Why don't climate change deniers publish?

Great Debates
21

I’m going to respond to more than just the above, but I quote it as a reference to what I’m responding to, so let’s start with Curry.

Judith Curry is someone that I’m quite familiar with. Yes, Judith Curry is a “real” scientist – or at least, she used to be – but is now doing her field a considerable disservice in her ranting blogs. If you actually look critically at her publications, she hasn’t published anything since 2011, and lists only one paper there that was actually published (look at the details). Curry is the worst kind of hypocrite – someone who accuses an entire scientific field of lacking balance and objectivity, and then spews forth intentionally deceptive, self-serving bullshit on her personal blog, ostensibly in the name of objective balance. Ray Ladbury, a physicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center with a background in science education and science journalism, had a great comment about Curry that perfectly sums up my own feelings:

There are actually better examples of denialists who publish – possibly the best of them is Richard Lindzen – but as I said earlier, when they do so it is a kind of Jekyll and Hyde persona – their published papers are generally legitimate and not even particularly controversial – Lindzen mostly does atmospheric physics – but then they use their acquired reputations to rant in public op-eds and blogs about issues that are unsupported by any research of theirs or anyone else’s.

But Curry is a disgrace to her profession; whether she has turned to blogging for fame or profit or the onset of dementia I can’t tell, but her antics have been well discredited here and here and here, just for starters. Curry’s antics have even caught the attention of Sourcewatch, and Scientific American published an article about her that I thought was much too kind, but nevertheless lays out many of the problems with her positions. Kind of reminds me of the old saying that, for a publicity whore at least, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

The reasons for all the attention are not hard to understand. She is the darling of WUWT and Watts’ gang of denialists; she’s teamed up with blatant denialists like McIntyre, Pat Michaels, and many others; she’s been courted and quoted by aides to the lunatic senator Inhofe; she’s been quoted and interviewed on denialist sites like Friends of Science and SPPI, the latter I believe slaveringly quoting from an interview with her published in a fine scientific journal called “Oilprice.com”, in which she asserts, among other things, that the IPCC is useless and that any possible attribution of climate change to CO2 is unknown, assertions with which the fine scientific journal Oilprice.com enthusiastically agreed.

You also mention John Christy, and he’s not much better. He’s an associate of the complete crackpot Roy Spencer, and the two of them frequently work together…

As for your link to “denialist climate scientists who publish”, I count 7 actually listed as climate scientists, about a dozen more in somewhat allied fields. The IPCC had almost 1000 of the world’s foremost climate scientists contributing to the AR5 alone, out of tens of thousands of qualified climate scientists in the world. What percentage are the avowed denialists? A fraction of a percent, it would appear. Actually, considering the money to be made from the massive disinformation campaign that has been underway for more than 15 years, I’m really surprised the number is that low. We can perhaps take heart that there is more integrity in science than in most fields.

22

Oh like this one?:

I have seen Curry throw a lot of bones to the contrarians but she does not put those bones where it counts, most likely because the data does not lie to her. Same goes for Christie, after he had to admit that most of what he claimed in the past was based on mistakes from his satellite readings, and IIRC he was part of the group that reported that.

What this shows is that even the ones that “speak” against the grain are in reality concentrating in minimizing the effects of the warming caused by humans, but they can not deny thermometers, nor the physics of adding CO2 to the atmosphere.

So let me guess, a Google vomit from Whats up with that uh?

23

Right, so if climate scientists are so venal, why are they fighting over whatever limited amount of grants are offered by the NSF, NASA, etc., rather than taking the billions being spent to promote denialism?

24

Speaking of cooking graphs, I do remember why they call it Baked Curry. :slight_smile:

25

If you think scientists get rich on research funding, you’ve clearly never been within spitting distance of a graduate department.

If you want to get rich, you get speaking or consulting contracts with those companies who fear they will lose money if we do something about this, money which does not have to be budgeted and justified, and money the university doesn’t take a big piece out of.

