Re: Global Warming
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It is very much in the personal interest of scientists fighting for scarce grant funding (and grant funding is always scarce, no matter the level) to attempt to maximize the perceived importance and impact of what they are researching. A great way to do this is to make dire predictions.
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There may be some element of that, but there is also the peer review process and the whole of the sceientific method to put a damper on it. Which is more closely monitored and held accountable -- the work done by scientists through grant funding, published in established, peer reviewed journals, or the work of industry spokespeople?
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The people doing the peer reviews are fighting for the same kind of grant money and making the same kinds of arguments. I'm not saying there's some giant conspiracy, or the people in the environmental science community are being dishonest, because they aren't. But self-interest is a powerful motivator that can distort one's perceptions. Believe me, I saw it first hand. I was a technical analyst and strategic planner for the EPA's National Environmental Supercomputing Center (NESC) and Office of Research and Development (ORD). I worked with a lot of people and one of their main goals was to constantly maximize the perceived impact of their work (i.e. spin it) to ensure funding. For example, there's a big move in EPA to pre-model atmospheric transport around major targets in the U.S., like cities. My boss and I basically sat around in an office one day brainstorming how we could raise the perceived value of supercomputing in the EPA in light of "Homeland Security", and this program is what we came up with. That doesn't make it a "bad" program, but it tells you where the motivations came from.
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What should also not be surprising is that scientists employed by governments produce results to those governments' liking, and what government likes the most is a crisis that allows those in government to justify the extension of their influence, power, and control.
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There's some logic in that, but in practice a lot of complexities probably add to the mix. The current administration has consistently dismissed human caused climate change.
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I'm not interested in the current administration. Like all administrations, the current one is filled with crooked crooks and their crooked cronies.
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