[dudeguy999]

There are a billion dollars worth of research money for group-think infested alarmist journals for every million dollars available from the fossil fuels industry. Your life as a climate scientist is MUCH easier if you shut up and find a hockey stick than if you take Exxon funding.

[scarmig]

I'll try to interpret this as charitably as possible =) I think there are two separate issues you're bringing up here.

The first is the implication that climatologists are all involved in a conspiracy with power hungry politicians to institute a kind of global eco-Stalinism, in exchange for research grants. It's the only imaginable scheme where you can treat all government-funded ecology, meteorology, clean-energy tech, and climatology research as part of a coherent but corrupt bargain (As you must to get your billions of dollars figure. I would also add that your mere seven figure fossil fuel budget is grossly underestimated.). Frankly, I don't think you actually believe it, as it's implausible rhetoric that could come straight from the fevered fantasies of Fox News and Rush Limbaugh.

The other is that there's group think among scientists. The idea seems to be that academics and scientists are all too often willing to get caught up in petty vendettas, battles for turf and recognition, and back scratching, instead of focusing on the angelically pure pursuit of knowledge. The issue with that is... well, there isn't an issue. It's totally true, as anyone who's spent much time in research knows. Hence the CRU emails.

It's a fair criticism. But science has soldiered on despite it through the centuries, and scientific institutions, even being plagued with those flaws, have consistently produced better explanations of the world than hacks-for-hire employed by Big Tobacco, Lysenkoist Communists, or the fossil fuel industry.

[moldbug]

There's only one small problem with your reasoning: the Lysenkoists called their work "science" as well. As do of course the other two.

Unless you adopt a tautological definition, in which "science" does not include pseudoscience, "science" is whatever the people in your society who practice and organize it choose to call "science."

More specifically, since basically all "science" is government-funded, you'll find that your actual working definition of "science" is "whatever my government funds and calls science."

So your statement boils down to: climatology can't be pseudoscience, because it's funded by the US Government. And Washington (unlike Moscow) would never fund pseudoscience, and call it "science."

This is a pretty interesting epistemology to say the least. Do I have it right? If not, where's the error? If so, what information do you, as (no doubt) a rationalist, have about the US Government that justifies this extension of trust?

And if USG is not the institution you're trusting, what is? What set of human beings are you investing your trust in? If the field of climate science as presently practiced was not in fact scientific, but rather pseudoscientific, who would you expect to have stepped in and shut it down?

[Edit: see also the links to the actual funding levels a couple of posts down. If you're interested in reconsidering your position on this issue, the blog to read is Steve McIntyre's.]

[danielharan]

You have got to be fucking kidding. Scientists have billions, and Exxon has millions for this fight?

Hell of an extraordinary claim. Got any proof?

[moldbug]

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/2010/02/02/president-obam...

http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2012/02/with-tiny-budgets-like...

You're welcome. Actually, the funding for the actual climate skeptics who are actually fighting this goliath is so close to zero as to be indistinguishable. The significant players all basically amateur bloggers. I think Anthony Watts got $40K from Heartland, but AFAIK it was for a contract not officially related to his blog at all.

The good news is - there's really nothing wrong with being wrong by five orders of magnitude. So long as you keep an open mind and are willing to learn from it.