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Comment by cameronbrown | Hacker News Reader

If someone in academia spent serious time and money trying to disprove climate change, they would be laughed out of their job. But this is a horrible culture because we won't learn anything by publishing the same dogma over and over.

Even if you are 100% convinced climate change is happening (as most of us are), funding people who are trying to disprove it is a necessary and useful function of science.

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Every one in academia working towards proving that climate change is real is also working towards proving it's not real.

In fact, if you go into it with a pre-conceived bias that disagrees with everything everybody else has seen, you'll be laughed out of it. You should be laughed out of it too if your bias aligned with what everybody else has seen.

Agree in theory, but alas, not in practice. Nobody's going to get funding for disproving/attacking climate theories.

But everyone is getting funding for collecting new and looking at existing data and thinking of new ways to validate that our climate models can be trusted. If they happen to find evidence that disagrees with the established theory they're in great luck because surprising results get published whereas confirming what we know lands in third tier journals.

Just having the mindset of "we need to validate this" isn't enough. Having the mindset of trying to disprove a theory encourages people to look in new areas. Diversity of thought is important because a monoculture stalls innovation and creativity.

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