107 Cancer Papers Retracted Due To Peer Review Fraud (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The journal Tumor Biology is retracting 107 research papers after discovering that the authors faked the peer review process. This isn't the journal's first rodeo. Late last year, 58 papers were retracted from seven different journals -- 25 came from Tumor Biology for the same reason. It's possible to fake peer review because authors are often asked to suggest potential reviewers for their own papers. This is done because research subjects are often blindingly niche; a researcher working in a sub-sub-field may be more aware than the journal editor of who is best-placed to assess the work. But some journals go further and request, or allow, authors to submit the contact details of these potential reviewers. If the editor isn't aware of the potential for a scam, they then merrily send the requests for review out to fake e-mail addresses, often using the names of actual researchers. And at the other end of the fake e-mail address is someone who's in on the game and happy to send in a friendly review. This most recent avalanche of fake-reviewed papers was discovered because of extra screening at the journal. According to an official statement from Springer, the company that published Tumor Biology until this year, "the decision was made to screen new papers before they are released to production." The extra screening turned up the names of fake reviewers that hadn't previously been detected, and "in order to clean up our scientific records, we will now start retracting these affected articles...Springer will continue to proactively investigate these issues."

Comments

Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

If cancer research is affected by incidents like this, what's to say that climate science isn't similarly affected?

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Mr D from 63]

Science today has its own cancers.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

If cancer research is affected by incidents like this, what's to say that climate science isn't similarly affected?

And evolution is a hoax! I knew it!

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Applehu Akbar]

If cancer research is affected by incidents like this, what's to say that climate science isn't similarly affected?

Pay no attention to the research assistant behind the curtain!

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent comment should not be -1. Can somebody please mod it up.

It raises a very important question: just how far does this go?

Over 100 papers were involved in this incident alone, according to the summary. The summary also mentions "seven different journals" were affected in some way last year, too.

We aren't talking about some minor field here, like gender studies or art history. Cancer research is one of the most prominent and important areas of research today, with very serious implications and consequences.

If cancer research is so heavily affected by falsely reviewed papers, it should immediately make us question every other journal and every other field out there.

If cancer research is compromised, then the only sensible thing to do is to assume that climate research is compromised, and to assume that computer science research is compromised, and to assume that linguistics research is compromised. This goes for any academic field out there.

Whoever wrongly modded down the parent comment probably isn't intelligent enough to see the big picture here. It isn't just about climate science. It's about all academic research.

Over 100 papers were allegedly improperly reviewed in this one journal alone. The only assumption we can realistically make is that this problem is far more widespread than we may believe.

We'd like to trust research scientists. They're considered some of the most intelligent, educated, and trustworthy people around. But after incidents like this, we can't help but have many questions and lots of doubt.

In fact, if we're truly practicing anything resembling science, we can have only one hypothesis in this situation: all peer-reviewed research may have been affected by faulty peer review processes.

Until proven otherwise, I think we'll have to take any and all academic research with a really big grain of salt.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Barsteward]

"Until proven otherwise, I think we'll have to take any and all academic research with a really big grain of salt."

you like a conspiracy theory don't you... why do you "have to assume" that everything else is as bad?

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Ol Olsoc]

If cancer research is affected by incidents like this, what's to say that climate science isn't similarly affected?

Pay no attention to the research assistant behind the curtain!

As long as humans are involved, there will be fraud along the way. But there is one beg difference between science and the religio-political world. We seek out and correct our fraud and errors. And once the fraud is exposed, the perp is a pariah, as opposed to the other world where they are often re-elected or otherwise rewarded.

Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself. So the tools that did it were extra stupid in their laziness.

As for AC's hand wringing, climate science is not cancer research, with obscure aspects only a few people know anything about. The physics is out there, the data can be perused by anyone, it's like permanent peer review.

In fact, if we want to see intellectual fraud vis-à-vis climate science, we need only look at the denialists work. We'll have to give some rope here, because denialists tend not to publish actual papers, but "publish" on line denial.

But you do the same process. You look at the claims and walk them back to the source. You look at the graphs and check for accuracy and graphic tricks. You check references - although in denialist work, there are not many. You also check timeliness. In an ongoing field of research like climate science, is the latest data being used?

So AC need not worry, climate scientists are acutely aware of the political scrutiny of their work, and are very very careful.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hope for the best, plan for the worst. Better safe than sorry. Etc.

I suppose you subscribe to the fingers-in-ear LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALA philosophy instead. Are you perhaps interested in purchasing a bridge, or perhaps you would care for a game of three card monte instead?

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't a conspiracy 'theory' when there apparently actually have been groups of people carrying out their plans. At that point it is a conspiracy.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's like permanent peer review"

So it's as good as open source software then?
That changes everything. ;)

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Plus1Entropy]

In fact, if we're truly practicing anything resembling science, we can have only one hypothesis in this situation: all peer-reviewed research may have been affected by faulty peer review processes.

