I get tons of drive by attacks on the HTTTACS articles and most are pretty thoughtless repetitions of everything we’ve heard a hundred times before, and often posted directly underneath their own refutations.
But occasionally there are seemingly very sincere and well posed questions or arguments that I have not addressed very thoroughly or very well before. These deserve equally thoughtful answers but I don’t always have the time to provide them.
I recently received one such via email from a fellow named Jonathon, which I will present below:
Dear Mr. Beck:
My name is Jonathan [redacted]. I am a fairly recent graduate with a BS in Economics, mostly focusing my research on climate change which I hope to pursue on a graduate level in the future. I’m also in the odd place of being a very staunch advocate of free market capitalism while believing climate change is a problem. I’d ideally like to try and reconcile the two in the future but my research isn’t why I’m e-mailing you. As I frequently refer to your refutations of denialist claims that I frequently encounter (ex. “since it’s exceptionally cold this particular day, therefore there is no such thing as global warming”), I find it as a way of keeping sane. However, I have two questions that I don’t feel you’ve really addressed in your guide.
One claim that I’ve encountered and can’t quite find a good reason to refute it is a claim about rent seeking or a “baptist and bootlegger” problem. The idea is that nearly all scientists get their funding from the government, and being normal people, they want money so they can continue to have comfortable lives doing what they enjoy, they will go with the flow and generate climate research that points to climate change which means they’ll get more money to investigate the problem because it’s of urgent importance and it’s another way for the government to exercise its power. This is not to say there is some grand liberal conspiracy of scientists or that all scientists are insincere and lack integrity, merely that they’re people who have families and bills to pay and they’re going to give the people who are paying their bills (bureaucrats who decide how to allocate funding) what they want to hear. A similar argument is that of the “baptist and bootlegger” – some argue that like a baptist preacher who would by day preach the evils of alcohol and by night make a hefty profit off moonshine, people like Al Gore are profiting through schemes like climate offsetting by preaching the impacts of global warming.
The closest you come to addressing this point is here – http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/11/23656/027 – but you cite entirely organizations who receive their funding through government grants. I do appreciate you cite some CEOs as acknowledging that climate change is a serious issue but one could argue that they have no more expertise in proclaiming climate change is real than a conservative pundit or economist in denying the fact. Essentially, this is a problem of “Who stands to gain?” and I’m curious how you address that.
Secondly, I have heard arguments that at the root of climate change debate isn’t so much actual science but philosophy and that environmentalists are using science for their own advantage to promote their own anti-capitalist agenda. I’m sorry I don’t recall the exact article, but I do recall on one occassion that GRIST was attacking a CATO Institute (a prominent libertarian think tank, in case you weren’t aware) who did a paper on climate change from a free market perspective (though rather wishy washy, in my opinion) and GRIST started attacking the paper based on assertions like “the free market is the best system for progress and equality”, arguing that the free market doesn’t “really” do that, that capitalists are greedy, bad people, etc. In short, this isn’t really abotu climate change but against environmentalists, who are inclined to be anti-capitalist, using science as a way of pushing their own agenda and that they could care less about the facts and merely want to placate their political and philosophical preferences. Furthermore, at least I would say that an environmentalist has no more right to pretend and be an economist than an economist does at trying to pretend and be a climatologist. In short, how do you address this point as well?
Thank you for taking your time in addressing my questions and I hope you will be able to respond.
I don’t find the second point very interesting as it is really besides the point about what the scientific case is. Anyone is free to use valid science as they wish, I only object when people lie and misrepresent it. The alleged agenda of someone offering a solution is is already beyond the question of is there a real problem, which is what my guide has always focused on. The article Jonathon cites in his first point, (local copy of that article is here) is actually a better response for the second point, at least if the suggestion is that the scientific case itself is the result of a pre-existing philisophical agenda.
But the first point, that science is biased towards findings that perpetuate its funding, is at least plausible. But a plausible hypothesis is not enough to draw a conclusion from. Is there actual evidence to support this? Is there evidence that is inconsistent with this hypothesis?
Frankly, my main peeve with people who offer this up as a reason to reject 100+years of developing research, is that they never offer any good evidence that this effect is, one, real (and I actually don’t doubt it is) and more importantly two, that it is large enough to sway thousands and thousands of researchers so far from the truth. I would also appreciate someone believing this to be the case to explain how a government full of former and future oil executives is seeking evidence that burning fossil fuels is dangerous. Why isn’t the bias the other way (and personally I think any such government influence does in fact push the other way).
Does anyone out there want to take a crack at offering Jonathon a respectful and substantive answer? Why shouldn’t we be wary of scientific research whose very existence depends on certain conclusions?