I’ve never reviewed NSF grants for climate science, but I have for engineering and computer science, and if there was a big chunk of money for the PI in there it escaped me. So, let’s say your knowledge of this kind of stuff doesn’t impress me much.

26

As shown by the research by Curry herself you need to take it with her for using models too to confirm not only warming but explain more properly the apparent paradox of seeing more ice inland in Antarctica.

BTW sleestak, stop with the strawmenand the personification of this issue by somehow taking it on me. You need to take it on the ones that are misleading you, as **wolfpup **showed your list pointed at for sure by WUWT is the pits and the point of the OP is totally missed, the researcher looked at last year’s publications to see the scientific activity of climate change researchers, the catastrophic fall of new peer review papers telling us that AGW is not happening is not to be expected if one of the big mantras of the deniers was true, that there is a lot of evidence and research being found constantly to dismiss the issue.

In reality it is what even a guy like me that came from the third world can notice, virtually all the recent reports of that contrarian “evidence” is coming from bloglessors and even researchers that are going like creationists to the media for support and publication, and when they use published articles more often than not they are misrepresenting what the researchers actually report in their conclusions. (Sometimes they even misrepresent themselves).

IMHO what we are seeing is very similar to the final twitches of creationist researchers (funny that Spencer is one also) when confronting the sea of biology papers confirming evolution. They then Publish books (or publish blogs) and skip peer review.

27

I think the premise is not that there is big money to be made in research grants, but that the “cash cowboys” will be the “carbon credit brokers”, or some such jabberwock. I heard the denial-ragers go on about how the fiendish algore creature is running the tables in this pursuit, not sure if that is even as substantive as meringue. Presumably, the scientists who give them support will be in for a piece of that, a gratuity of sorts.

28

There is too much money and too much political power involved in AGW as accepted fact to allow any hint that science has found it to be false.

29

And yet, it’s the deniers that are spending billions. And not on scientific research. Why is that?

30

Back in my day, a bachelor’s degree is all you needed.

No, I’ve not been within spitting distance of graduate departments in impoverished third-world nations. The ones run at UC are very well funded, extensively equipped and is arguably the finest in the world. Graduate students actually PAY to attend … [giggle] … I’m surprised you didn’t know that.

Thank you, sleestak, I think that’s a fine answer to the OP. It should remind us all that scientific method requires contrary opinions, contrary research and challenges to any and all published material. Once the entire body of science becomes focused on a single theory at the exclusion of all others, it stops being science and becomes philosophy. Consider the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics, and how we’ve had to change the Big Bang Theory to accommodate this new information. That’s how science works.

I afraid I have to agree with Gigo, I understand how richly he deserves such personifications. It’s more than just him that starts the ad hominem attacks, and it does disgrace the owners of this website who, in their wisdom, did provide an explicit rule forbidding such discourse on this board. It’s almost impossible to attack their ideas since they rarely state them, opting for copy/pasting someone else’s ideas. It’s in this cherry-picking that they run afoul the basic Laws of the classical universe. They don’t seem to know that publishing in a peer reviewed scientific journal is, in fact, an open invitation for criticism. I don’t know why they get so upset and start name-calling as soon as any objection is raised.

Pride is a sin, especially in science.

31

Since when was evolution a philosophy? And astronomy? sooner or later what is based on reality comes to dominate, the astrologers then do not publish much of it nowadays.

You agree? It is not clear because then you go for a mistaken point. You are mistaken, and you should stop the junior modding, pointing at the ignorance on this message board is more than allowed, it is the point of this message board. (and more than once I admitted my ignorance when it is shown with evidence)

I don’t think you are supporting people that do. You re not realizing that criticism was also part of the work of the climate scientists that published last year and the longer this goes it demonstrates that the criticism of the contrarians is less impressive as years go by.

So say the one that goes for the f-bombs directed to people like me elsewhere in the message board.

32

Would you please provide the incomes of the researchers there? Thanks!

