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Comment by guscost | Hacker News Reader

Do you think that it would be possible for someone who doesn't agree with global warming alarmism to complete a PhD in Climate Science? Honest question.

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There are no degrees in "Climate Science". But plenty of skeptics on global warming alarmism are PhD's in the relevant academic fields (one good example is Richard Lindzen at MIT), and they are still teaching students and helping some of them to get PhD's.

That said, I agree that academia is heavily skewed on the topic of global warming alarmism; I just think the skewing is more subtle than keeping skeptics from getting degrees. I think it takes the form of pressuring journals not to publish results that don't support the "consensus". And, of course, making sure that all the "official" information that politicians use to justify policies comes from the IPCC, and then controlling the IPCC process to only produce results that support the "consensus".

Here is a Climate Science PhD program. Candidates have to publish material in those journals:

http://www.swissuniversity.ch/unibe/climate-sciences/phd-pro...

"The PhD thesis usually consists of three to four peer-reviewed scientific articles"

Hm, yes, so there is at least one degree program in "Climate Sciences" (they use the plural, not the singular, but that's a minor point). So I should amend that particular claim to: most of the people working in the field called "climate science" do not have degrees in "climate science(s)". Most of them seem to have degrees in physics, meteorology, "earth science" or some variant thereof, or geology.

I don't think this materially affects the rest of what I said.

Sure. Not if they referred to it as "alarmism", because that would indicate that they don't give a shit about the science of it, which seems problematic in a science PhD. But if they did proper science, they wouldn't have a problem.

The use of "alarmism" is a political judgment dismissing the extreme of what some scientists claim is the only possible policy choice. Ethics and cost benefit analysis is never a scientific question. The cost benefit analysis needs input from science, but it is separate from the purely scientific questions.

It's entirely plausible to disagree with the politics of climate change (alarmism) without questioning the science.

Science is falsification, not some kind of dogma. Questioning assumptions leads to progress, although many scholars have forgotten this inconvenient fact.

http://guscost.com/2012/12/06/falsifiability/

Falsification as the royal road to truth was debunked some time ago, and isn't taken very seriously in contemporary philosophy of science. Partly, because Popperian falsification only gets you so far when you look at the actual history of science.

That is, when you look seriously at what scientists do as opposed to what they say they do when they attempt to justify their work, you will find they are not falsifiers but model-builders. If you like to learn more about how Popper has fared in the philosophy of science, you might find Thomas Kuhn [0] and Paul Feyerabend [1],[2] interesting counterpoints, I would throw in the work of Larry Laudan too as it is a good overview of "realist" attempts to move beyond falsification while trying to avoid Feyerabend's embrace of "relativism." [3],[4]

Obviously alot of more recent and good literature on the subject!

[0]: Kuhn, T.S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962 [1]: 1975. Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge [2]: 1978. Science in a Free Society [3]: 1977. Progress and its Problems: Towards a Theory of Scientific Growth [4]: 1996. Beyond Positivism and Relativism

After looking into this a bit, I can say that I don't subscribe to positivism or relativism, even if they are trendy in philosophy class these days. Both seem to reject realism and promote groupthink.

"Can we not account for both science's existence and its success in terms of evolution from the community's state of knowledge at any given time? Does it really help to imagine that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us closer to that ultimate goal?" (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 171)

I'll have to check out Larry Laudan, thanks.

I have not been publishing in many years so my reading appetite has diminished, but I think the trendy -ism in philosophy of science is not so much relativism but pluralism.

Regarding your quotation, Feyerabend explicitly rejects that science is successful and in fact has been actually harmful in understanding in the case of biology. And he argued cogently that "science" should be seperated from the state with as much rigor as "religion" is. He was one of the greatest anarchist minds I ever had the pleasure of meeting.

Nancy Cartwright makes a similar argument but keeping a realist stance about how science doesn't really make progress describing the fundamental truths about the world. That is, people usually hold up the wonders of the modern world as evidence that science progresses towards universal knowledge, e.g., jets fly! But she would say I think that jet engines do not depend at all on scientific understanding of turbulence, which tend to be completely wrong in the material world, and require all kinds of simplifications and specializations in order to make this concrete jet engine work. [0]

[0]: good review of her book Dappled World [pdf] http://bit.ly/TLcMAD

I fail to see why it wouldn't be possible. I assume a PhD in climatology would require 1. an understanding of the field and its state and 2. being able to perform research in the field.

I'd certainly expect somebody serious about climate change (including disagreeing with its existence or with it being anthropogenic) to be able to understand what it's about in the first place, how climate model work, how to create new model matching available data or mine for new data, etc...

And thus I see no reason why they wouldn't be able to get a climatology PhD.

Grad student: "Professor, my own analysis isn't matching all these graphs that keep getting published"

Professor: "Don't rock the boat, we're getting a lot of funding."

Keep your profs happy and toe the line if you want that Ph.D.

Most professors I know are not professors because of the money. These are usually the people who were the best students and as such could have found nice jobs in other sectors.

And do you really think they would have difficulty getting funding for climate research contradicting the current consensus?

> And do you really think they would have difficulty getting funding for climate research contradicting the current consensus?

Indeed, as BEST showed.

edit: erm... why the downvotes? I was giving an example of a climate research study from the "climate change skeptic" side and funded in no small part by the Charles G. Koch Foundation, not exactly a proponent of anthropogenic global warming.

Did you ever study for a Ph.D? From your example it appears you did not.

There are also plenty of research lines to get a degree in climatology that does not involve studying this type of stuff and which are not exactly a political issue, after you get your Ph.D you can study whatever you want, I'm pretty sure there's lots of think tanks who would pay for research countering the global warming hypothesis.

Bullshit. A compelling counterexample to "all these graphs that keep getting published" is far and away the best way to establish your scientific reputation, get a job, get money from the NSF, etc.

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