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.'"
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.
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.
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'.
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
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.
Since I think we know that few scientists are billionaires, and yet scientific fraud is documented to exist, you just might be distorting the picture. (I like the bit about, "might as well add creationism while we are into denialism." It really added to your argument. You should have suggested a more sophisticated cocktail for sipping on a "billion dollar yacht" though.) Thank goodness that everyone associated with climate science is clean, eh?
False positives: fraud and misconduct are threatening scientific research
The psychologist, who admitted "massaging" the data in some of his papers, resigned from his position in June after being investigated by his university, which had been tipped off by Uri Simonsohn from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Simonsohn carried out an independent analysis of the data and was suspicious of how perfect many of Smeesters' results seemed when, statistically speaking, there should have been more variation in his measurements.
The case, which led to two scientific papers being retracted, came on the heels of an even bigger fraud, uncovered last year, perpetrated by the Dutch psychologist Diederik Stapel. He was found to have fabricated data for years and published it in at least 30 peer-reviewed papers, including a report in the journal Science about how untidy environments may encourage discrimination.
The cases have sent shockwaves through a discipline that was already facing serious questions about plagiarism.
Spring (and Scientific Fraud) Is Busting Out All Over
Verbeke and Tijdink cast a wide net, with support they received from the Pascal Decroos Fund for Investigative Journalism. They contacted researchers from the medical science faculties of every university in Flanders, sending out more than 2,500 questionnaires and receiving 315 fully completed anonymous responses in return.
The answers startled. Four of the researchers who responded, or 1.3 percent, acknowledged that they had fabricated data at least once during the past three years, misdeeds that may still be unpunished. What’s more, 23, or 7.3 percent, of those who sent back questionnaires had engaged in the quaint term “massaging”—in which data or results were removed to make their work true up with original hypotheses. The roughly 8 percent of fraudulent practices found at the universities in Flanders compared with an average of 2 percent of smelly stuff going on that turned up in a 2009 meta-analysis in PLoS ONE of studies from around the world. .....
Respondents said the publish or die imperative was one of the main reasons for the infractions. The survey found that two thirds of the professors polled ran into excessive pressure to get their work into journals and nearly 70 percent of all of those surveyed had added the name of one author who had not participated in a study.
Study: Scientific research fraud on the rise
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
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.