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Alleging 'Malpractice' With Climate Skeptic Papers, Publisher Kills Journal
sciencehabit writes "A European publisher today terminated a journal edited by climate change skeptics. The journal, Pattern Recognition in Physics, was started less than a year ago. Problems cropped up soon afterward. In July, Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, noted 'serious concerns' with Pattern Recognition in Physics. As he wrote on his blog about open-access publishing, Beall found self-plagiarism in the first paper published by the journal. 'In addition,' says another critic, 'the editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis, which we regard as malpractice in scientific publishing.'"
0/10. Not very original or funny.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
So some scientists wrote a paper that warming isn't going up, easily provable fact, and isn't likely to match IPCC predictions, it never has. Because they pointed out some basic provable facts it had to be ended because they couldn't be countered with "science".
When you can't win the debate with facts, I guess censorship is your next best chance of winning. Yep, science isn't what it used to be.
Curious minds want to know what sort of "self-plagarism" in a journal's content rates shutting the journal down.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Many conservatives are climate-change skeptics. And many engage in lying about scientific fact in order to 'win' their argument. The first is ignorance, but the second -- think about that sentence. How dumb do you have to be to lie about your own safety in catastrophic situation?
Conservatism has become a joke. They are so caught up in the power of lies, that they have left reality behind.
Sea level temp. hash't raised much in recent years because we haven't had an el nino year (a year in which heat from the ocean moves into the atmosphere) in recent years, yet we have managed to get year equal or even slightly surpassing the last el nino year. Arguing global warming has ended because of no el nino years is like arguing global warming has ended because winter has not been any warmer the summer 6 months ago.
there can be no dissenting opinion because the science is SETTLED!
*fist banging*
There is a consensus. Now repeat after me.
There is a consensus.
There is a consensus.
There is a consensus.
Curious minds want to know what sort of "self-plagarism" in a journal's content rates shutting the journal down.
Apparently not curious enough to read the fine article.
The editors of the journal copy-pasted from an earlier work without crediting their earlier coworkers. So "Ouadfeul, Aliouane, Hamoudi, Boudella, and Eladj" became just "Ouadfeul and Aliouane".
http://scholarlyoa.com/2013/07/16/recognizing-a-pattern-of-problems-in-pattern-recognition-in-physics/
Then again, there is Retraction Watch in case deniers just want to claim that the scientists are sitting on their billion dollar yachts sipping their mojitos, and selectively killing only articles about global warming - hey, might as well add creationism while we are into denialism.
http://retractionwatch.com/2014/01/17/climate-skeptic-journal-shuttered-following-malpractice-in-nepotistic-reviewer-selections/
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Full disclosure: I'm one of those 'climate skeptics' that journals are trying to silence. Not that I'm trying to write a paper about it. But the 'debate' about climate change really has started to degenerate into the level of fanaticism in decent years. And this news story is a perfect example of that.
The whole idea of writing a previewed scientific paper is to get your research out there and present it to so that the scientific community as a whole can pick it apart. Call it Darwinian research, if nothing else. And this is done via these journals. But if journals beginning throwing out papers that don't agree with their ideology the entire system starts to go all to shit!
It should not be the job of these editors to weed out dissenting options. What they need to be doing is letting people with 'crazy ideas' embarrasses themselves enough that they go away. If their idea is 'that crazy'.
http://retractionwatch.com/2014/01/17/climate-skeptic-journal-shuttered-following-malpractice-in-nepotistic-reviewer-selections/
Science is easy when you have your mind made up for you by your employer, and only look for the data your employer wants.
Remember, get ALL your science data from politicians. They'd never ever lie. Nor would people who have a monetary interest in disproving something
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There were three *entire* sentences that were self-plagiarized? They shouldn't just kill the journal, but the author himself!
The horror.
But seriously, it seems to me that the librarian-blogger is full of himself, and that the publisher may be hyper-sensitive to any form of criticism (or might have people making decisions whose virtually religious views on the topic of climate change align with the librarian, and this was used as an excuse to smack down the journal). Of course that is just supposition.
This instance of self-plagiarism doesn't exactly seem like it was malicious, I imagine it was an oversight that the journal and author(s) would have no problem correcting.
When the whole point of a journal, though, is to only publish one viewpoint of an issue, it ceases to become an academic journal. Those people publishing can always start their own journal or publish to web sites they own, although neither of those options would carry the credibility of publishing into an academic journal would.
The issue isn't dissent. The issue is malpractice. The authors rehashed their old papers without crediting the old papers' co-authors, and the peer reviewers tampered with the review process to favor their own or colleagues' papers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
That's exactly what they told Galileo.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Not quite. Self-plagiarism is passing off one's own previous work as new work. For example, a college student who reuses a paper from one class to fulfill the requirements of another class. Or, an academic who submits an already published work to another journal.
Even if it was a single author, just copying from an earlier work is enough to be considered self-plagiarism. You must publish original research.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Galileo was a dick to the pope. He put a character with the name "Idiotocrotis" or something like that who used the popes arguments in his book. He actually was friends with the pope previously. No one gave Kepler any problems and he was around at the same time.
Interesting blogs on the history of that:
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html#more
Btw, Stanford has a MOOC titled "Writing in the Sciences", that covers plagiarism and other stuff you should avoid. I highly recommend that course.
`echo $[0x853204FA81]|tr 0-9 ionbsdeaml`@gmail.com
Wow! That means as a software developer, I must self-plagiarize all the time!
Slashdot Valentines Beta Massacre: iT WORKED! The boycotts killed Beta!!
...and David Irving, and Peter Duesberg, and L. Ron Hubbard... Truly they will all be proven right!
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Just like if someone published to continue their career because they just had a kid. They need to publish something and results that go against the status quo or are "negative results" are not "interesting" so they look at stuff enough ways to find something to publish even if they don't believe it. Everyone is biased and has external agendas.
But that doesn't address the other issues. Your world would have the child as part of the peer review group for their parent's papers.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
But evidence that REAL scientists did not all buy into the cultish AGM doomsday thinking could not be allowed to exist.
what is AGM?
What you're missing is that it's evidence that results in changing the accepted scientific view. If you want to claim an accepted scientific view is incorrect, simply show the evidence. A snarky remark just won't cut it. Sorry.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Oh well, guess you can always kill yourself. That solves both problems, right?
But you aren't presenting that reused code as new research advancing the state of the art of the field, right?
Do you have some evidence that journals are trying to silence climate skeptics? Don't journals publish papers from well-known skeptics such as Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer? If there actually was some sort of conspiracy, I think a skeptic that had good evidence would be able to simply put his papers on the web for all to see, yet I never see any posts pointing me to an article such as that.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
No, my world would have science rely on making correct predictions and have competing groups collecting data on the same phenomenon. The LHC teams seem to do the latter, although I am not sure how much competition there really is between the two. It is impossible to get rid of the bias and fraud.
Thank you. I was wondering how the heck you could steal your own writings and pass them off as your own.
Remember, get ALL your science data from politicians. They'd never ever lie. Nor would people who have a monetary interest in disproving something
Lets try flipping that and see how it works.
Remember, many scientists get their funding from politicians. They'd never stretch the truth, nor pervert science according to ideology. Nor would they pursue research out of a monetary interest or exaggerate its importance to keep the money flowing. And if disproving the claim that resulted in receiving most of their funding meant that the funding would then be lost, well then ....
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Apparently you are no scientist or you would know that the point of peer-reviewed journals (not sure what previewed papers are) is to make sure that they are of reasonable quality before they are published. The reviewers, who have experience in the field, review the data collection and analysis techniques used in the paper and look for systemic or logical errors that would lead to incorrect conclusions/reporting. Sometimes the reviewers miss something, limitations of existing equipment and techniques, or an ambiguity in interpretation of the results means further research is indicated, which may invalidate the original paper. The idea is to only waste at most a few people's time (the reviewers') instead of a whole scientific community's, to filter out the the chaff and improve the quality above what would normally found under Sturgeon's Revelation. In theory there's also an earlier filter at the grant submission stage that avoids funding the more obviously flawed proposals, but funding from industry to promote a financially beneficial result bypasses that filter (for prior examples, see research on morbidity caused by tobacco use). Generally climate skeptic papers aren't censored because what they report is unpopular, they are rejected because of blatant or more subtle flaws identified by the reviewers and which the authors are unwilling to correct. Back into the slush pile. Too bad, so sad.
When you have politically/economically sensitive areas, there can be attempts to manipulate the system to promote certain views. It would appear that there were multiple indicators that this was the case with this journal, starting with an editor with strong petroleum industry ties and choices in reviewers that were likely to be one-sided and leading to substandard peer-review.
Many publishers make plenty of money selling subscriptions to journals and collecting publishing fees from researchers. They would prefer to publish journals, so when they discontinue a journal like this it's going to be either
The only censorship here is the same kind as that of people who walk away furtively from the loony or the crooked politician haranguing people from his soapbox in the middle of a park.
Posting as Anonymous because I've already moderated.
Apparently, the journal publishes more than just climate articles.
I was going to point out that I didn't think much of your conclusion that a geophysicist working for a school that specializes in teaching how to drill for oil should necessarily be viewed as acting in strictly political interests. I also thought that you were being disingenuous in not pointing out that there are two geophysicists, the other from Stockholm, who are co-editors.
That was until I realized that I recognized the name of the editor you don't mention: Nils-Axel Morner. Apparently, among his other talents, he douses water. Instead, I'm going to pull an "ad hominem" out of my hat and suggest that we should be skeptical of a journal edited in part by a water-douser.
The idea that there is no money in Global scepticism is simple untrue. First there are plenty of people who will give you money for poor science that supposedly shoes global warming isn't happening. Secondly if you can do real science putting doubt on global warming, thats not going to suddenly kill any need to study climate.
The issue here is that the ideas have been picked apart long ago by the scientific community. But these journals are not meant to address the scientific community. They exist to provide industrial boilerplate as quote fodder for politicians and pundits. The real target is people who don't know any better. Even when the journal has been discredited, they will still quote it, because few people will know that it has been discredited.
A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on. That is the whole point of efforts like these.
