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Comment by zzalpha | Hacker News Reader

Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear, so it's not like he changed his mind when people offered him a big pile of money.

You're missing the point.

It's not that this guy was paid off and therefore changed his views.

It's that he published research that he claimed was independent that was not, and in the process neglected to disclose his sources of revenue and conflicts of interest.

Those very conflicts of interest would, under normal circumstances, force folks to question the nature of the research and the quality of the results. IMO that's getting awfully close to academic misconduct. It's certainly extremely unethical.

Edit:

BTW, "Merchants of Doubt" has covered this territory extensively, so to be honest, I'm not sure Greenpeace has added much to the dialog, here, aside from flat out catching folks in the act.

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"BTW, "Merchants of Doubt" has covered this territory extensively, so to be honest, I'm not sure Greenpeace has added much to the dialog, here, aside from flat out catching folks in the act."

Yeah flat out catching highly placed, non-anonymous culprits is very significant. I'll bet a lot more people would be paying attention to this article compared to those who read or watch Merchants of Doubt.

While I agree that this conduct is improper and should lead to the loss of their chairs (and retractions, if any paid "research" ended up in scholarly journals), you're also missing something important about science when you say:

> Those very conflicts of interest would, under normal circumstances, force folks to question the nature of the research and the quality of the results.

The fact that someone has a conflict of interest should be stated, certainly. But we should always question the nature of research and the quality of results. In one of these cases, it doesn't even seem that a research paper was being purchased but simply an essay, which presumably would not be cited by anyone or even considered a presentation of facts by other scholars. But in any case, we shouldn't assume someone's research is honest and valuable just because he doesn't seem to have an economic conflict of interest. There's a lot of bad science done with deliberate intent to deceive that involved no such conflict of interest at all.

The bottom line is that science is not being nearly tough enough on itself, and the results are what you'd expect: a lot of bad papers that are either useless and irrelevant or full of lies, errors, and fabrications. Reporting conflicts of interest might help a little, but it shouldn't be used as a cover for gullibility.

You are being overly pedantic when it comes to _science_ and I say this as a trained scientist. These guys are testifying before congress as experts when they are pedaling their credentials for money and burying their briber's identities. They should at minimum lose their jobs, have any research redacted from journals and possibly face jail time.

> You are being overly pedantic when it comes to _science_ and I say this as a trained scientist.

Reckon you're part of the problem, then. Appeal to authority and a refusal to hold research to a high standard.

> They should at minimum lose their jobs, have any research redacted from journals and possibly face jail time.

We agree on this. I don't even see how it's controversial. I'd just like to see the other 99% of crap science handled the same way.

We can't hold science to a higher standard than the rest of the world. You and I would both like this to be a more principled place, but one thing can't be the pin. It has to be across the board.

Most of everything is crap, the good stuff survives mostly. The bad stuff survives as crap mythos and some good stuff goes under.

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