The word "scientist" properly applied means "one who employs the scientific method in the process of examining data and developing conclusions." There are many, many specialities; biology (my field, once upon a time), chemistry, cosmology, astronomy, physics, many, many more.
The problem is that the non-scientific community hears the word "scientist" and gets the vague impression of someone like the Professor on Gilligan's Island, a polymath, an expert on all topics, who can build a fusion reactor from three lengths of bamboo, some vine and a couple of coconuts, but who can't manage to fix a three-foot hole in the side of a boat. This can lead agenda-driven people, like the climate scolds, to engage in the logical fallacy of the Appeal to Authority. In this, they find someone they call a "scientist" to advance their economy-destroying agenda, but when you look into their spokesman's background, he or she might be, say, an industrial chemist - someone who knows little or nothing about the climate.
Here's the thing about the Appeal to Authority fallacy, though: It's only a fallacy if the person appealed to isn't really an expert. Dr. Judith Curry is a real expert on climatology. She is an actual career climatologist, professor emeritus at the Georgia Institute of Technology, with over 190 proper scientific papers published on the topic. She has some thoughts on the claims of the climate scolds, and in an interview with Freedom Research, she lays those thoughts out.
Here are a couple of highlights:
Interviewer (in part): There’s a popular claim—it is still alive, pretty much, I think—that there is a scientific consensus that 97% of scientists agree that human-caused climate change exists. So, many interpret this to mean there’s no room for any discussion left. But where does this claim actually come from?
Dr. Curry: Okay, well, where it comes from was an activist scientist who had a blog, and he had some of his blogger buddies do a search of scientific abstracts, and they classified the abstracts as either for or against human-caused global warming. Well, most of them didn’t have, you know, that they just didn’t directly confront the issue, and they counted as for global warming papers that included cookstove technology being used in India. They counted that as in favor of the global warming narrative. So, it’s actually a big joke. What climate scientists actually agree on is very little. Everyone agrees that it’s been warming since about the middle 19th century. Everyone agrees that we’re adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and everyone agrees that carbon dioxide has an infrared emission spectrum that, all other things being equal, acts to warm the planet. Okay, but scientists do not agree on the most consequential issues, such as how much of the recent warming has been caused by humans, how much warming can we expect for the remainder of the 21st century, is warming dangerous, will humanity and human welfare overall be improved by a rapid transition away from fossil fuels? There’s huge debate—scientific and political debate—on these issues, and pretending that we shouldn’t have this debate and pretending that there’s some sort of agreement by all scientists on these issues, where there’s a lot of disagreement, not only is it bad for science, but it misleads policymakers. So, it’s not good for anybody other than for the activist scientists who want, you know, attention, fame, fortune, whatever—who knows what drives them.
In other words, there are many, many unknowns. There is little agreement on the causes and end results of a slight increase in CO2 levels, or in how that will affect humankind. There certainly is no "consensus," and no justification for destroying our modern, energy-dependent lifestyle for this bugaboo.
But here's the real zinger:
Interviewer: What I’m thinking is, how on certain topics, such as climate, how can this debate be killed that easily?
It’s about careerism. I mean, if your funding, if your research funding, is tied to agreeing with the consensus, if your salary increase, if your tenure case—it’s really about careerism and resources. I mean, so that’s what it’s all about. I mean, the incentives are all pointing in one direction, and, you know, people—the people who are speaking out—are either people who have retired or left academia for whatever reason but who are now either retired, working for the private sector, or working for non-governmental organizations. These are the people speaking out and challenging the consensus and really behaving the way scientists should behave, as opposed to in the universities, where they all have to dance to that same drumbeat if they want to get professional recognition and professional advancement. It’s a very bad state of affairs.
It's all about the money, the careers, the status. It's a sad state of affairs when our academics, the so-called experts, who set themselves up as the arbiters of what is "science" and what is not, simply cannot be trusted, because they're just parroting a line.
This leads to the opposite of science, and Dr. Curry talks about that as well, later in the interview. When money and position are at stake, too many will do the opposite of science; they will cherry-pick data to match their hypotheses, rather than do what the scientific method properly calls for, and change their hypotheses as necessary to fit the data. This leads to a real garbage-in, garbage-out situation - and it's producing bad results that are being used in an attempt to drive policy. In academia, toeing that line is too often necessary to survive, much less advance, in one's career.
That line, as we are seeing in recent months, is fraying.
See Also: Meet the Anti-Greta: Téa Johansson, Amazing Climate Realist
What the Climate Scolds Don't Get: Green Energy Is Not Possible Without Capitalism
Granted, it's only fair to point out that this can happen in the private sector too, and it's not impossible that career-minded individuals (and who among us is not career-minded?) may fudge their data as well. There's only one way to counter this:
Demand the release of the full, unedited data. Anyone doing any research, not just in climate but in any scientific subject, must, to be taken seriously, release their raw data, their methods, their assumptions, and their original and amended hypotheses. Reproducibility is a keystone of science, and all of this is required so that other researchers can attempt to duplicate one's work. If that work cannot be duplicated with the same raw data and the same methods, then there is something very, very wrong.
That's a big part of what Dr. Curry is telling us.
By all means, watch the entire interview. It's worth the 50 minutes out of your day.
