Matt Ridley, in his "Scientific Heresy" article, postulated that people have a tendency to gravitate toward information and opinions that conform with and confirm their own stance or "bias".
This, he concludes, probably explains the willingness for scientists and the general population to so readily buy into the proposition that global warming is a dire threat to the planet's viability.

Matt Ridley, like the rest of us, doesn't appear immune from gravitation toward information and opinions that confirm his bias.
We all seem to do it.

Your views?

No-one is immune to confirmation bias, which is very evident by the willingness of denialists to jump on anything that puts doubt on the theory, regardless of what the source is.

The peer-review process should act as a mitigator of confirmation bias. Certainly, if there were so many scientists who disagree with the AGW theory, as many denialists claim, the peer-review process would definitely weed out any confirmation bias. However, it seems the scientific literature continuously points in the same direction.

Dear Poirot,

I tend to agree that most people are guilty of some
measure of bias. We all have a tendency, often
unconscious, to interpret things according to our
own values. Therefore the same has to be inevitably
true of scientists, whose outlooks are also
influenced by their background, training, and
prior experiences.

This problem of bias occurs in
all sciences, but it becomes particularly acute in
the social sciences, whose subject matter often
involves issues of deep human and moral concerns.

Total objectivity is probably impossible to achieve
in any science but a self-conscious effort to be as
objective as possible will produce vastly less
biased results than not making this attempt. This of
course does not mean that scientists should not express
personal opinions or value judgements. It means that
these judgements should be clearly labeled as such and
that they should not intrude into the actual process of
research and interpretation.

It would be perfectly
legitimate for a scientist to give as objective an
account as possible of a problem, and then add a subjective
judgement - provided that the judgement was presented as a
matter of personal opinion.

Every one, no exceptions, has biases.
I hope most consider issues from a position of understanding both sides.
But few do so.

Poirot, science has long recognised that people has predispositions, often based on the understandable desire to confirm that what they had inferred from limited data was not contradicted when larger data sets and more sophisticated analyses are available.

That is why the scientific method, with it's demand for falsifiability, has been so successful.

Biases only work for a while before reality interposes its inconvenient corporeum.

Or the Government one relies on for funding proves both incompetent and insubstatial.

Such is life...

Apologies in advance/arrears for the confused tenses...