'And do they pay more if...'

Well, to be honest I'm not at all clear on whether climate researchers are actually paid more if they claim that the sky is falling. It's not as if good scientists would suddenly be out of a job if global warming turned out to be a hoax. Most climatologists don't even actively work on global warming, because many of the basic questions have already been answered.

Whereas, I'm aware that there actually are scientists paid to express doubt. Some of the worst show up in so called 'libertarian think-tanks' like Cato. Being essentially Libertarian myself, I bought into most of what was said, until I started to read some of the actual papers. It was really really bad. Seriously -- you're technical people, go and read some of this stuff. It's amazing how transparently bad it is.

The statements from 'experts' are then amplified by media echo chambers. This is a well known technique -- you'll see this article, in various forms, swamp the media, and thus, while the majority of scientists think differently, the public perception will be one of confusion and doubt. It's kind of a well known tactic. (a nice book on this is Chomsky's Necessary Illusions.)

To be sure, at one point I was a climate change doubter, and so was a friend of mine. We were both PhD students in Plasma Physics, working on nuclear fusion. So there is clearly some decoupling of political background and belief.

But I did two weeks of research, and pretty thoroughly convinced myself that global warming is humankind's doing -- my friend did the same. I knew about Dr William Gray from before, however. He's moderately famous for starting hurricane season forecasting -- this is kind of barebones statistical work that doesn't have a well developed physics basis but is still quite helpful.

He's done a number of other things too. He attributes a lot of climate change to Thermohaline Circulation, as discussed by RealClimate. You may have been introduced to this effect in the same way I was -- in the public eye it used to get a lot of press, though many of those claims have turned out to be false. I have my suspicions that the reason for the press was that it swept many of the climate change issues neatly under the rug, Dr. Gray has been campaigning for years now.

He's a media darling, for sure. He has a certain type of credibility (though so did Serge Lang when he was saying at HIV didn't cause AIDS), having brought hurricane forecasting to the fore. Yet a lot of the science he represents is just crazy -- like saying "How can we trust climate forecasts 50 and 100 years into the future (that can't be verified in our lifetime) when they are not able to make shorter seasonal or yearly forecasts that could be verified?". I don't see how anyone with a modern training in physical sciences would say such a thing -- there are so many cases where aggregate behavior is more predictable than short term. Given that this was spoken at the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, it strikes me as demagoguery.

One should carefully observe the format of the article as well, in the spirit of Paul Graham's 'The Submarine'. It begins: "ONE of the world's foremost meteorologists has called the theory that helped Al Gore share the Nobel Peace Prize "ridiculous" and the product of "people who don't understand how the atmosphere works"

Now you're drawn to the picture of Al Gore. 1,100,000 pictures via Google, and they decided to pick the one where he looks the weirdest. (here is another example of a fairly transparent smear, using imagery to it's fullest: http://www.nypost.com/seven/04122007/news/regionalnews/attac...)

Then it goes on and on, it cites the statistics regarding Hurricanes, which is his main trick (who said anything about hurricanes? This is Global warming...), and they don't even bother noting that the Associated Press looked asked 100 scientists about Gore's film, and they all said that he basically portrayed the science accurately. They don't say that Dr. Gray has been involved in a decades long continuous debate with mainstream climatology, in which most of his claims were discounted (usually upon the discovery of new evidence). None of that is mentioned, and you don't have to dig too deep to find out about it.

So the article was written with a particular message in mind. Indeed, search the web for, say, "Dr. William Gray Gore" and you'll find clones of practically the same article on a ton of different webpages. Hmm. Starting to look like a PR job, doesn't it?