Why I am Skeptical of Environmental Hysteria

[Borodog]

Imagine that there exists a cadre of tens thousands of people whose lives' work is to study the various and sundry component of your car. Your car has thousands of parts. Each of these people has a living to make, a mortgage to pay, kids to put through school, clothes and food to buy, etc. But you have a limited amount of funding to devote to your life, including the care and maintenance of your car. These multitudes must compete amongst themselves and everything else in your life for the attention of your scarce dollars. How best can they do this?

One way is to paint the importance of their particular car part in the grandest possible fashion. Their part you see is absolutely vital and critical to the safe and proper functioning of the car. Another way would be to portray the failure of their particular part as an immenent risk; it must be studied, prepared for, spares acquired, preventative maintenance performed, etc. A third way would be to portray the potential consequences of neglecting their particular part in the direst possible terms. To neglect their part, i.e. to not fund them and their study of that particular part, will have disastrous consequences; a catastrophe is virtually inevitable.

The result of such a situation is elementary to predict. You would be assaulted with a cacophony of hysterical warnings about the imminent failure and disastrous consequences of virtually every part of your car. In fact, if you did not start devoting vastly more attention and resources to the car problem very soon, you are told, you will not have a car at all, as it will likely impolode, explode or corrode into oblivion in short order.

This is exactly the case in the environmental sciences. This is not an idle claim. I am an academic. I have written grant proposals. We spin them, to portray our work in the best light possible, to make it seem as important as we possibly can, because we are competing for limited grant dollars. I worked as a strategic planner the EPA. I sat in a room and brainstormed how to make the center I was contracting with seem as important, critical, and indispensible as possible, to show how relevent their work was and how disastrous would be the consequences of "underfunding" it.

Note that I am NOT claiming that even a single scientist needs to lie about anything; they do not. There is a reason the scientist is studying what he studies in the first place: He likes it and thinks it is important. I.e., he is biased. Of course what he is studying important stuff. If it weren't important, he would be studying something else, somthing important, right? Besides, the first step in convincing someone that they should fund your work is to believe in it yourself.

There are many reasons why I am skeptical of environmental hysteria, but this is the one that, for me, ultimately rebutts the "But the scientific consensus is that . . ."

The truth is that if there is one consensus amongst scientists, it is that they want to see their research funded. I know, because I am one of them.

[Paluka]

Why does this apply to environmental hysteria any more or less than this concept would apply to absolutely everything?

[The DaveR]

As opposed to say the oil industry?

[Patrick del Poker Grande]

Where's Wacki?

Also, I'm of the opinion that it's irrefutable that global warming is for real. Whether it's a natural trend or it's man-made is what's up for debate. It may be a particularly one-sided debate, but nonetheless, it's up for debate. It's also irrefutable that there's a lot of [censored] in the air and, whether it's causing global warming or not, having a lot of [censored] in the air is generally not good for us or anything else. It only makes sense to try to minimize all the [censored] in the air given that we already know it's bad for our health anyway and there's the added chance that it'll help global warming.

[casaubon]

[ QUOTE ]
The result of such a situation is elementary to predict. You would be assaulted with a cacophony of hysterical warnings about the imminent failure and disastrous consequences of virtually every part of your car.

[/ QUOTE ]
This is actually my exact situation. Next time, I won't buy a volkswagen.

Also, your assumption that research only exists in order to gain funding for more research, ignores the entire peer review system.

[kickpushcoast]

who has the bigger agenda/motive to spin facts: some academians or oil companies who have billions, possibly trillions, to make or lose?

its been my experience that if you follow the big money, you'll find the lies, spin, etc

[iron81]

[ QUOTE ]
As opposed to say the oil industry?

[/ QUOTE ]
Exactly. There is plenty of money on the other side of the debate as well. The oil companies fund "scientists" whose goal is to disprove global warming. Any scientists who think they have evidence the other way can get plenty of money from them.

On top of this, the surest way to fame and fortune in science is to disprove conventional wisdom. Right now, the conventional wisdom in science is pretty ominous.

Politics forum thread

[private joker]

[ QUOTE ]
I'm of the opinion that it's irrefutable that global warming is for real.

[/ QUOTE ]

If it's irrefutable then it's not an opinion, it's fact. And you're right, it is a fact that global warming is real. But Borodog might have a point that what's up for debate is the degree to which we should be hysterical about it.

[amplify]

I think it's fairly normal for a planet coming out of an ice age to warm up, I could be crazy.

[Jingleheimer]

These biases are all around us. They are good reasons to be skeptical of almost all claims, initially.

But you must allow the fact that there is somewhere out there a very serious problem worth consideration. The people who alert you to its existence may very well benefit monetarily and professionally from added attention to the problem. Although their motives for publicizing their causes are not purely altruistic, that doesn't necessarily mean that the problem itself is not serious. So I think understanding motives is really only a part of it.



Also, let's turn your argument on its head; many of the anti-global warming views have come from researchers/think tanks who are funded by the oil industry. The same people who would benefit if attention to this problem would diminish. Maybe the initial debate has had the illusion of balance because of the presence of these views. Perhaps their views should be discounted similarly.