What you're missing is that it's evidence that results in changing the accepted scientific view. If you want to claim an accepted scientific view is incorrect, simply show the evidence.
what a load of nonsense.
like like everything else (including religion and politics) it is popularity that results in changing accepted scientific view, mainly because it is popularity that drives scientific funding from governments and educational institutions.
too many scientists rely on the inherent credibility of science to push their own agendas... they come up with a hypothesis and spend a fuckload of taxpayer money trying to prove it and then brag about their nobel prizes and patents whilst the taxpayer who forked out the money for the research in the first place is then forced to pay again to purchase products and services that derive from that research.
science has become as corrupt as any other institution.
Galileo lived in the Papal states, where the Canon law was the effective civil law and the Pope was the temporal king. Kepler lived in the Holy Roman Empire the Duchy of Wurttemberg, where Roman authority was depised. This fact has the most bearing on their disparate treatment.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
It wasn't just self-plagarism, it was also "the editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis, which we regard as malpractice in scientific publishing."
Interesting info, thanks. Do you have a source to recommend on the history of astronomy?
Ass Gushing Madness
if you rtfa, you'll notice that the journal was called "Pattern Recognition in Physics," yet it focused mainly and squarely on arguments against climate change.
If they had instead called it "Pattern Recognition in Historic Climate Patterns," all of us probably would've never heard of this journal.
what has been original in the last 10 yrs?
Round corners on handheld devices, according to Apple.
In case anyone wants to know the full extent of the self-plagiarism, here it is.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
the climate skeptic should just publish on wikipedia instead... they don't allow original research there ;-)
And yet, here you are, of your own free will.
What an odd claim. In the real world, disproving a widely believed theory is a huge success that will make the scientist famous, sell lots of copies of magazines, etc., while doing research that supports what everyone knows doesn't get you much at all. In science, the incentive is _always_ to challenge the status quo. Add in that the oil companies are paying scientists extremely well if they can produce research to disprove global warming, and you'd think that if there was anything to the anti-global-warming theories there would be plenty of proof getting published because people like getting famous and paid well. If, despite all the incentives, there's no credible anti-global-warming research getting published in any scientific journals, that probably means that there's no credible way to support their arguments.
Yes, everyone has biases. That's why the scientific method is designed assuming that everyone has biases, so the truth must be based on facts and on multiple, independent scientists ability to reproduce experiments to validate them. The science doesn't care what your motivations or biases are. And no matter what your biases are, other teams' motivation and bias is to prove that you are wrong. And peer review panels' motivation is to not let any flawed research get published. So everyone's competing agendas end up countering each other, and the truth emerges from that competition, validated as the truth not due to popularity, but due to being able to withstand scrutiny and be validated. In science, popularity doesn't matter, being right matters, and right can be objectively measured.
Pretty much the opposite of politics. Which is probably why politicians can behave in ways that seem so absurd to a scientist, such as by promoting as "truth" something that's clearly not true, but which furthers a personal agenda. Which is effective for politicians, because the truth can't be objectively determined most of the time. But if scientists promote as "truth" something that's clearly not true, but which furthers a personal agenda, someone else comes along, proves that they're right and the first guy is wrong, and the first guy loses and the truth wins. And while individuals are imperfect, the system as a whole works remarkably well, getting us advancing at a remarkable rate scientifically for hundreds of years.
If only someone could work out a system for politics that worked as well...
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Not me: I looked it up just now and Kepler actually did his work in Denmark with Tycho Brahe and in Graz, but he was the official astronomer to the Holy Roman Empire, so tomato/tomahto.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
At first I was "huh? How can you douse water?"
Then I realised you meant *dowse*...
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
If it's not original, it's not research. It might be nice writing, but if you're not moving the state of the art forward, you might as well be in Marketing. :-)
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Then it is ok for me to take this as speculation? If you have good background in history I would like to get your opinion on the series of blogposts I mentioned.
Do you really think the entire field of climatology would collapse if AGW were not a threat? I would also think that if there was some good evidence that AGW is not happening that the researcher who provided the evidence would get lots of fame and funding. If politicians wanted to convince the general populace of something, why would they bother paying thousands of scientists worldwide? I don't think the conspiracy theories fly, especially because it would rely on making sure that none of the thousands in on it would blow the whistle. If AGW isn't happening, then only one person need provide the evidence.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
there can be no dissenting opinion because the science is SETTLED!
Then it isn't real science. Theories are always up for review and revision in the face of new evidence and research.
Yes, there are some people who attempt to re-submit old, refuted work in an attempt to get it into the public record. But others have legitimate complaints in that their original research doesn't get much more that a response of, "Shut up! This has been settled."
Sadly, sometimes one does have to repeat themselves, more slowly and with simpler words to get everyone to understand them.
P.S. I think you forgot your <sarcasm> tags.
Have gnu, will travel.
. . .And I did it twice! :-) Thanks. It's been a long day.
Lets try flipping that and see how it works.
Remember, many scientists get their funding from politicians. They'd never stretch the truth, nor pervert science according to ideology. Nor would they pursue research out of a monetary interest or exaggerate its importance to keep the money flowing. And if disproving the claim that resulted in receiving most of their funding meant that the funding would then be lost, well then ....
Yes. And as humans, scientists are subject to the same shortfalls as the rest of us. It is not common for a scientist to be caught fudging the data, or sometimes total fabrication. Yes, it happens.
But part of the scientific system is to root out any fraud that exists. Professional Librarians take their jobs seriously - it was a librarian who noted the discrepancies involved in this Journal. And self plagiarism and narrow selection of reviewers, as well as heavily vested interests are big red flags.
So the question after turning my argument around, is what are the checks and balances on the people who would determine the truth or lack thereof of a scientific principle based on political motives?
Is there a peer review of politicians who say that Global warming is a hoax?
The same with other "statements ot truth" from politicians - added here not as a false equivalence, but as a political statement that has scientific implications
The world was created by one particular Deity less than 10,000 years ago.
A woman who is legitimately raped has a body function that keeps her from becoming pregnant.
All words from politicians that are a sort of alternative science. One that doesn't seem to have a basis in fact. Or is this just more scientific facts kept from us by those scientists?
I haven't had the chance ot read the papers in question. I'll work at that though. I think that what is needed is instead of the business of what might be called cherry picking, deniers might start out with the premise of why increased percentage of "Greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere does not raise the heat retention of the atmosphere. That would be a good start, and would be the core of any denial of AGW would be a good start. Some solid research that doesn't rely on being employed by a petroleum institute would help also. Solid research, impeccable credentials would be great also.
As for me, I would love for AGW to be false. Let's drill, baby, drill in that case. dig all that coal. Burn that stuff, and away to a glorious future, unfetterd by concerns, Someone without a vested interest in the coal and oil needs to show me that though, because otherwise I'm seeing a money based interest that relies on denial rather than actual research.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's why the scientific method is designed assuming that everyone has biases, so the truth must be based on facts and on multiple, independent scientists ability to reproduce experiments to validate them.
I agree. Unfortunately that does not happen in practice in my field. It is actively discouraged as "uninteresting" because people think a significant p-value means something is true unless they have prior reason to think otherwise. I do not know in the case of climate research, but no longer assume it to be true.
A scientific consensus forms when almost all scientists within a field of study are convinced, based on the strength of the available evidence, that a theory that is within their field of study is correct.
Global Climate Change has become the consensus position of Climatologists the same way that Evolution has become the consensus position of Biologists and the same way that General Relativity has become the consensus position of Physicists.
Warning: This sig is not thread safe. For more information see Slashdot's sig policy.
I said nothing about whether science is or is not corrupt. In either case, when public opinion (or popularity) in science changes, it is due to evidence. Mere innuendo will not change popular opinion -- only solid evidence will do it. It may take some time, as in the cases of tectonic plate theory or H. pylori causing ulcers, but in the end it's the evidence that changed hearts and minds, not mere rhetoric.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Apparently, among his other talents, he douses water. Instead, I'm going to pull an "ad hominem" out of my hat and suggest that we should be skeptical of a journal edited in part by a water-douser.
I didn't mention that - true enough. There are so many red flags on this stuff that it becomes difficult to defend it with a straight face.
If the deniers are going to make any real headway, they are going to have to stop relying on oil company employees and people who might otherwise end up on reality shows right after people who make duck calls or people who cut down trees in swamps. Or have a stock answer of "Ancient Aliens".
As someone who might be sort of in the middle, I would love for the AGW ideas to be disproved. I certainly am not for mountaintopping or running roughshod over th environment, but responsible drilling and mining are okay if they are not making a mess.
I even support Natural gas as a bridge to real sustainable energy. I demand responsible extraction though.
But I'm not political. I've seen enough political dissembling to let me know that I have to be skeptical about everything they say. And I am really, really skeptical about people whose science can be bought.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
That's not how science works. There are "revolutions" in science, disproving consensus, regularly. Because in science, popularity isn't relevant, being provably right is what matters. And, if anything, the incentives are strongly towards disproving what everyone believes, because they guy that pulls that off just proved that he's smarter and more right than everyone else, which gets him published, winning awards, etc. Scientists all need to do original research, since they don't publish the other kind, and disproving what everyone believes is HIGHLY original, while agreeing with what everyone believes is true is only marginally valuable, but isn't going to make anyone famous or rich. So you get some really weird theories (relativity, for example, etc.) that overturn the consensus because they're provably right, and amazingly enough, it's a virtue in a scientist that they change their mind when confronted with evidence that disproves their previous beliefs, and a career-ending failure to not to so. So all of the incentives are to disprove consensus, and then when that's successful for other scientists to take up the newly proven position.
Add to that the oil companies paying researchers tons of money to write anything that "disproves" global warming, and the complete lack of peer-reviewed research that disproves global warming probably means that there's not enough support for that position to stand up to any peer review at all.
