In one sentence, then in the next: "since Mann sought to produce that signal anyway, he stopped when he had produced it,"
Yes, and as I explained: that's not fraud. Fraud involves an element of intent, but Mann probably simply didn't know what he was doing so he thought this was OK. As I also explained, stopping when you get the results that you want is common in the sciences; it's a form of publication bias.
All of this is a huge problem in the sciences in general and why it takes a long time until we an trust scientific results in any field.
In one sentence, then in the next: since Mann sought to produce that signal anyway, he stopped when he had produced it,
Look, you obviously don't know much about science, so your "accusations" amount to nothing.
Gotcha, but we've only known about the greenhouse effect since the 1800's, so that's clearly not a mature science.
If you believe demonstration of the greenhouse effect is sufficient to justify and prove the predictions of the IPCC report and scientists working on climate change, you really are completely ignorant of the subject.
Well one of us is. Here is what you said: "Mann's data can be fraudulent without being wrong. That is, he may have deliberately manipulated the data..." and: "You can try how far 'I committed a crime, but nobody ended up getting hurt' will get you when you get dragged into court." and "they just 'tortured the data' until they got what they wanted." Is that in any way consistent with "I have repeatedly stated that I'm not accusing Mann of fraud"?
Yes. I pointed out that Mann could have committed fraud even though his results were correct. I didn't accuse him of having committed fraud. Nobody knows whether he committed fraud or not. What we do know is that his analysis was wrong.
Torturing the data until they got what they wanted is not considered scientific fraud; people rationalize it as trying different statistical methods and cleaning up the data. And Mann did that.
And now you are saying that Mann didn't use the best technique but got the right answer - either because his technique was 'good enough', or because the hockey stick is so inherent in the underlying data that you would get the same result no matter how you combined the proxies.
Yes, the recent temperature rise is a strong signal that probably would have survived a lot of bad analyses. But since Mann sought to produce that signal anyway, he stopped when he had produced it, in the process producing a graph that was otherwise wrong.
The point is that Steyn's accusation against Mann is justified, and the whole thing calls into question the competency of the climate research community. The fact that this kind of analysis was allowed to stand and people still keep defending his paper means that I trust very little that that community has produced.
And how do you become a famous scientist for conforming to the scientific consensus?
There are many ways of becoming a famous scientists while conforming to the scientific consensus: you publish huge numbers of incremental papers (with your graduate students), you give flashy demos and have a good PR department, you develop new tools and methods, you become leader of a big scientific consortium, and you become involved in lots of grant committees. Most of those require working within the scientific consensus.
Furthermore, most scientists these days are concerned not primarily with fame, but with getting an academic position, then tenure and grants. By the time they actually have the freedom to challenge the consensus, most of them are burned out or have too much invested in the consensus themselves.
Without showing that light can be bent by gravity, Einstein would have just been some schmuck we've never heard of. He gained a hell of a lot from his fame after that work.
The question is not whether many famous scientists overturned the consensus, but whether attempting to overturn the consensus is a viable career choice for scientists, and it's not.
The reason science moves forward at all, and I think you can agree with me that it has, is because scientists challenge the scientific consensus.
Of course that's true in the long term. But it took 200 years from Newton to Einstein, and that's a comparatively simple problem with a simple and clear mathematical answer and simple experimental tests that any physicist can understand and that are completely convincing. It requires a special set of circumstances for people to be able to challenge the consensus (in the case of Einstein, he was a patent clerk with nothing to lose). And it probably requires the death of the people who were invested in the old theory; as Planck put it "Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out." That's why we say that theories have to "stand the test of time".
Climate change activists are arguing that we should believe "the consensus" because nobody has overturned it and because there would be ample reward for overturning it. But serious research into climate change is only a decade or two old, and it simply hasn't "stood the test of time" yet. So, we shouldn't base serious policy decisions on it yet.
So Mann didn't do the statistics one way means he fraudulently manipulated the data
Are you dumb or something? I have repeatedly stated that I'm not accusing Mann of fraud, I'm accusing him of incompetence. And that was established by the Royal Commission (picking the wrong statistical analysis methods in such an important paper is incompetent).
You seem to be using the same flawed approach that creationists use. Only cite whatever little proof you have that backs your side and ignore the large body of work that contradicts you
My "side" is that AGW research is interesting and plausible, but that it isn't mature enough to base global economic policy on it; no scientific field is after only a few decades. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is backed up by more than a century of research.
but no one could figure what was wrong with the calculations that predicted the neutrinos. No one, however, called Davis incompetent.
