Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
And how long before all of the weeds just think of Roundup as a nice cool sip of water? Time for the next pesticide!
We're already seeing it. Several species of weeds in the midwest (including the already nearly indestructible pigweed and lamb's quarter) have developed not only resistance to Roundup, but a taste for it as a fertilizer. Glyphosate-loving superweeds are not science fiction or theory; they are already reality.
Talk of stronger herbicides is already happening, including the resurrection of Agent Orange:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/07/13/the-escalating-chemical-war-on-weeds/
That I'm right, and you don't like it, doesn't mean I'm a troll.
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!
That's because there's a LOT of fucking sea water.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence
"The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969."
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Good point. To drive it home the top 3 meters (~10 feet) contains as much energy as the whole atmosphere so the top 700 meters contains over 233 atmospheres worth of energy. I don't know if this is a valid calculation but 233 * 0.302 = enough energy for 70 degrees F of atmospheric temperature rise. Even if it's not valid it's obvious the oceans are absorbing a lot more energy than the atmosphere.
...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?
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.
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.