Not really, unfortunately. SOP methinks.
Eh, what do those eggheads know anyway? They canāt even prove the theory of evolution.
Those āScientistsā, always horsing around!
Speaking as a physicist, these guys are just an embarrassment. It is deeply disturbing to see prominent scientists treat science as a consumer good. But it isnāt surprising. Scientists are no better than any other group of human beings, and the politics in this field are just a nasty, petty and personal as in any other. Self promotion is endemic.
Donāt call them skeptics. They are denialists.
The AP even changed its policy and doesnāt abuse the term skeptic any more.
In the interest of science, someone should try to do the oppositeāfind scientists they can buy off to write papers that support the idea of global warming.
Why buy them off when they already publish, since it is true? 
"Monsanto is good people!"
this fits my personal idea of what i assumed was happening with these these conservative think tanks, but thatās the problem. iām for damn sure not going to use this link to try to convince any nonbelievers. until these allegations are vetted by groups without an axe to grind, itās just Greenpeace making an accusation. i believe it, it would be foolish of GP to manufacture such damning claims, but i have no qualifications to vet what theyāve published.
hopefully this gets picked up by a variety news sources asap who can verify the claims.
As far as I know, Nye never said that.
What actually happened was, when asked about GMOs for food, Nye said he didnāt really like the idea. He made some errors and didnāt cite all that much data.
Then the skeptic community talked about it to him, asked him to research GMOs, and he concluded that genetic modification is just a tool, like Haber Process, and that thereās nothing inherently dangerous about GMOs, you just have to keep studying them for a while and make sure theyāre safe.
What we see today are a lot of people not being skeptical about GMOs, but rather just deciding theyāre all bad and evil. To the detriment of peopleās health even. Take for instance Golden Rice which would save literally millions of children from blindness every year. But the golden rice folks, although having done years of research and development, and a proven-safe-and-effective organism, are still facing massive roadblocks in public sentiment. Much like people trying to run vaccination programs in the middle east.
They donāt have to do that, since 99% of the papers written by scientists in climate change-related fields are already supporting the facts of climate change. You donāt have to pay honest scientists to tell the truth.
DIYbio/biohacking to the rescue. CRISPR kits to every kitchen. Get people who want the nice things to make them on their own, at too many places without monolithic corporations to squeeze profits and ruin the good things for us. If you want onion that does not induce tears, donāt wait for an approval that may never come, hack it yourself. Same for yellow rice, or tobacco that makes antibodies/hormones/whatever for your specific illnessā¦
Of course the conspiracy nuts will ignore this (a real conspiracy) and keep bangingā on about climate science being n the service of āone world governmentā.
What should (but probably wonāt) give them pause is just how cheap these guys apparently are.
The usual conspiracy theory is that the politicians are in it to destroy capitalism and impose a tyrannical one-world-government on the emiserated and smoldering remains of whatever Agenda 21 didnāt have extirpated entirely; but those pesky āclimate scientistsā are supposed to be in it for the (stifled laugh) sweet, sweet, āresearchā funding gravy train that we all know is making liberal academia rich.
If the going rate is āthousands of dollarsā for someone who managed to land a professorship at Princeton(and in physics, which isnāt necessarily directly marketable; but usually implies enough mathematical facility to have a variety of options); to risk the wrath of The Conspiracy; exactly how lucrative do they think doing grunt work for The Conspiracy can be?
Better yet, just pay scientists better and get the same results. You donāt have to coerce them to do actual science.
Also: Physicists arenāt climatologists, and donāt necessarily know in detail anything about how the planetās climatology works.
But the thing is, physicists like to speak with apparent expertise on any number of fields, and I canāt exactly explain why.
I mean, when I was a teenager, I expected that if we figured out a Grand Unified Theory or something like that, then knowing everything about the universe would just be a simple matter of number crunching the most basic building blocks till you come out with an exact solution for, say, how many ants there are in Argentina at a specific point in time.
So I can see how at least teenage physics-nerd me would get all pompous and want to pontificate on stuff I have no understanding of. But that doesnāt really explain the old-timer physicists.
In anycase, physicists are easily co-opted by pseudoscience and itās a nice hint for telling when biological/medical scams include physicist endorsements. Because they often donāt have any expertise in the field theyāre being co-opted by.
And a side order of mutant anthrax.
Thereās a nice parallel to the Planned Parenthood videos. Except these arenāt faked. And also, nobody from the media or the halls of power will call for systematic changes or defund these fraudsters.
I can only assume that it is excessive exposure to the (in fairness, very powerful) uses of mathematical modelling, combined with a reasonably strong probability of having spent a lot of time studying phenomena that, while they may be mathematically brutal(in terms of requiring advanced techniques) are simple and well characterized enough that someone sufficiently familiar with tensor calculus or whatever happens to be required can actually get good results.
Yes, there are plenty of people using squishy soft methods because they simply arenāt very good at math; but there are also a lot of areas where mathematical models accurate enough to produce useful results are just computationally intractable(eg. we can model protein folding well enough to do interesting things with it; but weād probably have to turn all the silicon on the planet into computational semiconductors to model an ecosystem at that scale).
