed to negative feedbacks is not credible. And seeing as the current Holocene Interglacial has at best a few thousand years left to it, we want to keep the Earth on the cooler side of (inter)glaciation WHY again? Precisely, please. Because farming on top of mile-thick ice sheets presents... challenges.