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wnewman 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.
You wrote "what I chose to do to resolve the matter was to deep dive into three often-raised skeptic arguments using my knowledge of physics as a starting point" and "deliberate misinformation campaigns in the grand tradition of tobacco [etc.]".
Less Wrong is not the place for a comprehensive argument about catastrophic AGW, but I'd like to make a general Less-Wrong-ish point about your analysis here. It is perceptive to notice that millions of dollars are spent on a shoddy PR effort by the other side. It is also perceptive to notice that many of the other side's most popular arguments aren't technically very strong. It's even actively helpful to debunk unreasonable popular arguments even if you only do it for those which are popular on the other side. However, remember that it's sadly common that regardless of their technical merits, big politicized controversies tend to grow big shoddy PR efforts associated with all factions. And even medium-sized controversies tend to attract some loud clueless supporters on both sides. Thus, it's not a very useful heuristic to consider significant PR spending, or the popularity of flaky arguments, as particularly useful evidence against the underlying factual position.
It may be "too much information [about AGW]" for Less Wrong, but I feel I should support my point in this particular controversy at least a little, so... E.g., look at the behavior of Pachauri himself in the "Glaciergate" glaciers-melting-by-2035 case. I can't read the guy's mind, and indeed find some of his behavior quite odd, so for all I know it is not "deliberate." But accidental or not, it looks rather like an episode in a misinformation campaign in the sorry tradition of big-money innumerate scare-environmentalism. Also, Judith Curry just wrote <a href="http://judithcurry.com/2011/02/14/blame-on-heartland-cato-marshall-etc/#more-2362">a blog post</a> which mentions, among other things, the amount of money sloshing around in various AGW-PR-related organizations associated with anti-IPCC positions. For comparison, a <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7062667/Pachauri-the-real-story-behind-the-Glaciergate-scandal.html#">rather angry critic I don't know much about</a> (but one who should, at a minimum, be constrained by British libel law) ties the Glaciergate factoid to grants of $500K and $3M, and Greenpeace USA seems to have an annual budget of <a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/media-center/news-releases/greenpeace-announces-new-execu/">around $30M.</a>
I should have said that I tried to find the best arguments I could, and then deep dive into those. More from someone else in the link below. If someone can point me to some actual credible sceptical arguments I would be interested.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/4ba/some_heuristics_for_evaluating_the_soundness_of/3k1e
I certainly agree AGW is a highly politicized issue and there are plenty of people trying to profit from it. Any time money is involved that will be the case. One should not assume that all the anti money spent on anti AGW money goes through the think tanks mentioned.
The whole Glaciergate thing was indeed a disgrace.
I don't get too worked up about AGW because I think it is just one of the many things that are likely to sink us.