Heck a publisher TRIED to run a journal dedicated to anti-global-warning research. The fact that they could only find an oil industry hack, and a bunch of "scientists" who used it as an opportunity to hire their buddies, and writers who tried to pass off old work as "original research" doesn't speak well to to the credibility of the people or the research supporting the anti-global-warming position.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
Yes. Lets try this on for size. We have been coming out of the last ice age for ALL of human history. "An ice age, or more precisely, a glacial age, is a period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Within a long-term ice age, individual pulses of cold climate are termed "glacial periods" (or alternatively "glacials" or "glaciations" or colloquially as "ice age"), and intermittent warm periods are called "interglacials". Glaciologically, ice age implies the presence of extensive ice sheets in the northern and southern hemispheres.[1] By this definition, we are still in the ice age that began 2.6 million years ago at the start of the Pleistocene epoch, because the Greenland, Arctic, and Antarctic ice sheets still exist.[2]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age Once we have said that we know the general slope of temperature has been warmer for a steady 2.6 million years. Yes there is some fluctuation with minor times getting colder or warmer. But global climate not weather over centuries has been warmer and warmer. We know that it will continue in general terms to get warmer than it is currently until there are no glaciers, no sea ice, no ice caps at all. Having said that, and you can check, it's fact. How much would you bet that a trace gas, measured in parts per million, representing 0.04% of the atmosphere and created by humans for perhaps the last 200 years of that 2.6 million years actually has anything at all even slightly to do with why we are coming out of this ice age? If you knew these facts how many scientists would you pay to do research on that trace atmospheric gas and it's affect on long term global climate? Yes climatology would fall apart pretty quickly.
when public opinion (or popularity) in science changes, it is due to evidence
You mean like string theory?
Nope. While you, clearly not understanding science, may not believe it, scientists hold it a virtue to give up positions when they are disproven. So in science, if a popular idea is conclusively disproven, it becomes quite unpopular quite quickly. And this has happened many times in the past. Look, for example, at relativity, which was an "insane" idea when first proposed, but was widely validated by independent researchers, and adopted as the concensus by the scientific community.
When a scientist tries to use their personal agenda using their reputation, what always happens is someone smarter and more right comes along, and being right his research survives peer review and is validated by other researchers, and the guy who was wrong loses. It's happened for centuries. It's not that scientists are angels - the reason the scientific method works is that it assumes that everyone has biases and their own agenda, and the entire system is structured to use people's individual agendas and biases and force them to compete, with whoever's theories are provably correct winning. It's important to understand that, unlike politics, scientific theories can be objectively proven or disproven, by having competing teams try to repeat your research, with strong incentives to prove that you're wrong because they want to beat you. So if your research is right, and nobody can disprove it, your theory wins, and you win. That's happened over and over again for centuries, and it's resulted in constant change in science, as mankind's understanding of the world advances.
Sure, there's corruption. But the scientific method is designed to provide disincentives to corruption, because collectively scientists care about, and reward, truth. For example, if you do flawed research, meaning that your results can't be independently duplicated by others, instead those others come along and disprove your research, and they're rewarded for doing so. If a journal doesn't do proper peer review, then they lose credibility and go out of business. And if an industry (e.g. cigarettes, oil) tries to pay researchers to do corrupt research, they'll find some willing to take the money, but journals have a strong incentive not to publish research that's flawed, because if they publish flawed research they'll lose credibility (which they care quite a bit about), and thus sales. And peer reviewers have a strong incentive not to let flawed research make it past them, because individually they'll lose credibility, and not get paid to do peer reviews in the future. And other scientists have strong incentives to disprove any flawed research that's published, because disproving someone else's research is very impressive. So while the corrupted research may be useful politically (e.g. cigarette companies published lots of quotes from "research" that "proves" that cigarettes didn't cause cancer, letting them sell more cigarettes and give more people cancer for a few more decades), ultimately their research was flawed, often with falsified data, and the authors and journals involved were discredited, while the accurate research survived peer review and other teams' challenges and was proved correct. So the scientific method worked despite all of the money and other incentives that were applied to try to corrupt it.
So no, the scientific method works, and has worked for centuries, and will continue to work as long as scientists are rewarded based on the scientific method.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
I'm sure there's plenty of climatology research to do without considering greenhouse gases at all. It was a serious field of study long before the idea that burning fossil fuels could lead to warming was widely accepted. It's as if you're claiming that astronomy would fall apart if we developed an asteroid shield, or that geology would fall apart if we could stop earthquakes, or that meteorology would fall apart if we could prevent hurricanes.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Mere innuendo will not change popular opinion -- only solid evidence will do it
you're confusing evidence with propaganda
propaganda is almost always the cause of change in popular opinion... ask any military strategist, politician, priest, etc.
he who controls the media, controls the masses
I find it hilarious that you use that argument about consensus when the big subject is cancelling the journal with a non-conforming viewpoint. Just a little bit of self-lickking ice cream cone we have going on there. We need to crush the anti-science anti-vax and anti-GMO crowd in our party before we worry about pointing out how stupid the republitards look.
Yeah, like string theory. Currently, there's no evidence to support string theory, so we don't use it in engineering calculations. We do use Newtonian physics, relativity, and quantum mechanics, because those theories have lots of evidence to support them. Only highly theoretical physicists take string theory seriously (or really consider it at all), and they all realize it could be completely wrong. That's why they're attempting to devise experiments to test it.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Nope. While you, clearly not understanding science, may not believe it, scientists hold it a virtue to give up positions when they are disproven.
Ah, naiveté.
Seriously, scientists are just as human as the rest of us... and if you think for one moment that they all are eager to watch their professional reputations (and thus careers) go down the toilet just like that?
Sheyah, right.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
*ahem*... nobody disputes that climate change is occurring - it does that all the time (for sufficiently large values of "time").
The big arguments revolve around the rate of change and the cause of it.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
The journal had no problems any other journal did.
How on earth do you know this? Citation? I call bullshit.
Pattern recognition is a branch of machine learning that looks at getting computers to... drumroll... recognise and classify patterns. I know, I worked in that field for over a decade. So how the hell does this journal get away with such a blatant and obviously misleading title?
(glad the journal got killed even if the stated reasons were weak. Seriously, I've yet to see a journal that didn't practice a degree of nepotism when choosing editors and such, and so long as the research itself is new I have zero problem with people self-plagarising chunks of introduction, background or similar "blah blah" bits of filler and catchup)
Apparently you are no scientist or you would know that the point of peer-reviewed journals (not sure what previewed papers are) is to make sure that they are of reasonable quality before they are published. The reviewers, who have experience in the field, review the data collection and analysis techniques used in the paper and look for systemic or logical errors that would lead to incorrect conclusions/reporting.
Really, search for evidence of this. It does not exist. Everyone who has looked into it say peer review only maintains social norms.
Quite. String theory is currently one of the most elegant explanations for the otherwise arbitrary constants in Quantum Mechanics, and it gets a lot of support because of it. But so far it has made very few testable predictions, and the tests that have been performed have thus far been inconclusive*. As a result the majority of physicists (the only people whose opinion on the subject really matters) tend to regard it as nothing more an interesting but unproven hypothesis. If evidence in its favor is found then that will likely change fairly quickly.
*example: at small scales gravity is expected to fall off much faster than 1/r^2 as it propagates through the "looped back" dimensions, but that scale is sub-millimeter at the largest, and potentially sub-atomic, which makes testing difficult.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Fine then, show me evidence that undetectable magic fairy dust doesn't revolve around the earth causing it to rotate.
I don't care how 'accepted' a view maybe, the burden is always on those holding the view to provide evidence in favor of their view and not the other way around.
No, because you're not pretending the code is new and novel. Self-plagiarism involves sending some portion of the same material off to n>1 publishers and telling each one (implicitly or explicitly) that the work is new and not previously or concurrently published elsewhere.
Where it gets interesting is that large chunks of papers are literally re-telling the same stuff over and over again. For example background material like "Blah first did blah in blah, blah extended blah, blah blah blah, and now we're going to extend/change/analyze/whatever it". You could easily have to tell this same story in dozens of papers over the years as background for your truly new work. Obviously trying to re-write this over and over is a completely pointless waste of time, so many academics just copy/paste the same old crap and then get on with the rest of the paper. Is that sort of self-plagiarism bad, and if so why?
(Anonymous Academic)
It's actually correct.
Another interesting thing is the Pope was Galileo's former classmate and they had a bit of a history of not getting on.
Nearly half the Cardinals voted for Galileo. It wasn't the Pope's call alone.
So in other words, ordinary grubby politics and not really anything to do with Science or Religion.
At the time and since there have been portions of the Catholic church very much in favour of Science.
If they are obviously jumping well outside of their field into something where they only have a layman's perspective, and they try to use their reputation to push it through, then I'd say most definitely.
It's comparable to asking a cardiologist to design a helicopter. It doesn't matter how good a cardiologist is, the helicopter is going to be crap unless they put in the time to learn how to build it.
These "experts" have not put in the time. That makes it noise unless someone who does have a clue can recognise something of value in their writing. That's what peer review is supposed to be for - not the rubber stamp from a relative that was seen in this silly vanity press rag.
"hiding" the decline.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/records/
Yet, we keep getting more low temps and even more high temps - more weather extremes - just as predicted.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Worth mentioning as well - one of the faster ways a scientist can earn professional renown is to disprove a popular theory advanced by some major player. Of course they'd better be sure of their evidence and get some strong supporters on their side before addressing the larger population or they risk torpedoing their own career*, but in a field where hard evidence is the final authority even the most powerful personalities can be undermined quite effectively. Certainly far more easily than in any other field of human endeavor.
*See for example Fleischmann and Pons and their cold fusion claims - subsequent research suggests that they did in fact stumble upon some sort of interesting phenomena, but making grandiose public claims without solid, repeatable evidence devastated their careers as well as making it extremely difficult for others to get funding to investigate the phenomena more thoroughly, even decades later. Not that all the kooks and scam artists jumping on the bandwagon helped anything either.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
This first graph seems to point pretty clearly to a cause.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
. . .really, really skeptical about people whose science can be bought
My general position is so close to that which you've expressed in this posting that it sounds like words I may have said. This last bit, though, deserves a slightly cautionary warning. As my username makes clear, I'm not a scientist, but an engineer. For more than a decade, I worked as a consulting engineer preparing traffic, parking and other transportation studies, generally for private enterprise. Over the last 2 1/2 years, I've worked in the public sector designing highway safety improvements, as well as preparing parking studies. Right now, I'm repairing a parking study, initially prepared by other engineers, that is so badly skewed in the public favor, that I strongly suspect an ill-favored bias on the previous engineers' part, or perhaps a ridiculous incompetence in the subject matter. (Both positions are difficult, as I know the engineers involved in the previous study.)
While I used the previous paragraph to make a point, I'm going to use this one to counter it. I don't know about scientists, but engineers (ostensibly) work under a code of ethics that should prevent a bias. My experience in the private sector, with primarily private sector clients, and my work in the public sector with some truly outstanding people, suggests to me that the majority of engineers are mindful of the ethics governing our profession. (I want to be clear, here, that I'm not a scientist. My work was strictly a stochastic analysis of empirical data to hypothetical future conditions.