Ah yes, the oft forgotten rule of science; we are only allowed to have one hypothesis. Oh wait, you just made that up.

Over 100 papers were allegedly improperly reviewed in this one journal alone. The only assumption we can realistically make is that this problem is far more widespread than we may believe.

This is like saying that since someone is found to be a serial murderer, we should assume that their neighbors are also serial killers. Even if we have no actual murders to tie them to, the only assumption we can realistically make is that this problem is far more widespread than we may believe.

So you have your hypothesis, that's fine. The next step is to find evidence that supports it, which comes before you assert that your hypothesis is the One To Rule Them All.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Notabadguy]

Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself. So the tools that did it were extra stupid in their laziness.

That's speculation. The only KNOWN thing is that the authors of the papers perpetrated fraud to get peer reviewed and published. No research has been done into replicating methodology, experiments, or results.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Megol]

(snip)

Over 100 papers were allegedly improperly reviewed in this one journal alone. The only assumption we can realistically make is that this problem is far more widespread than we may believe.

No that's what _you_ can make. However your understanding of logic and science is obviously lacking. The evidence doesn't support your conclusion.

We'd like to trust research scientists. They're considered some of the most intelligent, educated, and trustworthy people around. But after incidents like this, we can't help but have many questions and lots of doubt.

Reasonable people expect them to be people. Anti-scientist idiots paint them as greedy lying bastards that want to turn people from God. Very few ordinary people have your idea of angels in flesh...

In fact, if we're truly practicing anything resembling science, we can have only one hypothesis in this situation: all peer-reviewed research may have been affected by faulty peer review processes.

That's not even remotely related to being scientific. Using the same train of thoughts would lead to the conclusion that because homosexual behavior is widespread in nature (fact) not only are homosexuality natural as occurring in nature without external forcing factors (fact) but all animals are homosexual. Instead the logical conclusion is that homosexuality exists, is natural but _not_ the only (nor the most common) sexual orientation.

Until proven otherwise, I think we'll have to take any and all academic research with a really big grain of salt.

Bullshit. First of all maybe you should note that the research itself haven't been disproved (yet at least) second maybe you should compare the amount of research done with the the amount of known faulty peer reviews. Or your "logic" would say that because there are fake dollar bills around all dollar bills should be taken "with a really big grain of salt".

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[Megol]

I guess you don't believe in gravity either?

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[ITRambo]

When there are a high number of faked peer reviews, and the public learns of them, I expect a growing number of "science is wrong" and flat-earth thinking in reponse. I see it more all the time on social media. We need to be criminally punish these fraudsters. A slap on the wrist isn't enough.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Oligonicella]

Because this is only the last of a series of revelations that research papers have been fraudulently produced?

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

If cancer research is affected by incidents like this, what's to say that climate science isn't similarly affected?

You can't say that, especially on "Earth Day". Progressives react harshly to such speech.
Seeing that this post kicked off a fairly substantial thread I hope more level headed minds will upmod you.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Kjella]

Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself. So the tools that did it were extra stupid in their laziness.

If they didn't do the peer review, it's probably because the work wouldn't survive it.

As for AC's hand wringing, climate science is not cancer research, with obscure aspects only a few people know anything about.

Climate models are huge and complex, only a few people can truly claim to understand them. They're not lab experiments where you can easily isolate causes and exclude other factors or extrapolate how the ecosystem will respond. There's huge local variations in climate that people use as proof or counter-proof because this year was particularly cold or warm without any validity as a global phenomenon.

That said, just because there's a lot of detail we're working on doesn't mean there's much doubt about the big picture. Take evolution for example, we're still doing tons of research into the exact mechanisms that create and divide species but there's no real scientific competition from creationism or lamarckism that genetics isn't real. "Survival of the fittest" does work as a one-liner summary.

The greenhouse effect is clearly real, if Earth had no atmosphere it would have a surface temperature of -18C instead of +14C. So when they're talking about trying to keep the temperature change because of human activity under 2C we're really talking about a <10% change in the effect. We are just a small part of a pretty big puzzle of how this all works.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Until proven otherwise, I think we'll have to take any and all academic research with a really big grain of salt."

you like a conspiracy theory don't you... why do you "have to assume" that everything else is as bad?

Not everything else - just climate research.

Because if you express skepticism towards towards the current "OMG we're all gonna die!" extreme rhetoric (that, if you haven't noticed, doesn't come from actual climate scientists but rather those that for some reason want to blame humanity, especially white European cultures...), you're labelled a heretic, errr, denier.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Humbubba]

A.C. wrote:

If cancer research is affected by incidents like this (fraud), what's to say that climate science isn't similarly affected?

