Science at a Crossroads

In a hyperlink in my recent blog post on genetics, I found this poignant quote:

[John Ioannidis, a Stanford professor] argued that scientists, motivated by the pressures to publish and entangled in a web of conflicts of interest, manipulate data so often that it’s impossible to trust the body of scientific literature …

Professor Ioannidis was talking about biomedical research, but, as we have repeatedly seen, I doubt if any body of current scientific research is immune from the intoxicating draw of money and notoriety ... including climate science.

Paradoxically, global warming deniers have fewer of these same motivations (oil companies cannot be generously paying off as many of them as governments are their counterparts) and, therefore I believe, their scientific conclusions can be a little more trusted.

Afterthought: And deniers seldom achieve notoriety ... and are usually vilified by the likes of our president and the media ... scant motivation to make things up.