You’re questioning Nye’s integrity? Him switching his stance on GMO’s made me respect the guy even more.
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The real fun starts when you can ‘compile’ pathogens that you can’t get access to conventionally.
Anthrax has a nasty reputation(in part deserved, it’s a very, very, hardy spore-former and so brutally difficult to get out of anything you sprinkle it on; excellent area denial); but it’s endemic to cattle in various places, and not wildly rare.
Something like smallpox, though, is supposed to be nearly extinct, with specimens only in a few, high security, locations. However, the cost of having a long string of DNA stitched together to-spec is falling, and the genome has been sequenced, so it should eventually be possible to synthesize ‘live’(to the degree that viruses ever are) specimens purely from a structural description and some otherwise innocuous building blocks. That’ll be fun.
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That doesn’t show that they are not being paid off to write supportive papers. It shows that no additional payoff is needed.
You think 99% of the scientists working in climate change specialties are being paid off ALREADY?
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Yeah absolutely. I have no idea what the solution is to stop people who have a bit of bioengineering knowledge, a desktop viral synthesiser, access to virushub.com and nothing to lose.
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What I think isn’t really relevant. My point is that the fact that a vast number of scientists already support global warming theories does not mean that they are incorruptible. Both sides should be tested.
Not to radicalize people, I think.
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Agreed. That’s the nature of neoliberalism, I’d say. As public money dries up for academic work and research, it’s not too surprising that such things have become a commodity that needs to prove its economic worth to be funded. So much for academic freedom!
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The problem with trying to use this story (assuming it’s true) to undermine climate change denial is that they will just see it as further proof that all scientists can’t be trusted.
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The evidence of these climate denying scientists keeps growing. I am also troubled that these universities are taking no actions against these individuals. Do these universities not have guidelines against taking money to write an academic paper with a predetermined outcome based on the desires of the funders as opposed to facts? Why should we trust any research coming out of these institutions? Pressure should be put on these universities to take action against their academics who act in such an ethically dubious way.
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Paid off by whom? There is a clear economic incentive for spurious climate science denial since a lot of fossil fuel industries are at stake. There is no clear incentive for the opposite.
Unless you subscribe to the Fox News Crazy view that scientists are getting rich off of grants.
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It’s all them big alternative-energy dollarz! Don’t let anybody fool you - “big solar” is sneaky.
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You know it’s gonna be someone on this BBS that actually does it, right? (I’ll be in my volcano)
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I do not accept the premise. It would be similar to wildly exclaiming that a single woman is the cause of the downfall of ethics in game journalism, so all women are in a conspiracy to…
Shit.
We’re fucked.
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“Big Solar” is China. So is Big Coal. They’re conflicted.
I dunno about you but I regard that as a good thing.
I think the public at large would be shocked at how a lot of academic research happens. Many researchers I know are on “soft money,” that is, their livelihood comes from research grants rather than “hard money” that comes without fail every year from the institution’s budget. While this is not a new phenomenon, it has been exacerbated by state governments cutting higher ed funding. Some professors who were once on hard money or maybe 50/50 have been moved to soft money because the budgets have simply dried up.
There are a number of things to keep in mind about soft money.
- It always comes with an expiration date. Research grants typically run one to five years. That means researchers–like politicians who want to stay in office–have to spend some of their time findin1. g new sources of funding. This is no joke. When the grant money runs out it means unemployment for professors, grad students, assistants, and so on. If you want to see panic and stress, talk to a researcher with three months left on her grant with no new funding in sight.
- With a smaller pool of grant money, competition is fierce. There just isn’t enough funding–whether from the government or private sector–for all the PhDs this country produces. If I am to believe my friends in research, grant proposals with truly ground-breaking medical potential have been turned down because a different proposal was ranked just a little bit higher. This was especially true in the aftermath of the housing meltdown when government research funding was slashed to help balance budgets.
- Money drives research. (Shocking, I know.) Climate change is hot right now, so researchers have a better shot at a grant proposal with a climate change angle than one without. Your speciality may be in cockroach biology, but if you want to stay employed then your grant proposal better be about how roach populations track with climate change rather than what we can learn about roach adaptability to zero G or how roach nervous systems could inform medical advances. (Those are just wild examples.)
- A lot of research grant money comes from the government, but not all. Really, it depends on your field. In medicine you have corporate research sponsorship on pharmaceuticals, new devices, or lab testing methods. There’s nothing inherently evil about corporate research grants as long as the sponsor doesn’t dictate or change the results. (Certainly there are examples of that kind of behaviour, though.)
Given the above, I’m not exactly shocked by what Greenpeace found. Without really digging into what the papers said, I’d even say it’s possible to write the papers described in the article without lying. Some crops flourish under CO2, and developing countries with an abundant access to coal may find it’s the most economical way to raise the standard of living. At most you could say the papers lie through omission, but it really depends on how the grant was written. It’s one thing to create a grant saying “Describe potential positive outcomes of increased CO2,” (neutral) and another to say “Write a paper explaining why climate change is a hoax and we’re all fine” (biased).
Maybe it’s all as villainous and moustache twirling as the article indicates. Given some of Greenpeace’s ill-conceived shenanigans, I’m at least willing to give the researchers the benefit of the doubt.
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This makes no sense. How and what would be tested, who would do the testing, and to what end?
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Seems like a lot of y’all are missing @adamrice’s point (although @CLamb clearly got it).
Real science - as opposed to faith-based Science - is not afraid of real data. It verifies, falsifies, and is skeptical of itself. If you are afraid to subject your own golden calves to the scrutiny you’ve admired Greenpeace for applying to climate change denialists, you are no better than they are - you’re just accepting something as truth because you want it to be true.
It’s extremely similar to the GMO stuff - it’s not necessary to claim that all GMOs are safe in order to support GMO research, development and use. It’s also not necessary to insist that GMOs are inherently sacred and good in order to oppose the idea that they are inherently evil and harmful. It’s a false dichotomy.
If you believe that science is on your side, you should support science. Saying “oh, I don’t have to do that, because I’m right” completely undermines any claim you might make to the scientific method.
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