I don't know if geophysicists (or climate scientists) in Stockholm, Algiers, Timbuktu, or Bumfuck, Ohio are governed by a professional code of conduct. I tend to think, though, that most are really trying to do good work, even if I think some are misguided. Others will make their bias clear, while a few will be completely incompetent or have a problem with judgment (like our friend the water-dowser) that makes their professional work suspect.
The sum result of my blathering should be that you ought to be as suspicious of research funded by, edited by or done by the public sector or the WWF as you are of the same performed by a petroleum institute.
--
p.s. I don't give a pass to oil companies or to institutions in the field. My initial degree study (3 years) was for a BS in petroleum engineering. My first internship was with a drilling company; an internship which caused me to change my major. I also live in Alaska, whose legislature was recently convinced to change our taxes on oil production. I *know*, first-hand, how short-sighted and selfish these companies are. I also understand quite well how dependent the related academia is on money from the industry.
Actually it all ties together. Christianity Lite sees an unchanging world provided by God to exploit in any way they like with zero consequences. Dumbing down Genesis to such a point where some stuff is taken far too literally (seven days then the modern world) and some stuff totally ignored for the sake of convenience (here's the Earth kids - look after it) produces the denialist mindset.
So that's the core. Marketing, PR and "lobby money" added the rest.
It's not just bad science. It's bad theology as well.
It's pushback. After a few decades of trying to let the lies slide off it became time to point out the liars.
I'm sure there's plenty of climatology research to do without considering greenhouse gases at all.
And funding for that research would probably be one to two orders of magnitude smaller than it currently is.
It's as if you're claiming that astronomy would fall apart if we developed an asteroid shield, or that geology would fall apart if we could stop earthquakes, or that meteorology would fall apart if we could prevent hurricanes.
Or that these fields would receive far less funding if the compelling interests such as asteroid strikes or space development, large earthquakes, or cyclones didn't exist. Many fields are driven by perceived threat or benefit and if that goes away, then so does most of the impetus for doing the research.
what is AGM?
Anthropogenic Global Marming. It's the effect kids all around the world feel when they see their school marms in the grocery store or drinking in a bar and realize they're actually human with a life outside of school.
Care to give some examples of when this has happened in the past?
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
So, let me get this straight, you're saying it is not detrimental to your professional image to FALSIFY NUMBERS AND FIGURES ON YOUR PAPERS but it IS detrimental to your professional image to not adapt to changing information and theories.
I don't have a better word to describe you than 'retarded'.
Well, the IPCC models were supposed to tell us by how much we could expect the temperature to rise due to increased CO2. They had huge funding and plenty of time and resources. The answer they came up with was higher than has been observed.
Are you saying that it is because they forgot to take account of the ocean heat absorption? That if they had taken account of it then they would have got a lower, more realistic, climate sensitivity?
Is it commonly accepted by that particular publisher?
...where the pope was the temporal king, and gave the equivalent of a court order during trial (ordering Galileo to make his arguments in learned Latin and not in common Italian until the court/church ruled on the case). G. did precisely the equivalent of defying many a modern judge's orders not to talk about the trial publicly while it was still going on, and not to try and inflame public sentiment while the trial was still going on. Then he insulted the judge as part of it (which would be most analogous to modern day contempt of court). The sentence Galileo got was less severe than in many modern cases. (Look at his house arrest vrs. modern open ended contempt citations).
The church was also going through the counter-reformation, which was historically an atypically bad part of church history. Galileo would have gotten away with more just 10-20 years before or (probably) 30 years later. This is why using the Galilean trial to prove anything about the relations of science and religion is roughly meaningless, it's like pointing to the story in To Kill a Mockingbird to prove Jury Trials in general are somehow a bad thing.
Kepler's own residence was certainly a factor, but this different treatment also happened because of his mother. Kepler's semi-SF writing, Somnium seu de astronomia lunari (roughly "Dream Voyage to the Moon"), is allegedly based on tales his mother told him. Kepler's mother was accused of witchcraft at one point, but Kepler was able to successfully defend her. An early move by the family was in all probability to find a political climate more congenial to protestant thinking and general freedom of belief, and when his mother was later accused of witchcraft, this probably paid off. Kepler didn't just live in the Holy Roman Empire, he sought to live in a part of it that was particularly enlightened and tolerant, and that helped immensely during a period when Europe in general, and not just the Papal states, was temporarily regressing towards the middle ages.
Who is John Cabal?
Where's the evidence for global warming?
If they will publish you.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Well... I'd be cautious in using that argument regarding extremes, not because I imagine it to be untrue, but because new extremes are a statistical inevitability. Getting an unexpectedly large number of them over and over, that tells you something, but the mere presence do not.
Which particular paper of this journal are you referring to? I have my doubts that you've read any of them.
If they are obviously jumping well outside of their field. . .
Are they? I'm not qualified to say that both of the editors are engaged outside their field. It certainly looks to me, though, like geophysics is closely related to studies of climate change. (The geophysical institute at the university I finished with some years ago has produced a number of researchers on both sides of this particular debate.)
. . .silly vanity press rag.
I don't think that you've looked or studied far enough to reach this conclusion: This paper, and lots more like it seem relevant to geophysics. I read the abstracts of the papers in the second edition and begin to sympathize with the publisher, but I'm not qualified to make a blanket statement that the editors are unqualified; are you?
Even if it was a single author, just copying from an earlier work is enough to be considered self-plagiarism. You must publish original research.
Not at all. There's a fair amount of boilerplate that goes into a paper. If it hasn't changed since the last research paper by the authors, then it doesn't require a rewrite. It's not original research.
I'm pretty sure I could come up with high profile examples from mathematical physics, for example where an author copy/pasted from one of their previous papers, summaries of other peoples' research.
As was noted elsewhere by artor3, the real problem was not crediting additional authors of the previous work. Even that doesn't strike me as a very serious problem since the primary author was the same for both papers, apparently, and may well be the sole author of the copied text.
Instead, the nepotism is probably what ended the journal. That's a much more serious issue.
Hmmm - I NEVER argue climate change - I argue that coal is an
abomination and we should stop using it!
I ruin this nice arguement by advocating MSRs and in
particular LFTRs.
good thing I am retired and have to do something :>
Publishers just want to get universities and corporations to buy subscriptions. Any relevance to good scientific practices is indirect. Use common sense.
Military technology development is a good example. Horse cavalry no longer commands the sort of respect that it had prior to 1900 AD. It's quite obsolete and as a result there's little interest or funding in creating specific tactics or technologies to counter cavalry except perhaps as part of a more general asymmetric warfare strategy. The threat went away and so did the interest.
A lot of programming places a much lower priority on memory usage efficiency than it used to. Memory for most applications is now quite cheap and the obstacles have shifted to other things, such as ease of development and maintenance or interface/usage constraints. The benefit went away and so did the interest.
Roig (2002) offers a useful classification system including four types of self-plagiarism: duplicate publication of an article in more than one journal; partitioning of one study into multiple publications, often called salami-slicing; text recycling; and copyright infringement.
But evidence that REAL scientists did not all buy into the cultish AGM doomsday thinking could not be allowed to exist.
what is AGM?
Antropogenic Genetically Modified.
The bad articles don't lead to self embarrassment by the authors ... takes much to much effort to debunk every of such articles. It is the job of the editorial office to prevent obvious faulty articles to be published. ;)
So that 'skeptics' like you can not quote them wrongly
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes. The anomoulous magnetic moment of the electron has been predicted to 11 decimals, and measure to match. I high point in the proving of QED, and one of the most accurate predictions in science. Where is there a prediction of climate scientists that is accurate to 3 decimals?
Actually String Theory is more mathematics then physics. The only reason they don't make it a branch of math is that mathematicians would force them to make it more rigorous. This is not surprising because QFT itself is very adhoc.
New themometers were gradually put out during the 80's and 90's and because researcher's only thought deeply about averages they missed that it was all due to different calibration. Give me my nobel in 60 years when everyone involved is gone.
Around 1900 the CO2 concentration was 0,028% ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Many fields of research are researched because they are worth researching ...
In most countries research funding does not work as weird as it seems to be in the USA.
How much can climate research cost anyway? Except for a few satellites that got launched in the last 20 years there is not much that comes to mind that costs 'real money'. A supercomputer perhaps, and thats it.
Perhaps someone finds a nice statistic, but I would bet that every mojour company that does research (like a pharma company) spends more for its research than the whole world is spending on climate research.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
If it's not original, it's not research. It might be nice writing, but if you're not moving the state of the art forward, you might as well be in Marketing. :-)
They are.
Sorry, but no. One guess as who I work with these days now that I've moved out of engineering in power generation and into computer wrangling of clusters. The resource exploration industry uses a lot of computer power so there will be a few readers like me that work surrounded by geophysicists. Climate is on a bit of a different time scale to what they deal with - as should be obvious.
So sorry, your silly bluff has failed. Why did you even try? Do you think so little of the readers here that you forgot that any field you mention is going to have someone familiar with it reading the article?
When you can't win the debate with facts, I guess censorship is your next best chance of winning. Yep, science isn't what it used to be.
They could have and still can easily form their own open access journal. The only reason to go with some specific publisher is because you want something more than a simple cheap website to host it, and because you want to be associated with that publisher's credibility. Since the publisher gave them some crap from the start, should they be surprised this happened, especially since it sounds like they were a bit misleading telling the publisher what they were trying to do with the journal? If they were honestly just trying to build up some reputation, why were they so impatient with the climate change stuff in what was supposed to be a more general journal? If they think they are right, and that they have an important message to get out, why risk it, especially since they knew the publisher could give them problems, and might end up pull such things on them? Seems like they were either hoping they can do what they want without he publisher noticing, or they were hoping the publisher would kick them out to drum up controversy.
As much as you can argue what the journal did as potentially being counterproductive to science, the stuff that editors and authors did isn't helping either, regardless of how true their message is. In a situation where both sides are trying to dismiss the other for pulling tricks, if you want people to pay attention to your work, you need to try pretty hard to avoid getting stuck in an argument that isn't about the contents of the work.
