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A comment on The inconvenient truth about malaria. Parent comment

Re:The inconvenient truth about malaria by ghshephard on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @02:48AM (#998322)
"scientists that have published hundreds of peer reviewed papers" - As anyone who has tried to get their grant money will tell you, most of those papers are institutionally funded, creating selection bias for the results. Those scientists in the community who put forth a hypothesis challenging AGW are ostracized, and, in some cases, actively targeted for their beliefs - the recent email archive revelations show a fairly consistent thread with regards to that.

Environmental Science has become (and perhaps always has been) politicized. It's not the pure world like relativity, or quantum/particle physics, where there is a passionate desire (and even support, and funding) to find something that might contradict established beliefs/theories.

I suspect there is actually a hierarchy of science beliefs that looks like:

    Political         Environmental Science
    Less Political    Evolutionary Science
    Apolitical        Particle Physics
(Apologies to the 2% of HN that questions genomes/fossil records. :-)

Used to be you could trust scientists to be pure - alas no more.

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Re:The inconvenient truth about malaria by guelo on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @03:34AM (#998356)
So one email from over 10 years ago from one scientist without the full context of what was going on and all of environmental science is discredited? For ever?

Who is really being political here?

Luckily, science will not stop because you say it should.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The inconvenient truth about malaria by ghshephard on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @04:26AM (#998423)
You are missing my point - if anything, I am almost a pure-play scientific hypothesis/experiment/observations/results fanatic. I cringe every time I hear scientific naysayer attack the institution of science.

But, with that said, I am much more skeptical about environmental science than I would be about topics that are somewhat less politicized, such as Eötvös torsion balance experiments - and even _they_ turned out to have suspect results in hindsight.

And it wasn't the email regarding the "hiding" of data I was referring to - it was the several _hundred_ where the various scientists discussed how to discredit or otherwise shut down those who stood in opposition to the popular environmental theories.

I'm all for setting up the experiment and letting the results speak for themselves.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:The inconvenient truth about malaria by blueben on Wednesday December 16, 2009 @10:19PM (#1000333)
Experimental results can't speak for themselves. They are experiments. Only people can speak and weave stories, and only stories will move a population to action. This is the reality of communicating with human beings.

Marketing is the practical application of the science of sociology.

[ Parent | on HN ]