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Comment by xamuel | Hacker News Reader

Real science should even welcome biased, hostile scrutiny. Actually, that's the best kind of scrutiny.

Read Blaise Pascal's work where he demonstrated how to create a vacuum experimentally. At the time, everyone thought that was impossible. Pascal calmly addresses tons of detractors (many of whom had real skin in the game). If climatologists can't do that, then their work SHOULD be questioned.

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This makes the naive assumption that the people evaluating the conversation are rigorous logicians who are not moved by emotional appeals and bad logic that confirms what they want to believe.

Yeah well the hostile scrutiny isn't trying to bias towards a different scientific conclusion. They are trying to undermine the entire concept of science. They don't want there to be objective facts. What we're talking about isn't biased scrutiny, it's dishonest scrutiny. Anything that endangers short term gains on Wall Street is to be destroyed.

There is no way that's compatible with such a complicated, subtle, and slow-moving field of study like climate science.

But that's not how it works. The EPA scrutinizes it in a biased way and comes to he conclusion that fossil fuels are just fine.

Conservatives get a talking point, people who don't know what a P value is and wouldn't read any of the publications that would cry fowl about this are now a little more sure that it's all a liberal Chinese hoax designed to take away hard won profits from nice American oil companies.

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