I've never before commented concerning moderation, so I hope that this carries some small weight in the moderation that follows my reaction. It seems to me that this should be (Score 2 or Score 3, Interesting), rather than the flamebait and troll that seem to dominate. This person has given a reasonable, though not fully considered, response to the grandparent. Please refer to the other responsive comments before you moderate.
"the editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis,
That's why they call it peer review. ;)
The copy pasted boiler plate typically is pretty clear it is describing a setup of a larger experiment that may have multiple results, as opposed to copy-pasting sections of results. A lot of the time such stuff gets abbreviated in later papers, with some details left out and pointed out as explained in a previous paper. Even without that, you still reference older papers that introduced the experiment, so it is pretty obvious you are acknowledging that previous work. As a result, usually certain papers end up with a high number of citations from within the group, because they have detailed experiment description (either one of the early first papers, or some large update paper later on).
Even then, that is mostly limited to the introduction and physical setup description, and the second half of a paper will have very little of it. The only reason to have large amounts of summaries of other people's research beyond a couple intro paragraphs is to either respond to someone else's specific work (and you're doing it wrong if the summaries/repeat descriptions of their work take up any where near the majority of your paper), or a review paper which is explicitly labeled as such usually.
I don't know if any particular research that can back that up or refute it. But at least in my case, the papers I've reviewed, and the proof reading I've occasionally done of others reviews when they wanted to double check something, and the results I've seen from other reviewers on the papers I review, and the reviews I've gotten on my own paper have all mostly been about the methods, analysis, and unresolved questions in a paper. A few have not, but that looked like laziness and not reading the paper (which doesn't help with maintaining social norms either). I did know of one project that seemed to have a reviewer with some grudge, but it was simple enough for them to request a new reviewer from the journal editor when the review was not pointing out any errors. I'm not saying the system is perfect, and a bad editor can allow things to go horribly wrong, but it least in one corner of the science world, I can tell it does work the way the GP said.
Where it gets interesting is that large chunks of papers are literally re-telling the same stuff over and over again. ... Obviously trying to re-write this over and over is a completely pointless waste of time, so many academics just copy/paste the same old crap and then get on with the rest of the paper. Is that sort of self-plagiarism bad, and if so why?
In the "keystone" course I took, (i.e. basic library use and academic writing) which included avoiding both self- and ordinary plagiarism, the main issue was clearly distinguishing among your new work, your new interpretation of others work, and the previous work of others and/or yourself.
The college uses an automated plagiarism-detection-and-measurement service, which compares newly submitted work against a database of previously submitted work, published work, and crawls of the web. We were warned, not just against using copy-and-paste boilerplate in multiple papers (or papers for multiple classes) but that the tool also tended to false-positive for self-plagiarism due to a person's writing style and word choices resulting in a tendency to put identical multi-word strings of significant length in more than one paper.
(I made a point of having a discussion with each prof, giving a heads up that I make extensive web posts under handles, consider it fair to use the same research and phrasing both in a discussion here and in a paper, and would be more than a little annoyed if the tool claimed I'd lifted a paper from my own contribution to a forum thread on some hot topic. So far I've had no problems.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
And, if anything, the incentives are strongly towards disproving what everyone believes, because they guy that pulls that off just proved that he's smarter and more right than everyone else, which gets him published, winning awards, etc.
I agree - an here's a contemporary example that I think everybody already knows about: the conflict between General Relativity (GR) and Quantum Mechanics (QM) - those two theories being fundamentally incompatible. For a long time, now, those in favour of QM have tried in every way to disprove GR, even to the extent that you can find numerous articles along the lines of "this is another symptom of GR being wrong". Now, personally, I favour GR as being the more fundamentally sound theory, but I have to admit that the "QM side" is scientifically sound in their attacks. In my view this conflict is a good illustration of how real science works, and it is also a very prominent example of how even the most popular, scientific theories are not safe from good, honest criticism. It also demonstrates why climate deniers, creationists and the like are not taken serious: the just don't have what it takes, scientifically. They can make noise and bluster, and that can fool the popular view for a while, but they don't have any true evidence.
We do use Newtonian physics, relativity, and quantum mechanics, because those theories have lots of evidence to support them.
How often do you use fundamental quantum field theory stuff, like QED and QCD? They have some strong evidence cases too. The reason they don't get used has more to do with their relevance. A lot of engineering can ignore non-Newtonian physics, or just use phenomenological models of things that are ultimately quantum effects. Likewise, the subset that actually needs more accurate theories still frequently use a lot of approximations. Even if say supersymmetry was confirmed on the ~ TeV scale, it would have zero impact on engineering for a long, long time, regardless of the amount of evidence.
And there is a lot of evidence supporting string theory, since it is supposed to reduce down to older theories at lower energies. Just as quantum and relativity need to explain Newtonian physics in the situations that experiments give Newtonian results, string theory needs to give results that match existing measurements. The problem isn't that there is no evidence, it is a lack of evidence that differentiates it from current theories. It is down to citing Occam's razor and picking the easier theory to use in the mean time (even though current confirmed theories also have confirmed holes, so new, more general theories are going to need to add things somehow).
> Global Climate Change has become the consensus position of Climatologists the same way that Evolution has become the consensus position of Biologists
Then we should be afraid. Very afraid.
Hardly. Mathematics is a construct based on pure logic, the foundations are absolutely, unquestionably true *because we say so* - any similarities to the physical world are pure coincidence, or (more likely) the result of choosing a set of axioms that aligns with our understanding of the world. Mathematics makes no attempt to describe what we would normally consider "reality", rather it is concerned with exploring the logical implications of an arbitrary set of axioms. Importantly there is no possible way to experimentally test the validity of an axiom, the very idea is preposterous - an axiom is by definition valid, only it's applicability to "real world" problems can be called in to question, and that's not a question that can be answered within the context of Mathematics.
Physics and the other hard sciences *are* concerned with describing reality, that they generally do that within the language of mathematics is a credit to the value and clarity of applied mathematics (that field based on axioms that seem to reflect. Theoretical physics ventures much further afield, and often involves even more ornate mathematics than applied physics, but it continues to be bound by an attempt to describe a reality that can only be known experimentally. Applied mathematics is deployed as a tool to ensure the theories remain consistent with experimental evidence, and to generate predictions, but the foundation is experimental data, not axioms. The language may be similar, but that implies no more relationship than there is between poetry and legal documents.
If you're going to try to conflate the two you're going to have to step back and say that both are simply branches of philosophy and leave it at that.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
How much can climate research cost anyway? Except for a few satellites that got launched in the last 20 years there is not much that comes to mind that costs 'real money'. A supercomputer perhaps, and thats it.
Yes, because you're a super-genius who knows everything about every branch of science as whatever you immediately assume must be 100% accurate and true.
In most countries research funding does not work as weird as it seems to be in the USA.
Wow, you've even got an extensive knowledge of "research funding" practices across the world. Surely, your time is wasted doing low-level IT work and practicing at your dojo.
Required reading for internet skeptics
The only reason to have large amounts of summaries of other people's research beyond a couple intro paragraphs is to either respond to someone else's specific work (and you're doing it wrong if the summaries/repeat descriptions of their work take up any where near the majority of your paper), or a review paper which is explicitly labeled as such usually.
The copy/paste was supposedly a few sentences which would easily fit into any of the more or less legit situations you mention. At a brief glance, the copied section didn't appear to me to be discussing original research, but I didn't look at it in context.
But in addition to not attributing the additional authors of the previous paper, they apparently didn't cite the paper either.
The article also cites the biggest problem of all which can be inferred from the odd name of the journal. Apparently, the sponsoring business was expecting a physics journal, not an advocacy journal for a particular flavor of climatology theories. I wonder how things got that out of hand.
When you google "peer review problems" the first hits are:
http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/10/04/open-access-is-not-the-problem/
and this
http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/oct/04/science-hoax-peer-review-open-access
and this
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong
and
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/
So, should all the journals discussed there be closed down? Peer reviewing ending up favoring somebodies paper whom the anonymous reviewers happen to know or like, or whose conclusions they agree with is a well known problem. As is peer reviewers delaying papers that disagree with their own research, despite impeccable research.
The problem is not that the peer review process used here was acceptable and should in fact have continued. The problem is double standards.
How much can climate research cost anyway?
At least tens of billions of dollars a year just in the EU. The cost is not just in the research, but in the public funding it helps rationalize.
I have been moderating this thread and to be honest the intent of grandparent and the parent are not terribly clear to me. Are they being sarcastic or genuine? At best they seem to be making very obvious points. Since the grandparent has been marked troll it is not really a surprise that the parent has been marked flamebait.
DodgyG33za aka AC to protect moderation
isn't that tomeyto/tomato ?
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
you're saying it is not detrimental to your professional image to FALSIFY NUMBERS AND FIGURES ON YOUR PAPERS
you're implying that anyone who does this is caught, and corruption goes beyond falsifying figures... there are all manner of ways that calculated figures can be incorrect or test results invalid, some deliberately, some ignorantly, some mistakenly. the scientific method seems simple when you look at it through the tunnel vision of ignorance, but as Penguinisto said, "scientists are just as human as the rest of us", which means that they are not only corruptable, but also prone to fucking up.
if a scientist finds out that he's blown thousands of taxpayer dollars down the drain chasing after proof of some hypothesis and test results show it doesn't work (which makes applying for the next grant that much harder to justify) or he invests years of time and energy and then discovers a flaw in his assumptions or test method or results etc (which can also easily get past peer review), do you think coming out would be easy? do you think it wouldn't be detrimental to his professional image?
engineers face a similar dilemma and there are even professional ethical and legal obligations on engineers to admit wrongdoing, and yet some engineers are still found guilty of malpractice. scientists in many cases aren't bound by such strict legal obligations as engineers so i doubt the scientific community is any more ethical than the engineering fraternity.
malpractice (by engineers or scientists) isn't always even caused by corruption on a personal level, but by external influences (such as funding obligations, management pressures to get results out in a tight schedule, etc) so anyone that assumes that science is incorruptible or not prone to human error is retarded.
The research is original (btw, who says I must....Perhaps I just want to refine a previous idea), just 3 sentences where not.
I work in science, I have no idea if I ever reproduced a few sentences that I wrote earlier (not unlikely since it could be that I simply come to the same sequence), but if I did, I sure do not need some people who have no idea what I am writing about running diff -u on my text and somehow conclude that my paper has less value because there are a few words identical with a previous work.