Davis' results contradicted predictions, but presumably his methods were found to be correct. Mann is the opposite case: his results agree with prediction, but his methods were found to be incorrect. That's what makes Davis competent and Mann incompetent.
According to you Mann and many countless others deliberately changed data and somehow got the right results that were later supported by other research.
I'm saying exactly what the experts who looked at his research are saying:
The 'hockey stick' that became emblematic of the threat posed by climate change exaggerated the rise in temperature because it was created using 'inappropriate' methods, according to the head of the Royal Statistical Society.... However the review, led by Lord Oxburgh into the research carried out by the centre, found no evidence of ''deliberate scientific malpractice".
Mann was not qualified or capable of performing the statistical analyses he did. The analysis he did was objectively wrong. And the resulting graph he got was quantitatively wrong. The only thing that was right about it was the qualitative behavior in the part of the graph used to justify political action against AGW; that is not a vindication of his work or methods.
The issue here (as with much of climate science) is one of lack of competence and publication bias, not deliberate scientific fraud. You ridicule people for supposedly alleging deliberate fraud by climate researchers, but that's a straw man. I am sure there is fairly little deliberate fraud in global warming research; I'm also sure that poor use of statistical methods and publication bias make most of the published results on global warming worthless.
I'm sure because that's the same in most scientific fields. Usually, these problems work themselves out over the next few decades. For climate science, however, politicians and activists want to rush into action based on results that are only a few years old, and that's a serious problem.
Mann and his co-authors were too incompetent to know "what result they would get anyway", they just "tortured the data" until they got what they wanted.
You know, like the Spanish Inquisition stopped torturing people when they confessed to having had congress with the devil.
I know it's a hard concept to grasp, but you'll get it eventually. Unfortunately, Mann probably still isn't a good statistician.
It doesn't matter that much if people are confused about the origin of species. It matters a great deal more if they are confused about the origin of wealth, and unfortunately thousands of tax payer funded schools teach the equivalent of economic creationism.
Yeah. Overturning the Newtonian consensus really screwed up Einstein's career.
He got the Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect and initially became famous for other papers. For decades, many people didn't believe in relativity and considered his papers in that area weird and eccentric, and most didn't understand them. If relativity was all he had done, he probably would have been working at the Swiss patent office until his death.
What!?!? Your assertion is completely absurd. Every famous scientist is famous precisely because they proved the standard consensus to be wrong.
You're confusing the probability of having upset the consensus given that someone is famous with the probability of achieving fame given that you are trying to upset the consensus. The fact that a lot of famous and wealthy people are actors and basketball players doesn't mean that choosing acting and basketball as careers is going to make you rich and famous.
Also, fame for upsetting the consensus is often only achieved after they are dead, and they may have paid a big price during their lifetimes. Galileo was subjected to the Holy Inquisition. Einstein didn't receive the Nobel prize for relativity but the photoelectric effect. Darwin was famous long before The Origin of Species, and others with similar theories had simply been ignored. Etc.
If you want a low probability of great posthumous fame (i.e. a lottery ticket), try to upset the consensus. If you want a safe, productive scientific career, don't.
The reason I "hate" the Baggers is because they are ignorant anarchists.
Stereotype much?
Without a broadly accepted social structure for regulating the distribution of resources, economy is simply not possible and all men become prey to whoever moves among them. The Baggers simply do not understand this
What you are saying is that you are a democratic socialist (I don't mean that as an insult, simply as a statement of fact), and you "hate" people who believe that fair allocation of resources requires a free market.
And as much as many deny it, the Baggers represent more than fiscal conservatism. It is their "extremism" which has pushed the country to the brink time and again,
No, what's pushing the country to the brink is for government to attempt "regulating the distribution of resources".
But they don't want a solution, they want a broken government
They don't want "broken government", they want small government, there is a difference. They want a strong judiciary, police, and defense. They do not want government to "regulate the distribution of resources" because they consider it harmful and unfair.
It is your mistake to assume that "redistribution of resources" is a function of government and that government that doesn't do that is "broken".
"But Michael, we get the same answer even if you don't torture the data!"
Mann didn't know what kind of result he'd get; he just wasn't a very good statistician. He fiddled with the data in inappropriate ways until it showed what he thought it should show and then published. By "torturing the data", Mann managed to produce the feature he cared about and that he intuitively felt should be there, the recent rapid temperature rise, but other parts of his graph seem to be wrong.
