Should more money be invested into skeptic-warmie-collaboration research on cloud feedback and deep ocean?

Question

To remove as much uncertainties as possible, should skeptical scientists who say 'less warming', because no one has yet quantified some important uncertainties, start collaborating with warmie scientists who say 'more warming', for the same reason that skeptics says less?

Rules: Be polite + Keep your answers as consise as possible + DO NOT start ranting at each other!
If you absolutely must use link, it must be pertinent and only one, post it in appropriate boxie.

Answer 1

I don't see any particular virtue in this. If people want to collaborate, they should do that. Grant proposals should be decided on the merit of their research and the capability of them being successfully carried out by the investigators, not by researcher biases.

Answer 2

There’s a weird and wonderful myth that climate scientists are either for or against the theory of climate change, this could hardly be further from the truth.



What we do is to conduct the research, analyse the results and see what conclusions (if any) can be drawn. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t and if the outcome suggests there is or isn’t warming then so be it.



It shouldn’t matter if the team consists of skeptics or warmies provided they’re honest and objective. You could have a team of skeptics and a team of warmies conducting identical studies and the results should be exactly the same.



Science isn’t about proving a point or taking sides. Science is, as the OED nicely puts it, “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment”.



I’ve worked with people on both ‘sides’ of the debate and at no time has anyone, from either side, attempted to introduce bias or skew an outcome as far as I’m aware. What tends to happen is that someone may be more or less willing to accept the outcome based on their stance on global warming, but the outcome itself is unchanged.



Another thing that many people probably aren’t aware of, climate scientists want to hear from those with different viewpoints, we go out of our way to encourage it. Although only 2 to 3% of climate scientists are skeptical that humans are affecting the climate, we (that is myself and those I work with) probably spend 10% of the time consulting with genuine skeptics. They introduce different perspectives and can provide valuable insight, which is how science advances. If scientists only set out to prove what was already known then no advances would ever be made, in anything.



Should more money be invested in skeptic-warmie collaboration? No.



Should more money be invested in research on cloud feedback and deep ocean? Yes.

Answer 3

Here are my quick thoughts on this. If the science is settled, then climate research funding should be scaled way back. Perhaps it (the research reduction money) could even pay for the proposed climate policies. Wouldn't that be great?



This fits well with Keven Trenberth's recent proposal to reverse the null hypothesis and declare man made CO2 warming as the default which must be falsified. I actually don't mind that approach because then all of the climate research would go into funding scientists who would be trying to show that CO2 is NOT the main cause of warming (perhaps taking the stress off oil companies now doing this with the added benefit that gas prices could go down).



Although, I'm not sure what all the consensus scientists would be doing. Maybe they could retire or find a new line of work.

Answer 4

The great thing about science is that it works much like the free market. Scientists who are capable of capitalizing on a segment of knowledge previously unexplored often find themselves in a position to publish great findings. There is an incentive to do such research.



I'm not a climate scientist or even remotely versed in the directions of climate research but if I had to guess the reason that such work has not yet been done would be (1) the technology does not exist to accurately measure (2) sufficient historical data sets do not exists or (3) it has been deemed as unimportant (not to say that it actually is).



As far as collaborations go, no I don't think there is any great need to force these kind of interactions into a already emotionally charged debate. In this light I agree with Pegminer. Much to the chagrin of many skeptics, grant funding is doled out based on the strength of the proposal, not on some archaic, Skull-and-crossbones type brotherhood/relationships. If the need to quantify and validate such parameters is deemed important by the funding agencies than a skeptic should capitalize off of this opportunity and seize grant money to investigate their hypotheses.



Otherwise the free market of grant funding would be interfered with by government...

Answer 5

People who are actually doing research don't conform with your dichotomy. The idea is to measure what you are interested in as accurately as possible and to characterize your errors as carefully as you can. An ideal is Keeling's work that has resulted in the "Keeling curve." This is still held up and taught as THE standard for meticulous experimentation. Scientists looking at cloud and deep ocean phenomena need most often to collaborate with engineers so as to get instrumentation that delivers more and better data. That's what you use to quantify those important uncertainties. The people who say more or less warming have to make their explanations conform to the observations.



An easier place than climate research to look at the differences between experimental scientists, theorists, and engineers is high-energy physics. The guys who built CERN were technicians, working to designs by engineers who collaborated with experimental scientists who had operated similar instruments in the past. The experimental scientists collaborated with theorists who explained what area of interactions they were interested in. The data is collected by experimental scientists, the theorists then jack their theories around so as to agree with what is actually observed.

Answer 6

'Skeptic-warmie' collaboration already takes place in climate science.



Contrary to what many claim and endlessly repeat, a very important part of the scientific process itself consists of taking other researchers' data, papers and predictions with a grain of salt and trying to find an error in it. If an error is found then the data, paper or prediction will most likely not form part of the scientific literature on the subject. Papers are never taken for granted just because 'climatologist X' wrote it.



That said, the climate scientists who actually call them self 'climate skeptics' are really less than 20 or so world-wide and their claims against 'climate change' vary greatly from 'it has not warmed at all' to 'CO2 is not so bad'. Their claims have already been dealt with extensively within the climate science community where numerous errors have been found in the data, research and papers presented by these 'skeptics'. The problem is that those disproven papers and research keep popping up, thanks in a large part to fake grassroot organizations often funded by big oil/big coal.

Answer 7

The existing scientific consensus on global warming is undeniably centrally based on more than a century of the kind of research-carried-out-by skeptics that this question "proposes," conducted across a vast range of subjects, including, and going way beyond, cloud feedback and deep oceans.

Answer 8

There could be some real benefits from such a collaboration. One thing which would be required would be two or more scientists who do not take their differences personally.



Peter







Bio-fuel is neither the only solution to global warming nor does it have to come from fuel. How about helping people who can't afford food because of drought.

Answer 9

Affirmative action for "skeptics". Will the "skeptics" self-identify in the same manner that visible minorities are asked to self-identify so that they can be singled out for special treatment? Will the same criteria be used to evaluate the qualifications of the researchers? If the same criteria are used to evaluate qualifications, how do you place the 1% or 2% of "skeptics? Most collaborations have only two or three partners. Do you run 30 studies and include a token "skeptic" in one of them or insist on unmanageably large teams? If merit is not the sole criteria for awarding research grants, there will be an incentive for weakly qualified candidates to take the minority "skeptic" position.



Aside from problems with the practicality of the scheme, there is a deeper problem. Researchers need to derive their conclusions from their observations rather than preconceived notions. The premise of the question is that the researchers have preconceptions.

Answer 10

The merit of the studies, what a ******* joke, who decided the merit of this study pegiminer?



http://dailycaller.com/2011/07/18/feds-pay-for-study-of-gay-men%E2%80%99s-penis-sizes/

Answer 11

Wow, I agree with pegminer and ****** on this one. The studies should stand on their own merit.

Answer 12

No. There is to much fraud in the climate research. It's no longer science. All money should be cut off and used for better things. Like helping to feed people that can no longer afford food because of the higher food prices caused by environmentalist pushing for the use of bio-fuel(which are made from food like corn).