This witch hunting has to stop. The point of citing is to give credit to people and to connect things together. Every paper I read omits 100s of citations because nobody can read everything and some things become "commonly" accepted. The fact that it is now digitally trivial to show when you verbally copied a sentence is just a tiny part of the cases in which a citations should have been provided. But it is not in anyway worse than all the other cases.
Since nobody is able to cite all that should be cited, we should not get overly hung up by it. Its worth to comment on it 1) by the reviewers/editors 2) by letters to the journal 3) by other publications on the same subject 4) personally (polite) by an email or verbally. It is NOT worth closing journals over, firing scientist over or generally making a big fuss about.
Though there is something called good-practice etc etc, being overly pedantic about self-citing hurts science far more than it benefits it.
Your hypothesis that both physics and mathematics are simply branches of philosophy is elegant, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Heck a publisher TRIED to run a journal dedicated to anti-global-warning research. The fact that they could only find an oil industry hack, and a bunch of "scientists" who used it as an opportunity to hire their buddies, and writers who tried to pass off old work as "original research" doesn't speak well to to the credibility of the people or the research supporting the anti-global-warming position.
It tells volumes on "science" today though.
What is "anti-global-warming position" anyways?
Pftt ... you seem to have trouble with big numbers.
Try again?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Just keep in mind the typical liberal MO...
The use of the phrase "the typical liberal" makes me thing you are a "typical right wing not job", the sort of gun toting, gas guzzler driving red-stater who would declare such things as "I don't believe no man came from no monkey".
Of course drawing such broad generalizations would be indicitave of a very weak mind, but you make that a dangerously tempting hole to fall into.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I love this. It is so naive it's beautiful.
Try being a bit more honest instead of things like the lie I caught you out on, which you have not bothered to defend since, and you may get modded down less.
You are dancing around the real question that is: Why is "pure logic" mathematics so useful (necessary?) to describe reality?
That's right. It wasn't a question of whether they were correct or not. Simply shedding doubt on the paradigm is enough. This is the very essence of censorship.
No, not in the same way. If Darwin's theory had come from a computer model and it turned out his computer model didn't match real world observations, nobody would believe it. Strangely exactly the same situation is present with catastrophic AGW and everybody seems to believe it. They believe it because it's their politics, not because it's actually true, for the same reason that creationists don't believe in evolution even though it is actually true.
@ Anonymous Coward
You making a fool of yourself.
Oil companies paying researchers? How many billions have institutions been given in grants by politicians, desiring as they were justification for their energy security policies? The fact of the matter is that you're confusing science in general with climate science, which is infested with NGOs and other political interests (unlike say, physics). Just how many non-peer reviewed NGO paper were in AR4? About half of the references, it turned out.
" If Darwin's theory had come from a computer model and it turned out his computer model didn't match real world observations, nobody would believe it."
That is your opinion, but I prefer facts.
"UN climate change projections made in 1990 'coming true'
Climate change projections made over two decades ago have stood the test of time, according to a report published Monday in the journal Nature."
http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2012/12/un-climate-change-projections-made-in-1990-coming-true.html (article links to the paper in Nature)
The people who have actually compared the model projections to observed climate changes over the past two decades have found the models to be accurate.
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So you don't think liberals form a type that, because of a shared ideology/psychology, tends to respond in similar ways to similar stimulus?
Oh, OK.
Futurist Traditionalism
Then we should be afraid [Social Darwinism]. Very afraid. [Eugenics]
Yesterday Creationists confused the science of Evolution with the political application of Evolution to public policy (Social Darwinism, & Eugenics). They were wrong. Politics never disprove science; only evidence can do that.
Today "skeptics" of climate change tell us that the science of climate change is wrong because of the possible irresponsible political applications of climate science to public policy. They too are wrong. Politics never disprove science; only evidence can do that.
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http://theclimatescepticsparty.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/peer-reviewed-magazine-axed-after.html
That explains the entire scam.
There is no such as 'man-made global warming', and there is no such thing as 'CATASTROPHIC man-made global warming' - funny how they never use the word 'catastrophic', isn't it, since non-catastrophic anything isn't going to be a problem. Funny how they renamed it 'climate change' while still insisting it means 'CATASTROPHIC man-made global warming', isn't it... Anybody would think the so-called 'scientists' who came up with this LIE are a bunch of worthless parasites, who live off the publics' taxes and have to come up with more and more ALARMIST nonsense in order to get more funding.
Or not... its a stretch to say its more extreme than it has been over the past thousands of years. http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2013/12/explaining-the-flaw-in-kevin-drums-and-apparently-science-magazines-climate-chart.html
Self-plagiarism? WTF? They used their own words, without giving credit to themselves?
I'm not reading this article because the summary alone is ludicrous.
Let's build a model of the Earth's atmosphere.
First let's model the Earth as a point particle with perfect blackbody characteristics. Taking into account the received radiation from the sun, that should get us a global temperature of ~6 degrees C.
But wait, we know the Earth isn't a perfect blackbody, so we'll factor in an albedo of ~ .3 and get a global temperature of -18 degrees C.
This isn't a very good model so far, is it? Well, let's model the atmosphere as a layered column of gases, then. Oh hey, funny thing. It looks like if you increase the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, it heats up, and then the atmosphere can hold more CO2, leading to arbitrarily large temperatures. That can't be right. Let's revise the model...
That brings us to the beginnings of the 20th Century in terms of atmospheric modeling. You can read more about subsequent steps in this textbook, or perhaps this one. I can particularly recommend the former as it is brief and a good introduction to the problems associated with e.g. where in the atmosphere CO2 is concentrated, and its peculiar vibrational modes.
All of Science is to some degree wrong. Congratulations on your discovery of this fact. The question is, how wrong? And with these models we try to estimate that. We would all dearly like for there not to be such thing as the greenhouse effect right about now, believe you me. However, since it is trivial to show that an atmosphere with a greater proportion of CO2 will retain more solar radiation, and this has been known since the early 19th Century, we're not holding out much hope for that hypothesis. Wrong we may be, but that wrong we are surely not. I don't know where in your fathomless depths of ignorance and hubris you find the means to dispute apparent fact, but keep in mind that when many others' opinions differ from yours, it's unlikely to be a conspiracy.
This post brought to you by the Anthropogenic Global Warming Conspiracy. Get your membership card today!
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Add to that the oil companies paying researchers tons of money to write anything that "disproves" global warming, and the complete lack of peer-reviewed research that disproves global warming probably means that there's not enough support for that position to stand up to any peer review at all.
This always drives me crazy... please show me any study, article or any bit of information that shows that oil companies are paying researchers any more money than companies that have a vested interested in climate change. You can't, because whilst you can find a lot of information on the Koch Brothers Funding Climate Denial, I bet you can't find anything talking about the funding that is provided from companies, institutions and individuals with a vested interested in finding climate change.
How often do you use fundamental quantum field theory stuff, like QED and QCD? They have some strong evidence cases too
I'm using the products of them right now to post on Slashdot, and I do whenever I use pretty much anything containing an IC.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No, not in the same way. If Darwin's theory had come from a computer model and it turned out his computer model didn't match real world observations, nobody would believe it. Strangely exactly the same situation is present with catastrophic AGW and everybody seems to believe it. They believe it because it's their politics, not because it's actually true, for the same reason that creationists don't believe in evolution even though it is actually true.
No, they believe it because Venus, despite receiving 25% of the energy from the Sun, is 70C hotter than Mercury. Why? Because Venus has a 96% CO2 atmosphere, and it has been known since the 1800s that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Equally, it is established fact that CO2 and H2O are the chemical results of hydrocarbon burning, and that if you remove a hydrocarbon source from the ground and burn it, you are going to add to the CO2 present in the atmosphere. Full stop. Any kerfuffling over the accuracy of the models is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
This is not a question 'if' and 'what', the science has been about 'how much' and 'how quickly'. Models are a tool for estimating that. If they're wrong, you don't throw out all the other observations that have been made. The correct thing to do is refine the model. The people offering excuses like 'oh it's just the natural system' and 'we were warmer millions of years ago' are ignoring that we have a civilization to preserve here that's far more sensitive to changes in climate than life in general, and they don't have a fucking clue what they're talking about. And I'd wish they'd stop seeing liberal and eco-conspiracies behind every attempt to explain it.
And it's not about money, either. The total amount of money spent on climate research by the US govt. between 2007-2011 was just over 2 billion dollars. Contrast that with the Large Hadron Collider, a single experimental device that cost 9 billion UKP to build, and will arguably have far less practical impact than results from climate research. By the by, 2 billion is less that a single quarter's profit for Exxon, yet it's like pulling teeth to get acknowledgment that, hey, maybe Exxon wants to protect that revenue stream, too.
But I'm wasting my time.
I used to think that this argument would be sufficient to convince deniers - and I call them deniers, not skeptics, skeptics weigh all evidence before them - but when Bill Nye put out this simple video to explain global climate change, people debated the simple facts of the matter in the comments(before they were disabled). Frankly, it proves Asimov right, that
"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
So have at it. Scientifically, the debate's been done for years. Politically, I'm no longer interested in debating this. My politicians remain convinced that this will only be a minor inconvenience, at worst. Rather, I'm seeing my way to being personally prepared for the possible consequences of unexpected social upheaval. 'Cause oddly enough, the military and the insurance industry, who's job are to understand future probabilities in their respective domains, seem to be taking it seriously, as well.
That is ridiculous. IPCC predictions v reality. The journal Nature also published Michael Mann's idiotic hockey stick and Steig's ridiculous Antarctic warming paper. And as we know from this story, it wouldn't publish anything that goes against the paradigm in any case, although recently it has tried to be at least a little more circumspect in its editorials. That's the whole point, which you seem to have missed from the OP. Here's a blog about it.
Add to that, unless you're in the running for a Nobel, your academic career isn't likely to be tied to a specific theory. No one is discredited for saying 'we did this work, and based on the evidence that we had we advanced this theory, but now we have more data we've disproven it and now advance this theory'. In fact, that's what a lot of papers do say. It's much easier to get that kind of paper published than one that says 'we thought this, and now we have more evidence, and we think it's still true.'
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Ordinarily I would recommend that you put your opinion in a paper but the only journal with low enough standards to publish it just got shutdown for scientific malpractice.
