Quote from: Saltzman Alaric on November 20, 2014, 05:42:53 PM

There is no conspiracy by professors to lie to the world about their research.

This is how the university works. The students give money to the university and the university gives money to the professors. Professors don't answer to anybody but the university president and often barely even answer to him/her. Some of these profs are conservative and some of which are liberal, just like the rest of America. (though in academia there is a more of a liberal slant)

If you think the professors are acting out of greed when they publish, you certainly have that part right. The more they publish, the more they get paid. It is that simple. It really doesn't matter what they publish. All they have to do is find facts that others haven't found or at least fake it well enough to fool their peers and they will get extra money. These professors aren't all in a mass conspiracy to hide the truth and in doing so willing to sacrifice their paychecks. They have houses and mortgages and kids too just like everybody else. One friend on mine gets a $10,000 bonus for each good article in a reputable journal he publishes.

This is how it works. They all on an individual level just want to get paid just like the rest of us. And to that extent the academic system while having its many faults is still kind of working to generally discover the truth. The fierce competition among the talent to be the next person with the best truth results in said victor getting paid the most. It is constantly a race to be the next person to add the next fact. And yes, this does lead to lots of individual cases where people lie or in haste make mistakes, but it just doesn't simply result in 97% of the professors lying in a big mass conspiracy in peer reviewed journals.

Just so you know what a peer reviewed journal is, when an article is submitted to a journal, a well respected team of academics in that field all read it and decide whether it has any new contribution. They then have to agree. If it does, it gets published, if it doesn't, then it won't. Now there are lots and lots of conservatives that could have made their own journal and form their own little circle and publish for one and another but this hasn't happened. Why? Because they science just simply isn't there. The only real source of anti-global warming science comes from non-peer reviewed articles, often times funded by big corporations, or by authors with suspicious ties to big corporations.

What a remarkably stunning degree of ignorance, and also an exact match for the message which is hammered home in the various media.

You seem utterly unaware of how grants fund a great deal of academic research (and the funding in the field of 'climate science' is enormous.) You also seem unaware that many professors make a good bit of their income (a majority in some cases) providing services such as being expert witnesses. This is the case with one of my relatives. There is nothing wrong with that, but there could be in some circumstances absent proper procedures including transparency.

I'll bet that you believe that banks take depositor's money and lend it out and that is how they stay in business. Sounds nice and clean, but it is almost completely not true and understanding things on the simple public consumption level leads to a similarly defective understanding of the larger world.

If you are comfortable with your current view of the climate issue I would suggest you NOT dig into the climate-gate material beyond what your favorite sources tell you should think about it. Indeed, you sound like you may be so programmed with 'new science' principles that what us old timer's consider to be fraud is actually just better science performing the greater-good duties that science should perform.