> If you weigh the bad actors and financial incentives of climate change proponents against the bad actors and financial incentives on the fossil fuel side, do you think the scale tips in favour of more honesty for the fossil fuel side or climate change side?
There's no honesty anywhere - or rather, the honest people get squeezed out of the field. Which is why the issue ends up so polarised.
> There's no doubt groupthink happens in academia on many issues, but the need to displace fossil fuels really is very important. Not just for climate change reasons, but overall human health. For instance, air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year.
Changing the subject like this is a huge red flag that you're using motivated reasoning, as you'd probably have noticed yourself if this wasn't such a political issue. It's a very small step from "it's important to displace fossil fuels even if not for the reasons I originally said" to "I'll overstate the effects of climate change to ensure that we abandon fossil fuels as quickly as possible to save thousands of lives", and once you do that all hope of finding the truth lost.
> Well that's an unsupported conjecture that I see no reason to accept.
I base it on having friends who were in the field; of course that won't be particularly convincing to you. (I'm pretty sure others in these comments had examples of people being pushed out for reaching the "wrong" conclusions, but I have to be honest that I'm trusting the people I know personally rather than anything else).
> Where is the motivated reasoning in acknowledging that climate change is not the only reason to replace fossil fuels?
Suggesting that climate change is likely to be true because you have non-climate-change reasons to want to replace fossil fuels is motivated reasoning. The fact that you brought up non-climate-change problems with fossil fuels in a thread about whether climate change is occurring suggests that you're doing it.
> Suggesting that climate change is likely to be true because you have non-climate-change reasons to want to replace fossil fuels is motivated reasoning
Except I didn't do that.
> The fact that you brought up non-climate-change problems with fossil fuels in a thread about whether climate change is occurring suggests that you're doing it.
The thread isn't strictly about whether climate change is real, it was about climate change alarmism, about whether climate change was reducible to a single variable, and whether we should be motivated by the available evidence to make drastic changes to potentially avoid the predicted outcomes. The additional point I made is perfectly in line with that.
I don't know. I believe the most likely outcome is effects that are serious, but significantly less serious than the mainstream consensus claims. I believe the error bars are much wider than anyone admits. I believe the narrow range of countermeasures that it's politically acceptable to move towards implementing are not particularly reasonable and will not be effective.
Off-the-record conversations with (ex-) climate researchers I know personally. Which I don't expect anyone else to find convincing, but there's enough talk going around of researchers who got the "wrong" results getting pushed out that I found what they said more plausible than trusting the big-name journals etc.
There's no honesty anywhere - or rather, the honest people get squeezed out of the field. Which is why the issue ends up so polarised.
> There's no doubt groupthink happens in academia on many issues, but the need to displace fossil fuels really is very important. Not just for climate change reasons, but overall human health. For instance, air pollution from fossil fuels kills tens of thousands of people every year.
Changing the subject like this is a huge red flag that you're using motivated reasoning, as you'd probably have noticed yourself if this wasn't such a political issue. It's a very small step from "it's important to displace fossil fuels even if not for the reasons I originally said" to "I'll overstate the effects of climate change to ensure that we abandon fossil fuels as quickly as possible to save thousands of lives", and once you do that all hope of finding the truth lost.