Perhaps my reading comprehension is failing me (happens all the time), but I don’t see a lot of Faith Based science going on here. Some snarky Bill Nye references, sure. But the majority of content in this particular thread ive been able mentally distill is in favor of data. And if data changes models, fantastic.
And frankly these ‘biased papers’ are simply the equivalent of farmed content on Google, and I lose little sleep over them. They will be weeded out (with roundup! :D)
Haven’t the scientists in question been saying the same thing for years?
This is like arguing with popo about, well, anything. Climate change denial is, like, Clamb’s jam. You’re gonna have a bad time… 
Well, this post…
…drew multiple replies by people saying that we don’t have to do that. Apparently many of us believe - without any evidence at all - that our side of the argument is not being paid off to spread falsehoods. Given that there’s no proof of this unreasoned belief, and people apparently don’t want proof, I think it’s fair to call that kind of attitude faith. Perhaps I’ve studied too much theology.
The position that those replies take is that there’s no need to apply the same experimental regimen to things we have already taken on faith to things we haven’t; that the Greenpeace experimental results should not be verified by applying them to a control population. Mr. Rice suggested following the scientific method and people essentially told him they didn’t want real science.
If it turned out that all academics are for sale, rather than just climate change deniers, that would be a very significant result. If it turned out that disproportionate numbers of climate change deniers are on the take compared to their peers, that would be an even more significant result.
We don’t have to do that, and how do I say this… We agree!! We don’t have to buy off scientists because we have faith in journals or scientists but because we have faith in the scientific method.
So I guess what I am saying is How I Interpreted the conversation is Yes, we will let the scientific method sort them all out. Not that we had to sit on our thumbs.
Again, that was my interpretation.
I suspect that if the research Mr. Rice suggested was done, we’d find that the deniers are significantly more likely to sell research results, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that more than 60% of scientists in general write whatever they are paid to write. Saddened, yes, but not at all surprised. I think that the deniers would be more in the 99% range (given a plus or minus 5% error).
We (meaning “Western Culture” if there is such a thing) are far too trusting of white lab coats. Stanley Milgram proved that, I think. Science put isinglass in beer, you know - or at least that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
I’ll be the first to admit that what I wrote was intended to be a little provocative. It’s actually an interesting problem.
Assume that manmade climate change really is happening in objective reality (humor me in saying that such a thing exists). If so, in my experiment, we’d be paying off scientists to say what they’d say anyhow. Where’s the harm? So you need to design the experiment with a little more subtlety.
There is certainly some disagreement within the mainstream scientific community about how fast climate change is happening, how severe its effects will be, and what the effects might be on a localized basis. So you could design an experiment in which you attempt to pay off climate scientists to state that climate change is faster/slower, harsher/milder, etc than they really believe.
First off there is nothing wrong with fish guts in beer 
(you never forget your first time using isinglass, it is very much a “what the hell am I doing!?” Moment).
Yes, we put a lot of trust in domain knowledge experts. And the only argument I would have with your hypotheticals are the numbers, not the reasoning behind it.
But as it is said in Amadeus, “There it is”. Sea levels are rising and while I will be fine (300 feet above sea level) others won’t. And I have a problem with that.
It wouldn’t be difficult to design such an experiment, but good luck getting it past the ethics committee.
But what would that accomplish? As a thought experiment, sure! However I suspect you see the consequences for not taking this problem with a very (I made myself laugh at this) Conservative course of action is kinda insane.
We have a lot to lose and little to gain if the seas rise 1.5 meters, 2.0 meters, 2.5 meters, and so on. So while the meta experiment you propose is intellectually interesting, I am going to take the conservative approach. Incent people to lower CO2. It will only cost a trillion dollars over the next hundred years.
Regarding golden rice: the massive roadblocks might be there because the blindness is caused by a distribution problem, not a lack of tech. How many dollars were invested to produce an intellectual property right protected product compared to providing goddamn carrot seeds? The question of why these people are so vitamin A deficient isn’t even thought of. Never mind providing the seeds, why can’t these people afford carrot or other vitamin A rich seeds/plants? It’s not like they have to have access to Rolex watches. Access to seeds, access to land, or access to some locally produced vegetables, that’s such a tall order?. I don’t understand why the only answer to a completely inefficient, corrupt system is some expensive high tech property right protected product that only continues the outrageously lunatic system that keeps people in such impoverished and dependent state.
It’s myopia on a global scale.