33

Actually they do, the deniers recently funded real skeptics like Muller to check the data from the IPCC and and to see if other conclusions made by most researchers were valid. After the Berkeley team came up with even more evidence that showed that previous researchers were correct, people like Anthony Watts did go back on his promise to accept what Muller did find out.

That denial of even what skeptical scientists found is endemic of sites like WUWT.

34

I’ve worked in extremely well-funded laboratories. and I’ve worked in laboratories where all the funding came out of the principal investigator’s pocket. None of the wealth in any of these laboratories was that of the principal investigator, the postdocs, the graduate students or the technicians. It was all the school’s wealth.

The graduate students that get a good deal in graduate school do not pay tuition and make a stipend that amounts to about $16,000/year for research or teaching work.

Postdoc salaries top out at about $55,000 and the typical person with their Ph.D. starts at about $40,000.

I never got past being a postdoc, but the salaries of those actually earning the big grants weren’t that impressive. Maybe $80,000, but I imagine that number varies widely based on a large number of factors. Where I last worked, if you do not earn grant money then your salary drops to zero.

I do not know where you got the idea that there is wealth to be had in being a researcher, but you are wrong.

35

We’re talking about research, so presumably people with research degrees are more qualified. Of course that doesn’t mean people with bachelor’s degrees are completely unqualified.

So, what’s the breakdown of the qualifications of deniers? How many bachelor’s, master’s, etc. in relevant fields?

Wow, you really don’t know anything about how academia works. Where do you think that funding comes from? It’s the research grants professors spend most of their time chasing. And the main use of that funding is to pay the graduate students that do most of the actual research. Very few people actually pay to get Ph.Ds, to the point that if someone did choose to pay their own way it would be looked upon with suspicion. FTR, I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science from a UC school.

So, given that’s the way it works, and given that in many fields it’s common for industry to give research grants to academics, and given that ability to bring in research funding is the major metric for academic success and tenure granting, and given that deniers are spending billions, why is so little of that money going to actual, independent research? Because the results are like what GIGO described above: confirmation of the existing results.

Trust me, if there was any valid science in denialism, there would be hordes of junior academics clamoring for that research funding and publishing dozens of papers. It would be a career making move. The notion that they would willingly be dupes in some vast conspiracy to hide the truth in hopes of getting a few crumbs from the limited grants from the NSF and other government agencies is absurd.

36

I’d like for you to confine your rebuttals to things I’ve actually posted, and not what others would insert into my statements:

Maybe I’m not connecting the dots here, please explain what the grad student’s stipend has to do with the overall economies of research, say compared to launching a single satellite into the proper orbit? But as a general rule, please don’t hold me accountable for what other people post, unless I give you my permission.

What do you think of my statement that “999 out of 1,000” articles are about man-made global warming? It smells fishy to me, what’s your take?

37

I’ve got total fees as $14,829.63 per year from at UCLA for a grad research student.

I am not aware of any scientific research into how we define “good” and “evil”. For the third time I state: I am a denier because I believe global warming is a good thing. If you have no rebuttal, then we have no debate … please choose another subject …

38

If you’ll look over that site again, you’ll find a column headed “Graduate Student Fee Remissions.” Please check out those schedules, in handy PDF format.

39

And you pay that out of pocket? In what field, if you don’t mind me asking. I must have known hundreds of grad students at UCSC across a wide variety of fields and never met a single one that paid out of pocket.

Please indicate where I or anyone else used the terms “good” or “evil.” Even in the part you quoted I said “valid.” You realize the difference between saying something’s invalid and saying it’s evil, right?

You might want to look at the title of this thread, and start a different one if you’re not interested in debating the topic.

40

Just one note on that, there is a lot of ignorance on the basic economics of this issue, **watchwolf49 **is indeed denying what even economists are also recommending.

And this is not adding most of the cost of other possible problems a warming world can bring, thinking that global warming is a good thing is reckless.