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Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

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Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#71

Post by fredkbloggs »

sitkack wrote: post #69
fredkbloggs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#73

Post by kijin »

fredkbloggs wrote: post #66
kijin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear We cannot know what his original view on climate change might have been. Even if he was on the conservative side to begin with, there's a large spectrum from "Earth might be getting warmer, but I don't think it's anthropogenic" to "CO2 is actually good for us!" Perhaps some of his previous papers were paid for by others with similar interests as well. J…

> We cannot know what his original view on climate change might have been. Does it matter? You don't have the right to demand that everyone agree with you, even if you're right . We don't burn people at the stake or try to silence them for disagreement. Please stop trying to create unanimity; it's not healthy. What we should punish people for: lying to Congress, taking or offering bribes, doing dishonest work while i…

I don't think you disagree with me. Of course people have every right to deny climate change or whatever else they want to deny.

His original view, if there ever was such a thing, still matters because many of us would like to know whether he changed his views after accepting the bribe. It doesn't matter if he changed his views from right to wrong or the other way around, what matters is that a scientist might have changed his public views based on something other than evidence.

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#74

Post by carc »

To all the people that are somehow saying that this isn't all that bad, you seem to be missing the point. The problem isn't that these professors are taking money to support something they already support. It's that they are taking money and then going to lengths to avoid disclosing the funding OR to make it look like their papers went through a real peer review process...

I'm utterly shocked and disappointed by how many people on here are saying things along the lines of "what's the big deal?"

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#75

Post by sanderjd »

hackuser wrote: post #56
aleh wrote: post #19

Wonder if anyone is going to do the opposite - try to buy off pro-global-warming professor to produce exaggerated doomsday prediction - and what the outcome is going to be.

I wonder if Greenpeace is doing more to undermine confidence in all academic research, undermining confidence in climate change science much more than the denial of it.

This was my first thought. The only difference between me and the climate change skeptics I know is that they have no faith in the integrity of scientists, and I do. "See, the oil and gas industry has been buying off scientists!" won't help my argument, they'll just think that it's a countervailing force to all the scientists on the other side of the question who are being bought off by …whoever they think it is.

Edit to add: Furthermore, I don't think this is unreasonable of them! Figuring out which experts to trust is a really hard problem in a society as complex as ours has become, and this makes it harder to argue for "you should trust scientists".

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#76

Post by x1798DE »

chetanahuja wrote: post #26

I see people arguing that there's nothing bad in this report. The shady, underhanded and dishonest context is so clear, I'm shocked to see so many such objections. The basic problem here is that two top academics are clearly selling the use of their credentials for clear commercial gain of a private company and using sophisticated means to hide the fact of such sale. That part is bad enough, even worse is the eager s…

This is clearly not being billed as a question about non-disclosure of funding, so you can understand why people might think it's not the smoking gun evidence of misconduct it is purported to be.

To me it feels like the headline and the story are that these guys have a conflict of interest because of the funding (i.e. "we paid these scientists to say climate change isn't a problem"), but in fact everything in this article is consistent with it going the other way around - they have a conflict of interest because they have strong beliefs on a scientific topic, and may be willing to do dodgy stuff in favor of that.

I never said that nothing wrong happened (I honestly don't know), just that it feels like a bait-and-switch because I get the strong implication here that the point of this story is that these guys are taking bribes to induce them to say what they are saying, which is very different from "they are hiding the source of the funding which enables them to say what they are saying".

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#77

Post by eli_gottlieb »

javajosh wrote: post #55
chetanahuja wrote: post #26

I see people arguing that there's nothing bad in this report. The shady, underhanded and dishonest context is so clear, I'm shocked to see so many such objections. The basic problem here is that two top academics are clearly selling the use of their credentials for clear commercial gain of a private company and using sophisticated means to hide the fact of such sale. That part is bad enough, even worse is the eager s…

What confuses me is that we all seem to have more-or-less the same moral compass when it comes to fiction. "The bad guy" is often going to extremes to prevent something from going public - dumping toxic waste in a river, taking bribes, selling a vote, torturing people in secret etc. Somehow it seems like these days, if someone gets caught doing these things in real life, nothing happens. Dumping toxic waste is pro-bu…

Unfortunately, what people seem to pick up as "evil" from the fictions isn't the immoral actions, but instead the color-coding of villains as wearing ominous clothes (often dressed for a funeral) and accompanied by certain musical stings.

I mean, for God's sakes, the Nazis wore skulls and didn't notice they were the baddies!

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#78

Post by OniBait »

OniBait wrote: post #72

I'm a bit curious what people's opinions are after reading this http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/12/08/breaking-greenpeace-co... Seems like there is some info being left out. Both sources seem to be hiding things, why not publish the entire e-mail exchanges?

Ah, I see the entire exchange was published here http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2642410-Email-Chain-H...

Seems quite different than how it was being portrayed. From what I'm seeing, they asked for a white paper, not a research paper and Happer said they could send money to his 501c3 charity which only pays part of his travel expense and would only write what he believed in. Even correcting them on peer review in an academic sense vs a white paper reviewed by his peers...

Am I missing something nefarious here? Because this seems much more like a 'hit piece' on a guy who is testifying before congress.

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#79

Post by javajosh »

shkkmo wrote: post #62
javajosh wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What confuses me is that we all seem to have more-or-less the same moral compass when it comes to fiction. "The bad guy" is often going to extremes to prevent something from going public - dumping toxic waste in a river, taking bribes, selling a vote, torturing people in secret etc. Somehow it seems like these days, if someone gets caught doing these things in real life, nothing happens. Dumping toxic waste is pro-bu…

> What confuses me is that we all seem to have more-or-less the same moral compass when it comes to fiction. > Torture? Heck, it's not torture, and they're really bad people anyway. The use of torture 'by the good guys' is actually pretty ubiquitous in modern TV.

That is very observant, something I've written about elsewhere. Not quite sure what to do about it to be honest. It makes me sick.

Re: Undercover Activists Buy Off Professors in Climate Sting

#80

Post by carc »

n0us wrote: post #52
kijin wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given how cleverly the authors tried to evade peer review, the evidence might have been quite flimsy to begin with. Peer review is the primary mechanism by which modern science verifies evidence, especially in fields like climate change where it's often very difficult to replicate another scientist's data. Evasion of peer review is like including an obfuscated blob in a critical part of some security software. It is…

Thats why you don't use that blob. I'm not saying that I trust the study, only that I don't see anything wrong with the author accepting money in exchange for writing it. Continuing the analogy, I don't see anything wrong with using or producing an obfuscated blob (in certain situations) but it wouldn't necessarily be wise to blindly trust it.

I don't either... assuming the author discloses the sources of funding. How can you rationalize away that part?
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