Actually, you're right in both senses of the word. For example, the eminent scientist Frederick Seitz, a true genius, fought scientific evidence and spread disinformation and doubt about smoking. He was paid to keep doubt alive about the causal link between cancer and smoking in order to keep the tobacco industry safe from litigation and regulation. He went on to use these same techniques in the employ of other industries, spreading doubt about acid rain, CFCs, pesticides, and, yes, global warming. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Seitz#Criticism

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Barsteward]

"current "OMG we're all gonna die!" extreme rhetoric" - thats your flawed representation of the issue so you will ridiculed if you take that tone. the cancer papers problem is from just a relatively few morons trying to game the system, no need to cast the net further to others because that is just trying to create a conspiracy to create doubt. Prove you accusation about climate research otherwise you haven't got a leg to stand on.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

And by "similarly", you mean in a minor way that doesn't actually refute the existence of cancer? Of course it could.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

107 incidents in one journal isn't just 'relatively few'. It's a huge number. One incident we could brush off. But 107 incidents indicates a systemic problem.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[The Real Dr John]

You are an idiot. They didn't say all cancer research articles were suspect, just a minute fraction of the total number published. And no one brought up climate research except you. But as an AC, you were just yanking people's chains without having the guts to say who you are. Pitiful. Log in next time, and try and say something intelligent, if that is possible.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[religionofpeas]

107 incidents in one journal isn't just 'relatively few'.

One journal is not a huge number.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the summary:

Late last year, 58 papers were retracted from seven different journals -- 25 came from Tumor Biology for the same reason.

It's not just one journal. It's many of them, including one that has experienced this problem repeatedly. It's a systemic problem.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[sysrammer]

"Until proven otherwise, I think we'll have to take any and all academic research with a really big grain of salt."

Ah, yes, guilty until proven otherwise. We humans do seem to like working in that mode. (As a sidebar, I do appreciate that some govts make it illegal to do that, in some cases.)

I read on the internet that AC's rape their pets. Until proven otherwise, I think we'll have to assume that any and all AC's are screwing the pooch.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[religionofpeas]

It's not just one journal. It's many of them

Seven out of how many journals ?

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[slashrio]

Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself.

So it turned out the papers weren't really peer reviewed at all.
So much for science then. Good they were retracted.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[slashrio]

Climate models are huge and complex...
And their alarming 'predictions' can't be trusted because they span a parameter space that they've not been (*cough..) 'calibrated' in.
Modeling is nice, but models by definition don't describe reality. Let alone an unknown one.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[slashrio]

Cancer and climate 'science' have a thing in common: There's a lot of money involved.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[slashrio]

Worst case scenario. You can't trust 'the papers' anymore, so you can't trust any paper, even if it claims to have been peer reviewed.
So until all 'peer reviews' have been reviewed, we have to fear the worst.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[bloodstar]

There were around 2.5 million papers are published in 2015. So if you are going to freak out over this, you're probably the same type of guy who thinks it safer to drive a car than fly somewhere.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[slashrio]

No, you're wrong.
The authority of science is based on the trust that is vested in the peer review.
The hypothesis that peer reviewed science is true science, is falsified if even only 1 example can be found in which the theory isn't true.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[slashrio]

I hope more level headed minds will upmod you.

No they don't. Because they get reported for hate speech or trolling by the not-so-level-headed people here who wage a religious war for AGW acceptance (and other things--vaccines come to mind...).
So the level headed people lose their mod points, and, because of the level-headed people that they are, they do not retribute that with flagging the AGW-warriors (and there's others too) for hate speech or trolling.
So the bad guys get the mod points, and the good guys loose them.
Welcome to /.

(watch this post getting modded down :)

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Ol Olsoc]

Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself. So the tools that did it were extra stupid in their laziness.

If they didn't do the peer review, it's probably because the work wouldn't survive it.

That doesn't account for laziness. We don't know if the work itself was bad. I'm suspicious it might be, but it needs reviewed properly.

Climate models are huge and complex, only a few people can truly claim to understand them. They're not lab experiments where you can easily isolate causes and exclude other factors or extrapolate how the ecosystem will respond. There's huge local variations in climate that people use as proof or counter-proof because this year was particularly cold or warm without any validity as a global phenomenon.

Deniers often do claim that the weather outside their window is enough data to refute AGW. I have no doubt that they might have a little problem understanding the modes and the data.

But you and I both know that isn't the real issue. I don't hear anything about radioactivity not being real, and that nucs are some other process is involved. its just accepted. We don't hear much about cosmology, even though it isn't remotely as settled as the greenhouse effect, and there are some pretty active controversies going on, and not many people understand it.

