The number of people researching the tooth fairy is likely quite small, but I think we can assume a high percentage–something close to 100%–think she is real. Otherwise, why do the work? Why go on snark hunts if you don’t believe in snarks?
If you want to work in “climate science” there is one Big Boy in town, and you either agree with him, or you don’t work. Very simple.
And moving farther upstream, everyone knows this. You don’t go into “climate science” in the first place if you don’t already think it is actually science, and not an abusive farce, which is what I think it is.
So we can assume with considerable confidence that 98%+ of the people ENTERING the field of “climate science” START as true believers.
And actually, researching this, the story is even worse: http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2012/07/17/that-scientific-global-warming-consensus-not/
Since 1998, more than 31,000 American scientists from diverse climate-related disciplines, including more than 9,000 with Ph.D.s, have signed a public petition announcing their belief that “…there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” Included are atmospheric physicists, botanists, geologists, oceanographers, and meteorologists.
So where did that famous “consensus” claim that “98% of all scientists believe in global warming” come from? It originated from an endlessly reported 2009 American Geophysical Union (AGU) survey consisting of an intentionally brief two-minute, two question online survey sent to 10,257 earth scientists by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Of the about 3.000 who responded, 82% answered “yes” to the second question, which like the first, most people I know would also have agreed with.
Then of those, only a small subset, just 77 who had been successful in getting more than half of their papers recently accepted by peer-reviewed climate science journals, were considered in their survey statistic. That “98% all scientists” referred to a laughably puny number of 75 of those 77 who answered “yes”.
But the fact remains that we just had a record cold winter, that the maximum ice extent on both poles has grown over the past few years, and that cold and hot are two different things.
The most pernicious element of modern education is teaching obedience to authority. Even people who think they are anti-authoritarian will abandon all reason if the right person is speaking.
The locus of perception is the individual. It cannot be otherwise. Some individuals have more “knowledge” than others, but if they are unable to treat it dispassionately and with the skillful application of critical reason, they can be taught to “know” countless things that just aren’t so, to paraphrase Reagan.
And to buy into any cult is to abdicate the personal responsibility we all have, in my view, to engage with the world as sovereign and interesting individuals. Sovereign::interesting as conformist:: dull.
And counter-cultural cults are still cults. This should be obvious, but it seemingly isn’t.