A global conspiracy of climate scientists?

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Movies and books often get things wrong and completely break my suspension of disbelief. The example of this that always comes to mind was in Dan Brown's book "Angels & Demons." What did it was right near the start when the director of the CERN physics lab is flying around on the lab's private jet. WTF!?!?!? Sure, this was a cool element and kept the story moving, but it is so far from the reality of real scientist's lives I just could not let it slide.

This is not just about my problem with unrealistic depictions of working scientists. This misperception has a real impact on how the public understands scientific results and consensus. As a patriot I care about making sure that our country acts in a way to ensure a thriving future for ourselves, our descendants, and the rest of humanity.

Unfortunately I think that there are a lot of people who actually believe that scientists and other academics live lives of luxury paid for with the largess of special interests. It might help explain the idea of a giant conspiracy of climate change scientists who have formed a cabal to promote this concept. 

American popular culture almost always supports an underdog hero fighting against some evil and oppressive institution. The tiny number of anti-climate change scientists have done an excellent job of adopting that underdog persona. We need to cut through the Hollywood plot and get down to reality.

Scientists doing fundamental research, like on climate change, could easily make far more money if they went to work in industry. They are there because they enjoy the process of discovery and feel that the things we learn are important. Being able to actually show that a major paradigm is wrong can make their career. My experience as an experimental physicist was that we always went in to an experiment expecting to see the predicted and expected result, but we really hoped for something unexpected. These experiments are chosen through a highly competitive proposal process and the results are subjected to peer review before publication. While not a perfect process it is the best methodology we have come up with so far to get to the truth eventually.

Scientists are an individualistic and very diverse group. It is impossible for them to form and maintain an effective conspiracy to fake data and results for years. Any such effort would be easily discovered and debunked. This has not happened.

Most of those arguing aggressively against human caused climate change are funded by the fossil fuel industry. This makes sense, they have a huge vested interest in the outcome of this debate. Their actions are very similar to the tobacco industry when the health effects of smoking were being investigated. The scientists who speak out against climate change, like William Happer are often not active researchers in the field and do not subject their opinions to peer review.

There are two realities about the scientific process: When the vast majority of scientists agree on something they are generally right. Almost every theory will eventually be shown to be wrong, although often very accurate in some particular domain. For example, Einstein revolutionized our understanding of gravity and showed that Newtonian gravity was "wrong", but  we still use the Newtonian equations for most day to day calculations because for human scale objects moving at reasonable speeds they are very accurate.

The climate is incredibly complicated and hard to model. There will and should always be robust debate about theories, models, and implications. Our policy decisions need to be informed by the best information available rather than by who has the best lobbyist or the deepest pockets.

The idea that climate change is a hoax created by a conspiracy of scientists is completely absurd. As a patriot I demand that our government base its decisions and policies on reality rather than special interests.