[RyanZAG]

> But I don't think it's true that every scientist expressing a belief in anthropogenic global warming has a conflict of interest. Some number of them are tenured professors, for example. This is a good example of the value of the tenure system in academia.

Even a tenured professor still wants to be published in leading journals. Plus he gets a huge amount of credibility within his own university by being constantly published. Tenure definitely is a positive here, but it's not a get-out-of-jail free card by any means as there are a ton of incentives for him to stick to the climate change dogma regardless.

> As for the papers in Nature and Science, well, I haven't read them, but given the extreme politicization of the issue, it doesn't surprise me that the authors are tending to omit qualifications and caveats, since many people who want to dismiss the evidence would pick up on these -- as we're seeing in this very discussion.

Great point! I agree fully. But is it really useful? Now instead of people picking up on these qualifications and caveats to attack the argument, they're pointing out the caveats themselves and saying 'Haha! You ommitted this! You have something to hide!'. So the cure they're trying to use here seems worse than the disease. We put in these qualifications and caveats to protect our work. A good Agile paper would include the criticisms of Agile too -- not because they want to, but because it's important to understand the weak points. Obfuscating it doesn't help anyone in the long run, and it doesn't stop the same people attacking it anyway.