alt Hacker News> A few years years ago, there was no conceivable profit motive for interfering with weather sensors on public property. Now there is one.
Can this really be said with a straight face?
Suppose you're an oil company, or a trader with a large position, and "hottest year on record ten years in a row" is bad PR that will make bills you don't like more likely to get passed. Or for that matter a company selling carbon capture stuff who wants to make sure it goes the other way. How about tobacco companies?
This has been a huge problem for as long as public data has been used to make decisions affecting profits.
> Your argument is that people had no existing profit motive to use dirty tricks to influence scientific results/data?
No, that's way too broad. I don't believe that, and I didn't write that.
Oil companies indeed had enormous incentives to obscure and confuse the scientific record of climate change. But hiring thousands of Taskrabbits to go around the world blowing hot and/or cold air on weather sensors would not have helped them: some of them would have been caught, and it would've been exposed as a hamfisted and shambolic scandal.
Oil companies had to do larger-scale, longer-term stuff like funding think tanks, lobbying politicians, and writing op-eds.
Now, because of prediction markets, the "attack surface" for interfering with scientific data collection is much larger and more fine-grained. The incentives for big oil companies probably haven't changed much… but now any random amoral idiot or degenerate gambler has an incentive to go find unguarded weather stations or water quality monitors, etc, and mess with them.