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Comment by logjammin | Hacker News Reader

Example of investigators whose work has suffered for fear of being labeled a heretic?

One of the more famous cases recently was Peter Ridd. He just won a court case against his university after being sacked for questioning the climate consensus.

He said the Great Barrier reef will profit from climate change and not die off because of it, is that the issue you mean?

Sooo - if it's true, great, one problem less! Regardless, there are still many other problems caused by climate change that he did not dispute and that we still have to fight. So the best course forward is still to reduce emissions, and keep an eye on the reef to see what's true.

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Googling around I found the statement that

“Dr Ridd was not sacked because of his scientific views. Dr Ridd was never gagged or silenced about his scientific views, a matter which was admitted during the court hearing.” [0]

(But if that's true or not.. hard to say from here. The court recordings would have evidence.)

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/16/james-co...

Freeman Dyson

He's a physicists. Why would he have any idea about climate?

He's just a person with an opinion not a dissenting scientist.

And if his work suffered as a result of voicing such opinion then it was only to be expected.

If you voice stupid opinion regarding domain you know almost nothing about and prop it up with your work reputation it's only fair if that reputation takes a hit.

The climate is a physical phenomenon.

And many climate scientists are in fact physicists.

Everything in existence is a physical phenomenon. That doesn't mean physicists have authority on everything.

You might as well consider every philosopher an authority on everything because every problem ever solved was solved by thinking and that's what philosophers do. While in reality philosophers are only authorities on (the history of?) philosophy.

that's too harsh. philsophers are experts at a particular way of thinking: logic. it is surprisingly powerful for clarifying ideas and advancing knowledge, in much the same way as mathematics or the scientific method are. we would not say mathematicians are only experts on "numbers"

Logic is actually part of math. There are even few different logics math worked out.

Some philosophers follow logic but apply it to unanswerable questions. Some can't even do the logic part rigorously enough. Personally I have no respect for this field of culture and humans that pursue it. All of them are not even wrong.

The “97% consensus” number is based on surveys of scientists in general, not just climate scientists. Including scientists when they agree with a position, but not when they disagree (because they aren’t real climate experts) is a very strange debate tactic.

Well, everything you said is false:

"Among the most-cited is a 2013 study of nearly 12,000 abstracts of peer-reviewed papers on climate science published since 1990, of which just over 4,000 papers expressed an opinion on the cause of recent global warming. Of these, 97% agree, explicitly or implicitly, that global warming is happening and is human-caused."

It looks like you’re right.

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