Conservative groups spend up to $1B a year to fight action on climate change

Re:Conservative groups spend up to $1B a year to fight actio... by snowwrestler on Monday December 23, 2013 @01:54PM (#6955879)

The fundamental question on climate change is whether you trust the academic- and government-funded ecosystem of scientific research. Structurally, it's not substantially different for research into the climate than it is for research into any other scientific subject.

If you believe such a structure is incapable of producing objectively supportable results on climate, then you must at least be skeptical of other scientific results.

If you feel different levels of trust for the results of different areas of scientific research, then you should engage in some introspection about the criteria you're using to make those distinctions. Is it because you have a deep working familiarity with those areas of research? Or because of some other factors?

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Re:Conservative groups spend up to $1B a year to fight actio... by glenra on Monday December 23, 2013 @03:07PM (#6956241)

It's possible for just about any scientific field to get stuck in an error cascade and take a while to climb out of it. Medicine has pretty much the same problem as climate - lots of scientists are doing good work but some are finding bogus results and we have very poor mechanisms for making sure the good work is what bubbles to the top. Even if many of the individual studies are fine, politically organized summaries of those study results are problematic - they can rather trivially be manipulated to show any result desired by controlling the timing of the inputs.

Good discussion of "error cascades" here: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1642

This research study finds that most research findings are false: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

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