It happens a lot in the sciences: a combination of poor skills in data analysis and publication bias. Usually, other scientists just look at the paper, look at the methodology, roll their eyes, and ignore it. The difference in climate science is that politicians take it seriously and are using it to justify huge tax increases and spending programs.
This triple package theory does not explain why, despite being endowed with the triple package in the dyed in wool pristine form, India and Nigeria are so corrupt and so mired in poverty.
I think it explains it quite well: the attitudes of the "triple package theory" are produced when a particular subgroup of people emigrates to the US. When they stay at home, they don't feel like they have to prove themselves. I think the article pretty much says as much. I don't see a contradiction.
According to a July Pew Research survey, Tea Party Republicans make up nearly half (49 percent) of the Republican primary electorate and fully 37 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaners.
I.e., people who identify as Tea Party are only half of the Republican constituency, they are not identical with it. At the level of congressional representatives, they are even further underrepresented, because they haven't had time to kick out the senile GOP representatives in office for decades.
And that's what we were talking about originally: is the Tea Party only a way of GOP representatives to rebrand themselves. It clearly is not. Many GOP representatives feel threatened by the Tea Party and Tea Party candidates.
As an aside, the quality of your news sources is rather low; all three sources you cite have a strong political bias towards Democrats, and the three pieces you cite are anything but impartial journalism.
The Tea Party as a movement has largely been destroyed by Republican and Democratic old boys. However, the ideas and political program, namely limited government, low taxes, and spending cuts will not go away, much as you may want them to. Obama's presidency has been such a failure that I think Democrats and progressives are going to be in deep trouble in 2016.
People get funding to do things that might produce new results that change previous understanding ("test or challenge").
Precisely. And that means that they don't get funding for experiments that they expect to produce the same results previous researchers have found. Therefore, if an erroneous or fraudulent research result sounds plausible and conforms to current theories, people will not apply for funding to test it. You keep proving my point.
I know the need for repeated replication of experiments without the expectation of getting new results must be hard for an experimental particle physicist to understand, given how simple the systems you deal with are, but in other disciplines it is absolutely necessary.
Look, don't try to weasel out. You yourself said that "replication of results in many fields suffers because nobody is interested in just 'confirming the consensus.'" Your words.
As for your comments on climate science and what is and isn't a "consensus", you have identified yourself as an experimental particle physicist; you simply aren't qualified to determine this at all.
34% is not "most of" but it is a substantial part of.
I didn't say "most of".
"Most of" tea party supporters indicated a republican and almost all of the tea party leadership is republican.
According to your own data, the majority don't pick Republican politicians as representative of their views.
I have no idea what the 'standard caricature of libertarians by Democrats and US liberals is' so I'll have to take your word for it. I came up with my own opinion after about ten minutes of reading the stance that the libertarian party takes on various issues of the day by reading this:
Well, what can I say: obviously you rush to judgment, and you're politically not very well informed.
indeed, replication of results in many fields suffers because nobody is interested in just "confirming the consensus."
And you just completely agreed with me: people don't write grant proposals to "confirm" (i.e. test or challenge) the consensus, they simply assume that the consensus is true. Thanks for agreeing with me.
To the extent that there is field wide error, such errors (based on historical precedent) are likely to be in the small details rather than the "big picture
Well, you just go on believing that. You asked why people don't believe climate scientists, and I gave you an answer. You can continue to denigrate people like me as "corporate shills", I don't care.
What your responses tell me is that you know next to nothing about the history of science, and your deficiencies in that area are so great that a debate with you about science and society is pointless. And it confirms my views of experimental particle physics again. Thanks.
That should have read "Scientists in any field don't usually get famous by..."
Trying to upset the scientific consensus is a very high risk and very costly strategy for a scientist. Of course, if you succeed, you get rewarded, although you're usually retired or dead by the time people recognize your contribution. Not a good career move.
There are many instances of individual lab / group level fraud in sciences across all fields. However, instances of entire fields committing fraud are unheard of.
No, but there are plenty of instances of entire fields getting it wrong for decades at a time.
who would secure immense fame and funding for themselves by making a breakthrough discovery that contradicts climate science consensus
Scientists in any field don't get famous by showing that the "scientific consensus" is erroneous, they get their grants turned down and their papers rejected. That's why it usually takes decades for major scientific errors to get corrected, and few people have the stomach and stamina to do it.
