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by RyanZAG 3403 days ago
> 1. That's a bit like saying if powered aviation goes away tomorrow (as in, it is to be completely proven to be impossible), every single engineer at Boeing would be out of a job.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. If you were doing a study on whether powered aviation is going away tomorrow, 99% (well probably 100%) of Boeing engineers would tell you that it isn't. Obviously. But you cannot use that as a proof that powered aviation is not going away. Even if it was going away, that's just not how you prove it. See? If every single powered aviation engineer in the world peer reviewed a paper on powered aviation not going away, it's still not any better or any more proof of it. There is too much financial incentive. It's not a good argument.

Now how much more so in the case of climate science where you can't clearly see airplanes flying above your head?

> 2. The incentive structure doesn't work that way. If you could show that global warming isn't real, yes, all the other climate scientists will lose their job, but you will be rich beyond your dreams. Every billion-dollar petro-business will shower you with praise and contracts. You will be hailed as a savior of mankind, saving a million jobs and preventing policy mistakes that would have cost many billion dollars. The stake has never been higher.

There's a few scientists trying to show this. They even have some papers that have convinced many non-climate scientists, although all have massive flaws if you look closely. Regardless, no matter how good those papers were, do you really believe all climate scientists would just sit down and say 'oh well, it was a nice life while it lasted' ? If a paper was released that truly did refute all climate science, nearly every climate scientist would declare it false, probably without even reading it. They'd look for spelling mistakes in the paper and declare it false if they found one. They'd tear it apart and convince themselves it was false, because their lives would literally depend on it.

> So who's brainwashing all those French, Japanese, Chinese climate researchers to conspire with NASA against their own interest?

Do you think researchers work in silos devoted to their own country without using the work of others...? That's not really how it works imo. Besides, climate change is massively good news for China -- they're making a fortune off 'green' solutions. I just checked and France and Japan are also, although to a much lesser extent. So I don't think this works as proof either.

1 comments

Your whole argument could be applied to biology too. If someone proved the theory of evolution false, millions of geneticists would be out of a job therefore we should suspect the theory of evolution to be false.
That's a great point -- and maybe explains why the theory of evolution had so much push back for so long? Maybe there's a link to skepticism and these kinds of financial or credibility links? Is it subconscious even? Could be useful in anticipating which theories would face more pushback?
No, the theory of evolution didn't have so much push back for so long because people thought "scientists are making this up just to get more grant money". It was because it went against mainstream religious belief of the time.
He's positing, not decrying that evolution vs. creationism wasn't because it went against the mainstream religious belief (which is still iffy without proper research).