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Those dudes know if what you're saying is truthful and valuable, the general public (including me) does not. Not necessarily. They are incentivized by fame and

by hop 17y ago

Those dudes know if what you're saying is truthful and valuable, the general public (including me) does not. Not necessarily. They are incentivized by fame and grant money to produce studies with a wow factor. Climatologists skeptical of global warming are outcasts among their peers - the leaked CRU emails illustrate this, as well as, intimidation to scholarly journals that publish skeptical papers. I am not a climatologist, but I've done some complicated math simulations in college and there is no way you can future predictions look like these - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Warming_Predictions.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Warming_Predictions... - how the fuck do you have squiggly lines, not a range, after 20 years from now - fails the common sense test. Plus, can any non PhD even get access to a scientific journal? Can you or me even access most of them without a paid subscription?

lucumo 17y ago
> They are incentivized by fame and grant money to produce studies with a wow factor. That's why I said "peer reviewed". Sceptics have the same incentives as climatologists and when they just publish in newspapers and blogs, they don't have the peer review stage. There is absolutely NO guarantee of correctness or even scientific soundness. Whatever you may think of the peer review process, it's a good deal better than nothing.
ewjordan 17y ago
Plus, can any non PhD even get access to a scientific journal? Can you or me even access most of them without a paid subscription? Yes - go to any local university library, walk to the section labeled "scientific journals" and go nuts. You won't be able to take the journals home with you (they're too damn expensive for libraries to have multiple copies), but most decent university libraries will let anyone in to do research without paying anything, and photocopies are relatively cheap. Obviously that's much more difficult if you're not near a university, and it is a sad state of affairs when publicly funded research is not instantly available for free online - anyone in academia should fight against this trend, and I think many are starting to, which is a good sign for the future. But it's at least possible to get to this stuff in person, and worth doing from time to time if you're interested in academic matters.

by hop 17y ago

lucumo 17y ago

> They are incentivized by fame and grant money to produce studies with a wow factor. That's why I said "peer reviewed". Sceptics have the same incentives as climatologists and when they just publish in newspapers and blogs, they don't have the peer review stage. There is absolutely NO guarantee of correctness or even scientific soundness. Whatever you may think of the peer review process, it's a good deal better than nothing.

ewjordan 17y ago

Plus, can any non PhD even get access to a scientific journal? Can you or me even access most of them without a paid subscription? Yes - go to any local university library, walk to the section labeled "scientific journals" and go nuts. You won't be able to take the journals home with you (they're too damn expensive for libraries to have multiple copies), but most decent university libraries will let anyone in to do research without paying anything, and photocopies are relatively cheap. Obviously that's much more difficult if you're not near a university, and it is a sad state of affairs when publicly funded research is not instantly available for free online - anyone in academia should fight against this trend, and I think many are starting to, which is a good sign for the future. But it's at least possible to get to this stuff in person, and worth doing from time to time if you're interested in academic matters.