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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.
Also, to comment on this:
That would fall under the "venal" part of considering the ideological/venal factors involved. I agree that I should have cited the example of drug research; the main reason I didn't do so is that I'm not confident that my impressions about this area are accurate enough.
One fascinating question about the problem of venal influences, about which I might write more in the future, is when and under what exact conditions researchers are likely to fall under them and get away with it, considering that the present system is overall very good at discovering and punishing crude and obvious corruption and fraud. As I wrote in another comment, sometimes such influences are masked by scams such as setting up phony front organizations for funding, but even that tends to be discovered eventually and tarnish the reputations of the researchers involved. What seems to be the worst problem is when the beneficiaries of biased research enjoy such status in the eyes of the public and such legal and customary position in society that they don't even need to hide anything when establishing a perverse symbiosis that results in biased research.