Career-wise, scientists choose to do experiments that are likely to support the current consensus, and to selectively show only data consistent with the consensus and dismiss data inconsistent with the consensus as experimental error. That's something we observe in many fields, and there is no reason to believe that climate science would be any different. People are slowly coming to realize this, e.g.
then I'm inclined (based on the history of how conspiracies work --- they don't last when too many people are involved) to assume there is vanishingly small chance of field-wide fraud.
I agree: the chance of deliberate field-wide fraud is indeed vanishingly small. The chance of field-wide error persisting for decades and remaining unchallenged, however, is very high, in particular given that "there aren't many climate scientists" and the statistics, computations, and models are highly complex and interdisciplinary.
You can verify climate science claims to the same high-school/college level that you verified all other branches of physics.
No, I cannot. I can verify the existence of the greenhouse effect, but that tells me nothing about AGW, since the greenhouse effect is insufficient to account for AGW.
Furthermore, I can directly observe the impact the results of other branches of physics have on my life: after verifying basic nuclear science, I can visit nuclear reactors and see the remnants of atomic bomb blasts. I can buy and use devices from numerous vendors based on quantum mechanical effects that I couldn't reproduce myself. Therefore, I can experimentally verify a lot of things that go far beyond what I can do in a high school lab, using lots of different sources.
You probably haven't personally worked on squeezed light states or quantum entanglement or production of exotic particles in TeV-scale supercollider experiments; do you assume the scientists doing these are frauds pulling the wool over your eyes?
I suspect a lot of those results are probably wrong. But those people aren't asking for radical changes to our global economic system based on their results, so I frankly don't care.
So, why do you assume that somewhere along the way (at the levels too complex for an Excel spreadsheet) the system suddenly turns fraudulent? Just because paid industry shills have told you so?
I have worked in three different areas of science and engineering. Bias, error, and fraud were widespread in all three of them. Therefore, it is reasonable for me to assume that they are widespread in climate science as well.
Why do you assume that climate scientists are any less prone to fraud, bias, and error than other scientific fields?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and as I explained: that's not fraud. Fraud involves an element of intent, but Mann probably simply didn't know what he was doing so he thought this was OK. As I also explained, stopping when you get the results that you want is common in the sciences; it's a form of publication bias.
All of this is a huge problem in the sciences in general and why it takes a long time until we an trust scientific results in any field.
Look, you obviously don't know much about science, so your "accusations" amount to nothing.
If you believe demonstration of the greenhouse effect is sufficient to justify and prove the predictions of the IPCC report and scientists working on climate change, you really are completely ignorant of the subject.
Yes. I pointed out that Mann could have committed fraud even though his results were correct. I didn't accuse him of having committed fraud. Nobody knows whether he committed fraud or not. What we do know is that his analysis was wrong.
Torturing the data until they got what they wanted is not considered scientific fraud; people rationalize it as trying different statistical methods and cleaning up the data. And Mann did that.
Yes, the recent temperature rise is a strong signal that probably would have survived a lot of bad analyses. But since Mann sought to produce that signal anyway, he stopped when he had produced it, in the process producing a graph that was otherwise wrong.
The point is that Steyn's accusation against Mann is justified, and the whole thing calls into question the competency of the climate research community. The fact that this kind of analysis was allowed to stand and people still keep defending his paper means that I trust very little that that community has produced.
There are many ways of becoming a famous scientists while conforming to the scientific consensus: you publish huge numbers of incremental papers (with your graduate students), you give flashy demos and have a good PR department, you develop new tools and methods, you become leader of a big scientific consortium, and you become involved in lots of grant committees. Most of those require working within the scientific consensus.
Furthermore, most scientists these days are concerned not primarily with fame, but with getting an academic position, then tenure and grants. By the time they actually have the freedom to challenge the consensus, most of them are burned out or have too much invested in the consensus themselves.
The question is not whether many famous scientists overturned the consensus, but whether attempting to overturn the consensus is a viable career choice for scientists, and it's not.
Of course that's true in the long term. But it took 200 years from Newton to Einstein, and that's a comparatively simple problem with a simple and clear mathematical answer and simple experimental tests that any physicist can understand and that are completely convincing. It requires a special set of circumstances for people to be able to challenge the consensus (in the case of Einstein, he was a patent clerk with nothing to lose). And it probably requires the death of the people who were invested in the old theory; as Planck put it "Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out." That's why we say that theories have to "stand the test of time".
Climate change activists are arguing that we should believe "the consensus" because nobody has overturned it and because there would be ample reward for overturning it. But serious research into climate change is only a decade or two old, and it simply hasn't "stood the test of time" yet. So, we shouldn't base serious policy decisions on it yet.