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I've never before commented concerning moderation, so I hope that this carries some small weight in the moderation that follows my reaction. It seems to me that this should be (Score 2 or Score 3, Interesting), rather than the flamebait and troll that seem to dominate. This person has given a reasonable, though not fully considered, response to the grandparent. Please refer to the other responsive comments before you moderate.
Unfortunately, I believe it speaks to deniers being totally honest with their opinions. And probably their view of how science should be practiced. What would be a huge conflict of interest in the world of science, is apparently a good qualification in their world.
Would a person who receives ther paycheck from an industry that has a vested interest in a product that is one cause of the increase of one of the greenhouse gases be likely to have an interest in disproving AGW, which would be of monetary benefit to their employers?
It certainly wouldn't be surprising.
After all, what might be the reaction of the editor-in chief of the journal if he were to write that people need to stop using fissil fuels as soon as possible? There is an excellent chance he would be out of a job.
That's why science works hard to avoid conflicts of interest. That's why a Librarian investigated and found problems with the articles published in that journal. That's why there are sites and publications like Retraction Watch, with if people were to check, they might see that there are a fair number of retracted articles.
And that is exactly why I can give a real link, and a statement about where we get should our information from, and it gets modded to troll.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The world is 10,000 years old, flat, and dinosaurs lived with humans. Think I'm a quack? That's exactly what they talk Galileo.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
String-theory, the clarion call of non-scientists who want to assert their intellectual supremacy over science. If only physicists weren't look for physical evidence for string theory. If only physicists didn't understand that it's underdetermined. If only string-theory calculations weren't made to comport with 100s of years of experimental observation.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
You've never tried to prove something with an experiment have you. I have. It's a humbling experience. Now I hold the main problem with science education is that non-scientists don't have the esoteric experience of demonstrating something empirically -- where all you brilliant brain-farts die a quick and deadly death.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
I'm sorry, but what aspect of IC design involves the modeling of the interaction between quarks? Even nuclear engineering which at least deals with physics of the nucleus doesn't use QCD. What part of IC design even requires electron and photon loop calculations, or other use of the QED Lagrangian? Researchers will use some other field theories, and quantum mechanics, but IC engineers don't even need most of those calculations.
If Darwin's theory had come from a computer model and it turned out his computer model didn't match real world observations, nobody would believe it.
People argued that Darwin's theory was wrong because people's grandfathers obviously (or, in some cases, less obviously) weren't monkeys. It was a nonsense argument, because they weren't actually comparing Darwin's theory with reality, they were comparing the media soundbite version of his theory with reality. AGW also fails to stand up to this kind of attack, but that doesn't mean that the theories are wrong.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Theories are always up for review and revision in the face of new evidence and research.
I don't know, Newton's three laws look settled. Sure there are error bars, but within the error bars, I don't see any dispute.
The problem is, like all relativist arguments, you are taking a small wedge to characterize the totality of what is going on. Sure theories are always being reviewed and revised. Sure there is always uncertainty. But the people who bring this up a pushing a line on global warming that is almost certainly wrong, and we know that very well. If you want to the science is uncertain, then you have to say alternate theories are less certain. But that type of intellectual honesty is not what this is about.
Somewhat humerously these "skeptics" are immune to actually learning something about the real research, and so are about as faithful and tribally loyal and non-scientific as any good young-earther or "creation scientists". Somewhat ironically, these "skeptics" call scientists "alarmists", when really, their opposition to AGW is fundamentally about a neo-liberal economic argument that climate action will destroy the economy, or FREEDOM!!!, or both. The economics profession, of course, disagrees.
In short, we're dealing with madness through and through.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It is difficult to cite every piece of research that contributes to a paper. Although at least every idea you bring in that is not new should have some citation, or be at the level of being in textbooks on the subject. In the former case, people can then at least find other citations by following the one. It isn't really that difficult to do. But if you are going to go as far as copy-paste wording, and not just summarize some other idea, it shouldn't be that hard to cite the original paper in that case.
(btw, who says I must....Perhaps I just want to refine a previous idea)
If you are refining a previous idea in a way that hasn't been done before, ti is still original research. A new explanation to an old idea or adding data to an old idea is still new work.
That's because logic is unambiguous, and it allows us to clarify our own thoughts. Otherwise our brain gets ridden with misconceptions, prejudices, and lousy thinking. The need of pure logic is a testament to our brains' messy nature, not any characteristic of the workings of the world.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
I see we have another faggot follower of the whiny asshole Lee Smolin.
The biggest problem with the String Theory detractors is they are even more full of shit than the proponents.
You assholes are going to have to do better than LQG to get rid of the String Theory Infection.
> Today "skeptics" of climate change tell us that the science of climate change is wrong because of the possible irresponsible political applications of climate science to public policy.
Now THAT's a non sequitur if I've ever seen one. I certainly didn't say that climate change is wrong because of possible political applications. That's because it's nonsense.
What does follow from the example of eugenics, however, is that perfectly correct science has been abused to justify politics without considering further consequences which can be very dire indeed. The measures introduced under the rubric of eugenics have also been justified by the supposed consensus of experts in their day.
The massive destruction of food for ethanol on a scale of hundreds of millions of tons annually is one such consequence of politicking through the creation of a climate of fear.
That's exactly what they told Galileo.
Funny how kooks always think the are Galileo, and not one of thousands of crackpots who were also laughed at. Especially when their ideas aren't brand new and revolutionary, but old and stale.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Wow! That means as a software developer, I must self-plagiarize all the time!
And if you reuse code you wrote as a contractor, you may actually be in trouble.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
You almost had me until the phrase "self plagiarism" appeared.
Plagarism: the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.
I think my teenage daughter would say "derp."
But he's right, and completely on topic. If fixing AGW was free, you'd have never opened your mouth. We'd have pressed the "fix AGW" button and everybody would have gone on with their lives. You only have a problem because it's going to cost money to fix, and your mindset simply will not allow you to accept responsibility for anything. It must be a plot to abscond with more of your hard-earned money. Nothing that actually costs money to fix ever happens, so that must be the explanation.
If somebody found a cheap solution to AGW you'd never speak again on the topic. You'd just move on to the next fashionable denialism.
You are saying the people who publish research don't read it.
Again, RETARDED
You need to learn the big difference between "dousing" and "dowsing"!
Mercury is cooler than Venus because it barely has any atmosphere. Gas contains heat, holding it like a thermal battery.
The arguments, however, against C02 are all based on the extremely tenuous concept of "Radiative Forcing", which has nothing to do with its thermal qualities.
Think of it this way; when a planet is surrounded by dust and other light opaque matter, the planet cools because light cannot reach the surface, convert to IR and heat the atmosphere. CO2 is opaque to a thin band of IR, and so, in its own small way, it behaves like dust. If anything, (and that anything isn't all that much since so much light from the rest of the spectrum can still reach the ground), it serves to *cool* the globe, not heat it. But the effects are minuscule.
The only way CO2 could actually heat the planet would be if there was enough of it introduced to significantly increase the gas density of our atmosphere and thus raise the amount of matter which can act as a thermal capacitor. That isn't what is happening.
There are other, far more interesting reasons our planet is undergoing climate change right now. They are linked to electrical and gravitational qualities of the solar system, as evidenced by the rapidly increasing number of comets in our skies and surges in volcanic activity beneath our feet.
C02 is a misdirection to make us blame ourselves, allow carbon taxes, and to fail to see that the elites in all their psychopathic bluster, cannot save us.
this laird guy must be a scientific inquisitor because he apparently got two max rated posts. the relativity scam was exposed by Stephen Crothers but the scientific "community" just kicked him off his PhD program instead of trying to find flaws in his arguments. This guy is a scientific "true believer". Don't bother to ask him when they're going to dismantle LIGO because it's out to look for something that doesn't exist.
And for whatever reason, nobody of his sort won't stand up to defend Professor Steven Jones and his basic material research combined with XEDS to assertain that WTC was blew up using nano thermite.
I'm here to skull F* true believers like this guy. He'll suffer mentally because of his stupidity and I'll get a vote or maybe too. But the message will get to him.
What makes you think I have problems with "big numbers"? For example, the EU plans to spend about 30 billion a year on climate change-related issues from 2014 to 2020. That was rationalized on the basis of climate research.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Official weather monitoring stations that record temps used to claim global warming exists are often installed near heat sources or heat absorbing and radiating materials. The False Global Warming Temperature Readings (with pictures.)
you have obviously never conducted any sort of peer reviewed research in your life, so i wouldn't expect you to know any better
You've never tried to prove something with an experiment have you
yes i have. i'm not a "scientist", but as an engineer i've been paid to physically test many things to prove they are compliant with various regulations for certification. there are differences between experimentation and testing, and whilst engineers generally have an idea of how things they design will behave, especially with testing of large (and expensive) structures such as major aircraft components there are finger crossing moments when you resort to mere hope that failure doesn't occur due to uncertainties that often crop up. on the same token, scientists don't generally just experiment wildly with no idea of what to expect; they start with a hypothesis, formulate a method to test that hypothesis under certain conditions and they also have some idea what they might expect (both for and against their original hypothesis) from their results by variation of certain parameters.
It's a humbling experience.
experimentation and testing is usually a repetitive, tedious and mechanical process, which is why much of the time either graduates are employed or machines are developed to perform it.
maybe if you're working at CERN or something it can be humbling, but the majority of scientific experimentation isn't exciting or revolutionary.
non-scientists don't have the esoteric experience of demonstrating something empirically
there's nothing scientific about gathering data (machines can do it automatically in many cases)... the real intelligence in science is interpretation of data to draw conclusions, which may or many not be obvious from the data and is also where things can get subjective and be affected by external influences unrelated to the data (which i think has been the case with the climate change debate).
Sounds like you weren't trying to prove your own theory, that you thought up. Collecting data isn't science. Too bad.
Sounds like you weren't trying to prove your own theory, that you thought up
When engineers design structures and machines, the hypothesis is that they will operate safely and reliably for their intended life. Whether this hypothesis is true or not can rarely be determined without rigorous process, usually involving multiple levels of peer review before final acceptance.
Certification of a design by engineers is about taking that hypothesis and putting it to the test; to prove that the design is safe in accordance with accepted standards and regulatory requirements. This usually entails either analysis, testing or justification by experience. Experience can rarely be accepted on its own, and analysis is usually only accepted based on significant historical emperical justification of the techniques behind the analysis (such as with FEA or CFD), so regardless of how engineers justify the safety of a design, testing forms the fundamental basis of that justification.
