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Apostastrophe t1_ixxq0p5 wrote

As a medical professional and someone trained in the scientific method I actually find this concept rather distressing and have considered it before.

Like say we have X issue and there are grants to do scientific studies on it but 99% of the money is there to do studies proving X angle and only 1% of the money is there to just to consider Y angle, you’re going to end up with an information bias. I don’t want to get into controversies but I’ve seen this sort of thing happen within other scientific fields and it concerns me greatly. To clarify, I am 100% believing of anthropogenic climate change phenomenon, BUT there is now a huge amount of money there specifically to study how almost anything is caused by climate change and very little about things that are not and I have a friend who did a type of geography postgrad who pointed out that some of them are basically just mindlessly choosing such funding for research trying to find stuff that might’ve been affected by it as its always there and other areas aren’t to get money for their research and postgrad studying. I won’t insult them by saying that they’re deliberately fudging data (I would never know though) but when you overwhelmingly fund for one particular type of evidence you’re only really going to have that type of evidence if that makes sense.

Clarifying again. I Do believe in fairies climate change I do I do I do. I just query the way a lot of the funding is managed and how it’s affecting science.

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Still_Ad4634 t1_ixym5aj wrote

Fortunately, this isn't true - because oil companies drop frankly huge sums into funding research into climate change to the point where there's been attempts to put together a research group (Fossil Free Rearch) in order to operate without the influence of funding from sources that are heavily biased against results that show fossil fuel impact on climate change.

We have a history of fossil fuel companies doing the research themselves - including as far back as 1971 (Total, scientific article for internal corporate magazine) - proving their direct detrimental impact, and then hiding the results from the wider world. Exxon had a secret climate research program that even the wider oil industry didn't know about until 1984, which predicted that fossil fuel controls were going to be needed and determined that an international response from IPIECA would be needed to keep fossil fuels top of the heap.

tldr; The companies most invested in finding that fossil fuels and related issues (runoff, byproducts) are not affecting climate change are funding huge amounts of research and are /still/ finding the same results, to the point where the risk is that we are underestimating the issue - not overestimating.

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SnooConfections6085 t1_ixyyc0b wrote

You don't need to be scientist to know that we used to drive cars on the lake to go ice fishing as a kid, nowadays that same lake hasn't been driven on it in the winter in years, the ice doesnt get nearly as thick as it used to.

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