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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.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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That's exactly what they told Galileo.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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
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.
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.
Thank you. I was wondering how the heck you could steal your own writings and pass them off as your own.
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 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.
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.
what has been original in the last 10 yrs?
Round corners on handheld devices, according to Apple.
Actually I haven't seen ANY evidence of negative results from genetically modified organisms that has withstood scientific scrutiny.
On the other hand, Global warming has had significant scrutiny, and it still stands with around 100% support with the experts in that field, the climatologists.
After all, if you are asking questions about rocks you consult a geologist, not a dentist. So why are so many people listening to the dentist that disagrees with the worlds climatologists.
I've heard some people say there's a conspiracy. Maybe, but it's not among the scientists. Don't forget that the scientists get nothing from it whether it exists or not, they are dedicated to the scientific principle where the theories must be supported by the evidence, and they often quibble about details and would dearly love to find something to prove everyone else wrong and themselves the founder of a new discovery.
Don't forget that Scientific Journals have to meet certain criteria to be accepted. That criteria is not based on whether or not it makes other scientists happy or sad, but rather that it is properly attributed and backed by evidence. In this case, it also looks like one of the reasons that one got canned was because it was consistently off topic, and with troll articles not backed by evidence. Then there's that whole self-plagiarizing thing. I'm not sure to consider that repeating the same dross while trying to flog it off as new, or doing a bit of circular logic by using yourself as reference for your self is the worst part of this mess, but no matter how you look at it, both are bad and definitely violations of Scientific Journals.
So hey, if you can't follow the rules and meet the requirements, you're going to get bounced. Don't like it? Well maybe you shouldn't have tried to scam the system.
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."
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...
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
There's no science to support the idea that GMO foods need special warning labels. All the hippy nonsense about "toxins" is born of ignorance.
There is no evidence the solar system is warming. There is plenty of evidence the Earth is warming. There is no evidence that GMO foods *in general* are deleterious to human health, although there may well be specific exceptions. It seems reasonable to assume that the safety of any particular GMO depends on the organism itself and the nature of the modifications made.
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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
Yeah, probably. Like those damn hippies of a century ago who brought pasteurization to "kill the toxins". Bullshit, all of it, no doubt.
Or that damn hippy Semmelweis who started that ridiculous hand-washing nonsense.
Let's look at your words again:
Do you wash your hands before you eat? Do you wash vegetables after you get them home from the store? Do you eat food after you've dropped it on the floor? Do you leave raw poultry out in a warm kitchen, and then consume it raw? Do you feed fish every meal to pregnant women? Do you support safety standards for food?
I think you are perfectly mindful of "toxins", you goddamn ignorant hippy! And a fuckin' hypocrite to boot.
Let me tell you something, pal. It is perfectly legitimate to question the safety of EVERYTHING in the food supply... ESPECIALLY things that have not had adequate safety testing -- a criteria that applies PRECISELY to GMO crops.
It is also perfectly legitimate to demand labeling. I want to know what's in my food. Don't you? Or do you just randomly dumpster-dive for calories?
I wonder what your daily diet looks like... because you are either full of shit, or you're a fool.
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
It's pushback. After a few decades of trying to let the lies slide off it became time to point out the liars.
...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?
http://cpo.noaa.gov/warmingworld/
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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?
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.
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.
Actually, the IPCC models came out for a long time lower as observed (or the observations were close to the upper limit of the models). And even with the alleged pause of globally raising temperatures, we are still way into the predicted range of raising temperatures.
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.
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.
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.
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Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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.
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
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.
The first IPCC report from 1990 predicted a temperature rise of 0.15 to 0.3C/decade. Since then we have seen a temperature rise of 0.21C per decade: http://woodfortrees.org/data/gistemp-dts/from:1990/trend
Seems like they're doing ok so far.
"alleged pause"? I don't think that anybody is seriously questioning that there has been a "pause" in the rising global temperature observations. In fact it looks as though that is what will even appear in the IPCC report:
"Yet the leaked report makes the extraordinary concession that over the past 15 years, recorded world temperatures have increased at only a quarter of the rate of IPCC claimed when it published its last assessment in 2007.
Back then, it said observed warming over the 15 years from 1990-2005 had taken place at a rate of 0.2C per decade, and it predicted this would continue for the following 20 years, on the basis of forecasts made by computer climate models.
But the new report says the observed warming over the more recent 15 years to 2012 was just 0.05C per decade - below almost all computer predictions."
"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2420783/Worlds-climate-scientists-confess-Global-warming-just-QUARTER-thought--computers-got-effects-greenhouse-gases-wrong.html"