There's nothing un-scientific about engineering.
Because it looked like you ment millions. There is no way that the eu is spending 10 billion on climate research (per year), there is no way that the whole planet is spending so much, not even half of it. And if I divide your now given 30 billion by 6 (years) we are down to 5 billion per year.
If you say 'climate related issues' then I wonder what you mean with that. Wind farms?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It's 200 billion euros over six years. And that's just for the EU-level. Each national government has their own thing.
May I ask, from where you have thise numbers?
Regarding to this: http://ec.europa.eu/clima/news/articles/news_2013111901_en.htm the EU will spend roughly 20% of its budget to work against/with climate change. A lot of it in third world countries as developing aid.
The original question was: how much is spent for "climate research". I doubt the EU pays anything in the range of a billion for that (not the EU, but all EU countries combined).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes, shut them down. Few use facts, most take research out of context, ans they only throw chaff in the air to obscure the truth. And , yes, they tend to scratch each others backs, quoting and requoting each other.
It's even more obvious you haven't. Peer reviewers need to be able to use capital letters and punctuation properly.
Oil companies paying researchers?
Openly so. Available to any scientist OR economist. Example:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2007/feb/02/frontpagenews.climatechange
Of course there is far more money available from the oil companies than is actually taken, because few scientists got in to science to take money to falsify articles.
How many billions have institutions been given in grants by politicians, desiring as they were justification for their energy security policies?
It may have escaped your attention, but most governments around the world have actively avoided implementing the requirements from the Kyoto protocol. Most politicians, especially conservative ones, would much prefer that AGW was not true.
I'm afraid you have decided against AGW based on your politics, and everything else you believe is just confirmation bias. You're deluding yourself.
Anyone commenting on this post that doesn't agree with the "settled science" of global warming or climate change or whatever the name du jour is today has been modded "Score:-1, Troll." That's very telling since most of the "troll" posts are not trolling. Hopefully this reflection of one side's agenda is fixed during metamoderation.
Somewhat ironically, alarmists call skeptics "denialists" even though the alarmists are the ones that deny proper science. Global climate (a very complex system all by itself) over long terms by definition can never have sufficient human-collected evidence to predict. To deny this is grossly unscientific. Denialist and alarmist are labels that rightly can apply to those who think human-induced global warming/climate change is not only scientifically confirmed but flat-out "settled."
The original question was: how much is spent for "climate research".
The answer is all of it. They made this huge financial decision on the basis of modern climate research. You asked how much climate research can cost. I gave you the numbers you asked for.
It make me wonder who is funding this stuff and more importantly why?
How can one possibly plagiarise oneself? Plagiarism is presenting the utterance of another as one's own.
Surely this is merely repetition. If he assigned away copyright to the first utterance, it could be copyright violation, and that is probably a felony offence.
--
I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. - Hunter S. Thompson
Lol, hoe I understand it, the money that is spend is spend to mitigate climate effects (like CO2 scrubbing, higher dams etc.), it is not spend for research.
Nbut perhaps we find somewhere a number.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Lol, hoe I understand it, the money that is spend is spend to mitigate climate effects (like CO2 scrubbing, higher dams etc.), it is not spend for research.
A cost is not merely the amount paid directly for the research. It's also the cost of societal actions which get rationalized (especially when actual cost/benefit analysis doesn't justify the actions) by that research.
you don't pay me enough to use correct punctuation and capitalization
You don't care enough about getting your message across to even be bothered with using correct punctuation and capitalization. Thus nobody cares about whatever message it is that you're trying to convey. It goes both ways.
Do you question today whether your home is not being burgled AT THIS MOMENT? Do you question whether the chemistry of copmbustion will still work and enable you to drive home?
No?
Then your faith and decision not to question further does not mean you are wrong.
Neither does it make you deniers right to deny everything unless it implies "AGW is wrong".
...
Yes, the more closely we can adhere to that, the better. That's never happened perfectly. After all, as I understand it, scientific journals started as letters among over-lapping circles of acquaintances until someone with a bit of ambition assembled, edited and sent the collections of letters back out to all of the participants. And it was common for friendships and animosities to pre-exist or to develop among these overlapping circles. When there were good editor/publishers, working with well-considered, well-written letters, it worked well.
Unfortunately, despite (because of) "peer review" as practiced today, the scientific method is often abandoned for the sake of politics... as most often is the case with the "warmist hysterics" vs. the "deniers". Factions circle around particular publications, blocking papers from other factions, and making snide remarks and otherwise propagandizing about the others, often disregarding the merits and essential faults of each.
OT1H, no one should be forced to publish sentiments with which he disagrees, or to associate with those with whom he disagrees. OTOH, sustaining the debate as openly and honestly as possibly is the thing.
IMO, it should all get published, with the names of the authors, the (unfudged, un"trick"ed, un-homogenized) data. Dispense with the propagandizing and restrictions against assertions and counter-arguments and counter-counter-arguments from reaching the public light of day.
Dispense with the government subsidies for this political faction and not that, dispense with the "scientists" meetings with editorials and media moguls to plan the propaganda strategies, or at least attempt to get knowledge of all such meetings out to the public as quickly as possible and reported in as much depth as possible.
Let everyone see where data has been jiggered and decide whether those processes are valid or not. Let everyone see the back-slapping and back-stabbing cliques clearly.
Let each person examine and judge each issue to the extent of his ability within his economic means...
I don't see anything wrong with "self-plagiarism". I mean, if X wrote it, X wrote it. It doesn't matter whether X wrote it 1 time or 100 times; it's still X's work. OTOH, I can see how a publisher of one paper might object to material in that paper being re-used in another, because the first publisher won't be able to fully milk it. As a writer not compensated by publishers/producers for some work whose value went to others on a number of occasions that's not tugging at my heart-strings just now.
We don't pay you anything. You're here because you want people to pay attention to your point of view. But they don't because they think you're an illiterate.
So what does it say about you that you find such things attractive?
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
i'm here because i like to make fun of the stupidity of others like yourself, and occasionally discuss issues with those that demonstrate a shred of intellect.
i frankly don't give a crap if people care about my point of view or not.
you're here because you are a doofus.
That's pretty sleazy quoting so selectively, cutting out the part that addresses exactly the issue your raising, in order to say that I ignored that issue. It's almost like you're willing to use dishonest tactics to try to win an argument that you can't win legitimately. Instead, I'll go with sarcasm, and then quoting myself:
"Sure, there's corruption. But the scientific method is designed to provide disincentives to corruption, because collectively scientists care about, and reward, truth. For example, if you do flawed research, meaning that your results can't be independently duplicated by others, instead those others come along and disprove your research, and they're rewarded for doing so. If a journal doesn't do proper peer review, then they lose credibility and go out of business. And if an industry (e.g. cigarettes, oil) tries to pay researchers to do corrupt research, they'll find some willing to take the money, but journals have a strong incentive not to publish research that's flawed, because if they publish flawed research they'll lose credibility (which they care quite a bit about), and thus sales. And peer reviewers have a strong incentive not to let flawed research make it past them, because individually they'll lose credibility, and not get paid to do peer reviews in the future. And other scientists have strong incentives to disprove any flawed research that's published, because disproving someone else's research is very impressive. So while the corrupted research may be useful politically (e.g. cigarette companies published lots of quotes from "research" that "proves" that cigarettes didn't cause cancer, letting them sell more cigarettes and give more people cancer for a few more decades), ultimately their research was flawed, often with falsified data, and the authors and journals involved were discredited, while the accurate research survived peer review and other teams' challenges and was proved correct. So the scientific method worked despite all of the money and other incentives that were applied to try to corrupt it."
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Impressive pile of hand waving. I'm not entirely sure what overall point you're trying to make, but I'll try to correct a few errors.
"I don't see anything wrong with "self-plagiarism". I mean, if X wrote it, X wrote it." - the problem isn't quoting yourself, the problem is reusing old material and claiming that it's original research, which is lying, and even more it's fraud, because the entire reason papers are published is for the original research. And in the scientific world, lying and fraud (taking credit for work you can't take credit for) is a serious offense that can wipe out journals and end careers. Perhaps you should consider a career in marketing or sales?
"OT1H, no one should be forced to publish sentiments with which he disagrees, or to associate with those with whom he disagrees. OTOH, sustaining the debate as openly and honestly as possibly is the thing." These two cancel each other out. In science, you're supposed to keep an open mind and certainly be willing to associated with those with whom you disagree - the first mindset is politics, not science. If your theories are so indefensible, and your ego so weak, that you can't even talk to people who disagree with you then you shouldn't work in science, which is a pretty aggressive, competitive field. And any professional journal had better be happy to print things that it "disagrees" with, because personal opinions aren't a legitimate measure of scientific value - research should be published as long as the science is valid. And since science is all ultimately based on objective facts determined by competing teams verifying each others' work, the sort of BS that you're imagining doesn't work for long. Sure, someone could try to throw a bunch of money into supporting their agenda, but ultimately either the science is solid (i.e. others can verify your work), or it isn't, and is rejected. So all the money can do is create some wasted effort for a while. For example, the cigarette companies spent a fortune funding "science" that "proved" that cigarettes don't cause cancer, which was all ultimately discredited. From a business perspective it was a successful tactic, because they made a fortune creating confusion and giving more people cancer for a few decades, but from a scientific perspective their attempt to corrupt science in their favor was ultimately rejected. And it's not terribly ethical.
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i'm here because i like to make fun of the stupidity of others like yourself
You're not even very good at that. When you appear stupider than the person you try to mock, it doesn't work. Again, that's a problem you bring on yourself by your laziness with the shift and punctuation keys.
you keep focusing on your punctuation then... even if the message you're trying to get across is a load of horseshit
> There is a lot of evidence to support all of these
I wonder what do you _understand_ in these evidence. You should be really omnipotent science erudit to grasp it all. But you are not, You just believe and propagate after the media. And that's it.
Are you a geneticist or climatologist? If your understanding of the eveidence in these subjects are so good
What conclusion should we draw from the complete lack of an evidence that there are companies with "a vested interested in climate change" that are funding biased research? Do you think that Greenpeace and the solar panel companies have much better funding and security than the oil and oil-powered car industries?
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