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Vladimir_M comments on Some Heuristics for Evaluating the Soundness of the Academic Mainstream in Unfamiliar Fields - Less Wrong
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If you are going to suggest that academic climate research is not up to scratch, you need to do more than post links to pages that link to non-academic articles. Saying "you can find lots on google scholar" is not that same as actually pointing to the alleged sub-standard research.
For a long time I too was somewhat skeptical about global warming. I recognized the risk that researchers would exaggerate the problem in order to obtain more funding.
What I chose to do to resolve the matter was to deep dive into a few often-raised skeptic arguments using my knowledge of physics as a starting point, and learning whatever I needed to learn along the way (it took a while). The result was that the academic researchers won 6-0 6-0 6-0 in three sets (to use a tennis score analogy). Most striking to me was the dishonesty and lack of substance on the "skeptic" side. There was just no "there" there.
The topics I looked into were: accuracy of the climate temperature record, alleged natural causes explaining the recent heating, the alleged saturation of the atmospheric CO2 infra-red wavelengths, and the claim that the CO2 that is emitted by man is absorbed very quickly.
In retrospect I became aware that my 'skepticism' was fulled in large part by deliberate misinformation campaigns in the grand tradition of tobacco, asbestos, HFCs, DDT etc. The same techniques, and even many of the same PR firms are involved. As one tobacco executive said "Our product is doubt".
An article about assessing the soundness of the academic mainstream would benefit from also discussing the ways in which the message from, and even the research done in, academia is corrupted and distorted by commercial interests. Economics is a case in point, but it is a big issue also in drug research and other aspects of medicine.
Another thing I have noticed in looking into various areas of academic research is just how much research in every field I looked at is inconclusive, inconsequential, flawed or subtly biased (look up "desk drawer bias" for example).
Edit: fixed a few typos.
Edit: good article by the way, very well reasoned.
waveman:
I agree that I should have argued and referenced that part better. What I wanted to point out is that there is a whole cottage industry of research purporting to show that climate change is supposedly influencing one thing or another, a very large part of which appears to advance hypotheses so far-fetched and weakly substantiated that they seem like obvious products of the tendency to involve this super-fashionable topic into one's research whenever possible, for reasons of both status- and career-advancement.
Even if one accepts that the standard view on climate change has been decisively proven and the issue shown to be a pressing problem, I still don't think how one could escape this conclusion.
Yes.
My daughter works in molecular biology, and she has noted that every paper / grant application is full of hope and promise of a cure to cancer or some other dread disease. Sometimes this hope and promise is significantly exaggerated.
It is very depressing, even in fields where the science is absolutely rock-solid, to read the nonsense that comes from the periphery. Read Deepak Chopra on Quantum Mechanics for example.