Hacker News Reader

Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

> That's very flawed reasoning: Do you think these scientists didn't have a job before?

A huge percentage of them didn't actually. Most of the current researchers into climate change have always worked as researchers in this field. You have to remember the field has been around since the 60s, but has rapidly begun to attract PHD students and others because of the vast amounts of grant money devoted to it in recent years.

> Where are you getting your global warming papers from?

Nature and Science. Where are you getting your Agile papers from?

View on HN

> has rapidly begun to attract PHD students and others because of the vast amounts of grant money devoted to it in recent years

I think you are very likely wrong about the causal link there: the way science organizations allocate money is that they decide what is important to study, so it should make sense that important fields are the ones that attract money and people. And there's a general scientific sense in which some fields are more important to the progress of science than others. But that's just how it should be, and less important fields should have less money. So you observe the expected behaviour (important fields get more research effort), but you think you're seeing a pathological behaviour instead. After all, what evidence would you accept that climate science deserves that particular level of funding?

There's lots of evidence to show that climate science deserves a lot of funding -- our world kind of depends on it. Believe me, I'm not in disagreement with you there.

However, I think there is a massive causal link there. If you're looking to do your PHD and your advisor tells you to research climate change because of all the grant money, that seems like a massive link to me. Then once you have your PHD on climate change, the obvious next step for funding is to do more research on climate change.

Then in what way does any of that condemn climate science? The PhD student in your example decides to study climate science because a committee of scientists somewhere decided climate science is objectively important enough to get people to study it. Seems okay to me.

Yes, seems okay to me too. It's how you'd expect it to work. But now that we're in the position we're in, there is a financial incentive for climate science researchers to never research anything to disprove the basis for those committees to keep giving them money. And any non-climate science researcher would never be taken seriously. And any climate science researcher who found evidence against climate change would be heavily incentivized not to publish. And it's why it's not convincing for climate scientists to tell you that climate science exists.

Although really what I was trying to get at originally is simply that multiple climate change scientists endorsing each other on the existence of climate change does not make their work any more convincing than just a single author in a good journal discussing Agile. It went on a major windy path, but hopefully you at least understand my point even if you disagree.

> Where are you getting your Agile papers from?

Same place as lrenaud.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com