Nah, everyone here seem to know the Time Enough at Last paradox, by which we would only break our own glasses in the end. Better to be social.
As I understand it, Golden Rice was developed in order to solve cultural acceptance problems. From what I’ve read, and what the Golden Rice devs say, there’s not a lot of vitamin A availability in southern Asia. That there’s been attempts to get supplements, and even stuff like carrot seeds into people’s hands, but the cultures often just doesn’t accept it.
So the idea was, we solve the completely preventable childhood blindness problem by engineering a staple crop to take care of that. Since rice is already familiar and everyone eats it, it’d be a good organism to modify.
Same exact general principle as iodized salt in the western world.
Not saying that Golden Rice is a panacea, but it’s preposterous the amount of goalpost moving in the agricultural approval processes they’ve had to deal with. A lot of countries have been changing the requirements for Golden Rice to be approved for use, and there’s also the small fact that Golden Rice research farms have been getting sabotaged by anti-GMO activists who just don’t like it for reasons that have no basis in science.
Do you honestly think adding salt to another salt is basically the same principle as grafting a bacterial gene into a plant?
You’re assuming that posters here are insisting on all-or-nothing with regard to the Greenpeace action. Here’s an example of a response here on this thread:
Do you see the difference between your claim and what’s actually being said?
You’re also assuming that people on this forum aren’t scientists or at least directly working with scientists. Many of us are involved in scientific discovery and research. Many more of us are avid readers of the research once it’s published. We’re not idiots who have no idea how non-scumbag scientists work.
You could maybe ask them to say climate change is accelerating, since that is more or less as true as the widely reported hiatus, supportable by the same type of analysis. Though I’m not sure it’s the exact same, because some people could suppose it’s not so unreasonable to counter a popular distortion with its opposite.
That said, thinking people taking a mainstream academic position are on average less venal than ones taking a contrarian position promoted by well-funded industry is a pretty reasonable deduction. It’s nice to have more direct evidence for that sort of position – I think many of us do have some in one form or another – but in any case it’s hardly faith, unless you mean ordinary trust people aren’t always horrible.
Brown rice is culturally deprecated because it’s not white. Neither is golden rice. White rice is a traditional emblem of success and prosperity. Not golden, white. People will pay extra in order to malnourish their children on white rice; we humans are all idiots.
Golden rice was developed because rapacious agchem/GMO zaibatsus had an image problem, so they funneled a lot of money to some decent, kind-hearted scientists who legitimately wanted to use genetic manipulation techniques to actually help people in need. (I think you and I will agree that we should be happy about that outcome!)
Anti-GMO people include a totally lunatic fringe that pro-GMO forces like to characterize as representative of their opposition as a whole, but that’s not objectively true. The average person has made a rational economic decision based on the limited information they can trust - although it’s in the interest of the aforementioned rapacious corporations to pretend that they are just poor little victims of a terrible witch hunt.
@anon67050589 - I have daily interaction with scientists involved in basic research, both because I’m married to one, and because I was one for a long time (but nowadays I’m just a grubby little salaryman even though my job title does have the word “research” in it).
We know there is a broad consensus that climate change is happening and is human cause and there are few who deny that. Identifying some deniers whose “expertise” is for sale does a lot to discredit the denial, especially given that we know who is buying them off and that they have money to buy them off with. While there are undoubtedly many unscrupulous scientists saying that climate change is a thing (just like there are many unscrupulous people in job), there are far too many to conduct a sting of any meaningful size and the notion that support for the result is largely the result of corruption is almost impossible to sustain unless we can identify a very large funding source.
The most useful result of the sting isn’t the exposure of one fraud, it is the exposure of the practice of committing fraud on the part of large energy companies.
I guess my question is, what would we learn by doing that? In the case of deniers, we learn that monied interests really are buying studies to say what they want said. That casts significant doubt on studies forwarded by those interests. Suppose we carried out your experiment and found a whole bunch of corrupt or corruptible scientists in climate science (and I have no doubt we would). What would we do? Well, presumably those scientists might have career trouble after that, and that might be a good thing in itself. And if we found that certain positions were substantially more likely to be supported by corrupt scientists, then we might give extra scrutiny to those positions, or think about whether or not those positions are of interest to someone who has the money to buy off a bunch of scientists. But we can’t really ask Greenpeace to be the scientific integrity police, and I think saying that we ought to test both sides is kind of a distraction from what we can learn from the fact that someone out there tested certain people.
