But, if the Communist Party had an official policy on genetics, this fact might reflect on his motivations and biases. Surely, a known or possible bias in a scientist isn’t completely irrelevant. Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” graph can’t be reproduced from his published data, for example — there has to be an element of trust involved, which immediately makes evidence of personal bias relevant in evaluating his work.

Perhaps in a world of “perfect information”, ad hominem is not relevant, as the work can stand by itself: But, in a world where trust is necessary, evidence of bias (and personal character) becomes relevant in determining how much trust is warrented.

So: is it really “Ad Hominem” to claim that many AGW activists are communists and socialists, when they really are? Many of these folks (who used to, in fact, work against global trade and capitalism for the Socialist and Communist parties) have now adopted AGW as the most likely method to install massive government control and a socialist state. It’s not much of a stretch to think that their main motivation may not be future climate.

It’s also clear (to anyone who has worked on grant money) that many of the AGW scientists are trying to grab a portion of the $5B grant stream (which dwarfs the moneys available from the energy industry). The resulting distortion of science and interaction with political policy is pretty close to what Eisenhower warned about in his farewell speech — No, not the “industrial-military complex”, but the “scientific-technologial elite”.

jb

jb

It seems like there are two somewhat different arguments about areas where bias is claimed:
- What we should believe about the future and
- What policies we should adopt given our beliefs about the future

Regarding what we should believe, there seem to be arguments about biases in modeling, biases about how much to trust the models, and biases about how to respond to uncertainty in our modeling.

Absent evidence to the contrary, these questions seem to be a domain of normal scientific debate. I have seen just such debates and they have converged in the normal scientific way (for example resolving the disparities between ground and satellite temperature data).

The fact that after approximate convergence on a normal scientific consensus, the domain remains fraught with a lot of accusations of bias is unusual. Why would people who still disagree in this area argue based on claims of bias, rather than developing models that demonstrate the validity of their own positions, showing things about the distribution of possible outcomes given uncertainty, etc.?

I’m inclined to agree with Stuart Armstrong, but in any case I think we should all agree that this is an interesting phenomenon that needs to be explained. If others have evidence for other explanations I’d like to hear it.

The issue of policy biases is inherently murkier, because choices of policies are always murkier in our sub-lunary condition.

While policy preferences could legitimately drive funding for scientific investigations, they cannot legitimately drive judgments of scientific bias.

If there are strong correlations between policy preferences and accusations of bias, as I suspect, then that would be evidence as to why those accusations are made, and more generally why the scientific discussion is unusually prone to public debates about bias.