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SilasBarta comments on You're Entitled to Arguments, But Not (That Particular) Proof - Less Wrong
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http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/11/its-news-on-academia-not-climate.html
People are crazy, the world is mad. Of course there's gross misbehavior by climate scientists, just like the rest of academia is malfunctioning. But the amount of scrutiny leveled on climate science is vastly greater than the amount of scrutiny leveled on, say, the dietary scientists who randomly made up the idea that saturated fat was bad for you; and the scrutiny really hasn't turned up anything that bad, just typical behavior by "working" scientists. So I doubt that this is one of the cases where the academic field is just grossly entirely wrong.
Yes, and I expect that if you put this much scrutiny on most fields, where they are well-protected from falsification, you'd find the same thing. Like you said, scientists aren't usually trained in the rationalist arts, and can keep bad ideas alive much longer than they should be.
But this doesn't mean we should just shrug it off as "just the way it works"; we should appropriately discount their evidence for having a less reliable truth-finding procedure if we're not already assuming as much.
Another difference is that climate scientists are deriving lots and lots of attention, funding, and prestige out of worldwide concern for global warming.
True -- they seem ignorant of the "politics is the mind-killer" phenomenon. A boring research field may yield reliable science -- but once huge sums of money start to depend on its findings, you have to spend proportionally more effort keeping out bias -- such as by making your findings impossible to fake (i.e. no black-box methods for filtering the raw data).
Which climate researchers failed at tremendously.