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No, I think most of the folks spewing this stuff are mostly just functionally incompetent, a position which you might agree with yourself if you'd actually read any of their research and understood the "data" which they try to use to justify it. (Don't get me started!) But some of them are also clearly dishonest, too, IMO. Michael Mann, for example, who is generally considered an esteemed climate scientist, got caught some years back attempting to commit perjury by claiming in court documents that he was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, which he clearly was not. (The situation with him - and a few others who made similar claims - got so bad that the Nobel folks eventually had to step in and put a stop to it.) And those who looked closely at the tree-ring data which he used to help build his famous "hockey stick" temperature chart found a lot of problems with that data and how he used it, but I don't remember all of the details. I do remember it being stated that tree ring growth responds primarily to changes in precipitation, though, rather than temperature. I recently read a paper where two of the authors (out of several) are considered to be among the most esteemed climate scientists in the world. And I just shook my head at how bad that paper was, the ridiculous claims that it made, and at how seriously it was being taken, at least at first. One of those esteemed authors has of late taken to making such outrageous claims that even his own acolytes don't really want to talk about it much, so I was a bit surprised to even see his name on that paper to begin with. Of course, in the press the paper was being hailed as breakthrough research at the time. But I noticed that it kind of fell off the radar pretty quickly, so I guess a lot of other folks had quietly come to the same conclusion as to how bad it was. I have to see any public acknowledgement of that, though. BTW, I read somewhere that there are something like 200x as many climate papers being published today as there were a generation or so ago. So if there is a research bandwagon that someone might want to jump on in order to get funding and get their papers published, that's probably a good one to go for. But it turns out that an awful lot of so-called "climate experts" publishing such papers actually have little to no formal training in matters of climate, which I find very telling. Some of them have little to no STEM training at all, in fact. |