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Request to Falsify Data Published In Chemistry Journal
New submitter Jim_Austin writes "A note inadvertently left in the 'supplemental information' of a journal article appears to instruct a subordinate scientist to fabricate data. Quoting: 'The first author of the article, "Synthesis, Structure, and Catalytic Studies of Palladium and Platinum Bis-Sulfoxide Complexes," published online ahead of print in the American Chemical Society (ACS) journal Organometallics, is Emma E. Drinkel of the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The online version of the article includes a link to this supporting information file. The bottom of page 12 of the document contains this instruction: "Emma, please insert NMR data here! where are they? and for this compound, just make up an elemental analysis ..." We are making no judgments here. We don't know who wrote this, and some commenters have noted that "just make up" could be an awkward choice of words by a non-native speaker of English who intended to instruct his student to make up a sample and then conduct the elemental analysis. Other commenters aren't buying it.'"
That's true for hard sciences, but not climate science. Emotion and rhetoric play a huge part in that. And you can't repeat the experiment to see if it would have supported the conclusion, you just have to trust the original researcher's models.
What exactly has astrophysics and geophysics predicted accurately?
All three fields of science seem to be more interested in creating a fancy narrative (Big Bang, AWG, Geochronology) but in reality rely on too much indirect evidence.
And since they all rely on indirect evidence, anyone reading through it quickly realize the majority of it is inductive in origin not deductive.
Your order-of-magnitude higher ID than the parent poster suggests an explanation.
Myself, I like Courier. But then, I'm in the lower 10x of that equation.
And please, if you're going to criticize someone's choice of font, take a moment to do it with precision and figure out what the name of the font is.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
It was far more than a "trick on the data" the entire batch of FOIA emails known as climategate shown systemic manipulation of the peer review system, data manipulation and croneyism.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
"And you can't repeat the experiment to see if it would have supported the conclusion, you just have to trust the original researcher's models." as in astrophysics, and yet it is highly predictive since it is based on physics.
Sure, you can. For example, for stellar physics you have something like 100 or more billion stars to study just in our galaxy. That gives you a vast population of objects to study, in various stages of the lifespan of a star and a variety of mass, composition, companion objects, etc. While for climatogy you have one climate with roughly 30 years of good data, another century of so so surface data, and progressively worsening temperature proxy data as you go back further in time.
As to being based on physics, they can't nail the temperature sensitivity of carbon dioxide beyond a factor of two (usual estimate is 2-4 C mean global temperature increase per doubling of CO2 concentration and that might be too high). Sure, it's physics, but it's physics that we don't understand very well.
The 'emotion and rhetoric' comes when some people don't like the consequences of the answers.
Or because actual science isn't being done. Keep in mind that there's a lot of money riding on anthropogenic global warming being a sufficiently urgent threat that governments can be convinced to spend vast amounts of public funds - more than the entire fossil fuels industry takes in as profit. I think that money buys a lot of favorable and biased climatology research.
And there's an interesting example of faulty research which blames the shifting population of a particular butterfly on climate change:
Parmesan tactfully offered lip service to altered landscapes, but stated that her âoeprobabilistic modelâ accurately separated the effects of land use from climate change. To demonstrate her modelâ(TM)s power, she wrote, âoeConsider the case of the silver-spotted skipper butterfly (Hesperia comma) that has expanded its distribution close to its northern boundary in England over the past 20 years. Possible ecological explanations for this expansion are regional warming and changes in land use. Comparing the magnitudes and directions of these two factors suggests that climate change is more likely than land-use change to be the cause of expansion.â That was a very odd claim.
This was the very same Silver-spotted Skipper that Jeremy Thomasâ(TM) detailed studies and subsequent conservation prescriptions had saved from extinction along with the Large Blue. Parmesan was hijacking a conservation success story to spin a tale of climate disruption. Her âoeproofâ that climate change was driving the Silver-spotted Skipper northward came from the work of her old friend C.D. Thomas, known for predicting that rising CO2 levels had committed 60% of the worldâ(TM)s species to extinction.5 Using a mesmerizing statistical model, C.D. Thomas argued that because the Silver-spotted Skipper âoeneeds warmth,â only global warming could account for its recent colonization of a few cooler north-facing slopes of Englandâ(TM)s southern hills.
The Skipper is indeed fond of hotter south-facing slopes. However, the butterfly had historically inhabited cooler northern slopes if those slopes had been grazed. Like the Large Blue, the Skipper had disappeared from both cool north-facing slopes and warm south-facing slopes whenever the turf grew too high.6,7 C.D. Thomasâ(TM) model was statistically significant only if he ignored recent conservation efforts to promote warmer, short-turf habitat. At the end of his paper, relegated to his methods sections, he quietly stated, âoewe assumed that grazing patterns were the same in 1982 as in 2000.â4 Parmesan and C.D. were guilty of grave sins of omission.
As opposed to the nuclear PR and billions in wildfarm PR and rich dudes with land to milk subsidies PR and oh dear my energy bill just shot up. Or maybe the "consumption" is original sin Marxist atheist environmentalist PR? Climate "justice"? People are greedy and consume too much and that's why we need to make them reduce consumption, like how the Catholic Church says people want to fornicate and that's a sin so we should ban contraception? Anyway, it is fun to play with points of view. Try it sometime.