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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.'"
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.
That's exactly what they told Galileo.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
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.
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, 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.
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.