Are you dumb or something? I have repeatedly stated that I'm not accusing Mann of fraud, I'm accusing him of incompetence. And that was established by the Royal Commission (picking the wrong statistical analysis methods in such an important paper is incompetent).
My "side" is that AGW research is interesting and plausible, but that it isn't mature enough to base global economic policy on it; no scientific field is after only a few decades. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is backed up by more than a century of research.
Davis' results contradicted predictions, but presumably his methods were found to be correct. Mann is the opposite case: his results agree with prediction, but his methods were found to be incorrect. That's what makes Davis competent and Mann incompetent.
I'm saying exactly what the experts who looked at his research are saying:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ear...
Mann was not qualified or capable of performing the statistical analyses he did. The analysis he did was objectively wrong. And the resulting graph he got was quantitatively wrong. The only thing that was right about it was the qualitative behavior in the part of the graph used to justify political action against AGW; that is not a vindication of his work or methods.
The issue here (as with much of climate science) is one of lack of competence and publication bias, not deliberate scientific fraud. You ridicule people for supposedly alleging deliberate fraud by climate researchers, but that's a straw man. I am sure there is fairly little deliberate fraud in global warming research; I'm also sure that poor use of statistical methods and publication bias make most of the published results on global warming worthless.
I'm sure because that's the same in most scientific fields. Usually, these problems work themselves out over the next few decades. For climate science, however, politicians and activists want to rush into action based on results that are only a few years old, and that's a serious problem.
Mann and his co-authors were too incompetent to know "what result they would get anyway", they just "tortured the data" until they got what they wanted.
You know, like the Spanish Inquisition stopped torturing people when they confessed to having had congress with the devil.
I know it's a hard concept to grasp, but you'll get it eventually. Unfortunately, Mann probably still isn't a good statistician.
It doesn't matter that much if people are confused about the origin of species. It matters a great deal more if they are confused about the origin of wealth, and unfortunately thousands of tax payer funded schools teach the equivalent of economic creationism.
Yes. But the example of Nigerian American success shows that inferring racism from disparate impact is invalid.
He got the Nobel prize for the photoelectric effect and initially became famous for other papers. For decades, many people didn't believe in relativity and considered his papers in that area weird and eccentric, and most didn't understand them. If relativity was all he had done, he probably would have been working at the Swiss patent office until his death.
You're confusing the probability of having upset the consensus given that someone is famous with the probability of achieving fame given that you are trying to upset the consensus. The fact that a lot of famous and wealthy people are actors and basketball players doesn't mean that choosing acting and basketball as careers is going to make you rich and famous.
Also, fame for upsetting the consensus is often only achieved after they are dead, and they may have paid a big price during their lifetimes. Galileo was subjected to the Holy Inquisition. Einstein didn't receive the Nobel prize for relativity but the photoelectric effect. Darwin was famous long before The Origin of Species, and others with similar theories had simply been ignored. Etc.
If you want a low probability of great posthumous fame (i.e. a lottery ticket), try to upset the consensus. If you want a safe, productive scientific career, don't.
Stereotype much?
What you are saying is that you are a democratic socialist (I don't mean that as an insult, simply as a statement of fact), and you "hate" people who believe that fair allocation of resources requires a free market.
No, what's pushing the country to the brink is for government to attempt "regulating the distribution of resources".
They don't want "broken government", they want small government, there is a difference. They want a strong judiciary, police, and defense. They do not want government to "regulate the distribution of resources" because they consider it harmful and unfair.
It is your mistake to assume that "redistribution of resources" is a function of government and that government that doesn't do that is "broken".
Mann didn't know what kind of result he'd get; he just wasn't a very good statistician. He fiddled with the data in inappropriate ways until it showed what he thought it should show and then published. By "torturing the data", Mann managed to produce the feature he cared about and that he intuitively felt should be there, the recent rapid temperature rise, but other parts of his graph seem to be wrong.
It happens a lot in the sciences: a combination of poor skills in data analysis and publication bias. Usually, other scientists just look at the paper, look at the methodology, roll their eyes, and ignore it. The difference in climate science is that politicians take it seriously and are using it to justify huge tax increases and spending programs.
I think it explains it quite well: the attitudes of the "triple package theory" are produced when a particular subgroup of people emigrates to the US. When they stay at home, they don't feel like they have to prove themselves. I think the article pretty much says as much. I don't see a contradiction.
Which "racism" would that be? The article explicitly and clearly points out that these traits are not caused by race.
From that article:
I.e., people who identify as Tea Party are only half of the Republican constituency, they are not identical with it. At the level of congressional representatives, they are even further underrepresented, because they haven't had time to kick out the senile GOP representatives in office for decades.
And that's what we were talking about originally: is the Tea Party only a way of GOP representatives to rebrand themselves. It clearly is not. Many GOP representatives feel threatened by the Tea Party and Tea Party candidates.
As an aside, the quality of your news sources is rather low; all three sources you cite have a strong political bias towards Democrats, and the three pieces you cite are anything but impartial journalism.
The Tea Party as a movement has largely been destroyed by Republican and Democratic old boys. However, the ideas and political program, namely limited government, low taxes, and spending cuts will not go away, much as you may want them to. Obama's presidency has been such a failure that I think Democrats and progressives are going to be in deep trouble in 2016.
You can try how far "I committed a crime, but nobody ended up getting hurt" will get you when you get dragged into court.
Precisely. And that means that they don't get funding for experiments that they expect to produce the same results previous researchers have found. Therefore, if an erroneous or fraudulent research result sounds plausible and conforms to current theories, people will not apply for funding to test it. You keep proving my point.
I know the need for repeated replication of experiments without the expectation of getting new results must be hard for an experimental particle physicist to understand, given how simple the systems you deal with are, but in other disciplines it is absolutely necessary.
Look, don't try to weasel out. You yourself said that "replication of results in many fields suffers because nobody is interested in just 'confirming the consensus.'" Your words.
As for your comments on climate science and what is and isn't a "consensus", you have identified yourself as an experimental particle physicist; you simply aren't qualified to determine this at all.
I didn't say "most of".
According to your own data, the majority don't pick Republican politicians as representative of their views.
Well, what can I say: obviously you rush to judgment, and you're politically not very well informed.
And you just completely agreed with me: people don't write grant proposals to "confirm" (i.e. test or challenge) the consensus, they simply assume that the consensus is true. Thanks for agreeing with me.
Well, you just go on believing that. You asked why people don't believe climate scientists, and I gave you an answer. You can continue to denigrate people like me as "corporate shills", I don't care.
What your responses tell me is that you know next to nothing about the history of science, and your deficiencies in that area are so great that a debate with you about science and society is pointless. And it confirms my views of experimental particle physics again. Thanks.
That should have read "Scientists in any field don't usually get famous by..."
Trying to upset the scientific consensus is a very high risk and very costly strategy for a scientist. Of course, if you succeed, you get rewarded, although you're usually retired or dead by the time people recognize your contribution. Not a good career move.
No, but there are plenty of instances of entire fields getting it wrong for decades at a time.
Scientists in any field don't get famous by showing that the "scientific consensus" is erroneous, they get their grants turned down and their papers rejected. That's why it usually takes decades for major scientific errors to get corrected, and few people have the stomach and stamina to do it.
Career-wise, scientists choose to do experiments that are likely to support the current consensus, and to selectively show only data consistent with the consensus and dismiss data inconsistent with the consensus as experimental error. That's something we observe in many fields, and there is no reason to believe that climate science would be any different. People are slowly coming to realize this, e.g.
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/0...
http://www.scilogs.com/next_re...
I agree: the chance of deliberate field-wide fraud is indeed vanishingly small. The chance of field-wide error persisting for decades and remaining unchallenged, however, is very high, in particular given that "there aren't many climate scientists" and the statistics, computations, and models are highly complex and interdisciplinary.
No, I cannot. I can verify the existence of the greenhouse effect, but that tells me nothing about AGW, since the greenhouse effect is insufficient to account for AGW.
Furthermore, I can directly observe the impact the results of other branches of physics have on my life: after verifying basic nuclear science, I can visit nuclear reactors and see the remnants of atomic bomb blasts. I can buy and use devices from numerous vendors based on quantum mechanical effects that I couldn't reproduce myself. Therefore, I can experimentally verify a lot of things that go far beyond what I can do in a high school lab, using lots of different sources.
I suspect a lot of those results are probably wrong. But those people aren't asking for radical changes to our global economic system based on their results, so I frankly don't care.
I have worked in three different areas of science and engineering. Bias, error, and fraud were widespread in all three of them. Therefore, it is reasonable for me to assume that they are widespread in climate science as well.
Why do you assume that climate scientists are any less prone to fraud, bias, and error than other scientific fields?