Its money, and who's ox is gored, and who is getting paid for their vote, and inertia, and how somehow the laws of physics has become affiliated with a political party or not. Where once upon a time, not many years ago, the greenhouse effect was believed by most, and how now, scientists are scrambling to save climate data before it is destroyed http://www.businessinsider.com... Who knew that in 21st Century America, that science could become illegal?

That said, just because there's a lot of detail we're working on doesn't mean there's much doubt about the big picture. Take evolution for example, we're still doing tons of research into the exact mechanisms that create and divide species but there's no real scientific competition from creationism or lamarckism that genetics isn't real. "Survival of the fittest" does work as a one-liner summary.

The greenhouse effect is clearly real, if Earth had no atmosphere it would have a surface temperature of -18C instead of +14C.

And yet, people will differ http://www.energycentral.com/c... http://blog.nosuchthingasgreen...

So when they're talking about trying to keep the temperature change because of human activity under 2C we're really talking about a <10% change in the effect. We are just a small part of a pretty big puzzle of how this all works.

It is small in some respects, rather large in others. In addition, there are some wild cards such as methane released by warming: http://www.natureworldnews.com...

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Ol Olsoc]

Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself.

So it turned out the papers weren't really peer reviewed at all. So much for science then. Good they were retracted.

Yes, it was good they were retracted. That's science working to expose the people who don't follow the rules.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[jedidiah]

Science today is having it's own religious fit of a protest march. it's truly fitting that this is being posted today. Science very much needs heretics. Zealots like Tyson and Nye don't help the cause of science by trying to be inquisitors.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[jedidiah]

> Yes, it was good they were retracted. That's science working to expose the people who don't follow the rules.

That only works if you are allowed to be a heretic. If you are expected to always follow blindly (like Tyson and Nye suggest), then such investigation isn't going to occur.

That attitude should be encouraged NEVER. It doesn't even matter if you're a "mere layman" expected to just passively swallow whatever the current scientific establishment comes up with.

If a middle school teacher or a museum curator can't manage not alienating people, try employing a magician.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[jedidiah]

I can and have replicated the experiments in that area. This is part of any decent public school education. What you are suggesting is that we should take anything on faith that is more complex than that.

I became an atheist not so much of my disbelief in the supernatural but of my mistrust of mere mortals that were the gatekeepers of the relevant knowledge. I knew that they were fallible and corruptible.

Why should I hold science to a lower standard than religion?

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Mr D from 63]

Scattered groups of protesters, many of whom likely could not even carry on a decent conversation about scientific method, some of whom are just on board because its a protest, is not what science needs. Science needs proper representation in the media instead of a bunch of ignorant science and tech reporters who taint everything with their politics.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[jedidiah]

> There were around 2.5 million papers are published in 2015. So if you are going to freak out over this, you're probably the same type of guy who thinks it safer to drive a car than fly somewhere.

If this were a controversy over some regional carrier completely dropping the ball on their maintenance and inspections, then such a conclusion would be entirely warranted. The entire FAA inspection regime would be called into question.

The same is actually true for the USDA if you actually have half a brain cell. Certain foods like chicken should be treated like a deadly biohazard always.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Ol Olsoc]

If a middle school teacher or a museum curator can't manage not alienating people, try employing a magician.

I suggest getting all our science information off of politicians who are paid for their votes and beliefs. Hard to go wrong that way, and its proven by history to be the only sure fire path to the truth.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Ol Olsoc]

Its also good to point out that the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself. So the tools that did it were extra stupid in their laziness.

That's speculation. The only KNOWN thing is that the authors of the papers perpetrated fraud to get peer reviewed and published. No research has been done into replicating methodology, experiments, or results.

So if you are agreeing with me, fine. If you are disagreeing with me, try reading what I wrote again.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[Ol Olsoc]

"It's like permanent peer review"

So it's as good as open source software then? That changes everything. ;)

Just about!

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Plus1Entropy]

The authority of science is based on the trust that is vested in the peer review.

I am speaking about science the method, where the only "authority" is empirical evidence gained through repeatable experiments. The authority you are speaking of is the institution (or community) of science.

Peer review is not a fundamental part of the scientific method. You are more than welcome to distrust all peer reviewed research and attempt to repeat or falsify the results yourself. Strictly speaking, the scientific method demands that we do just that, but we generally don't because it's highly impractical.

The hypothesis that peer reviewed science is true science, is falsified if even only 1 example can be found in which the theory isn't true.

I'm not sure what you mean by "true" science, but it seems that you have switched to another common meaning of the word, which is science the accepted body of knowledge. Just because something has been peer reviewed doesn't mean it automatically becomes a part of scientific knowledge. In other words, you're right, the hypothesis is false, but it's not the revelation you think it is.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are you going to find all those right-wing scientists though? Reality has a liberal bias.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[riverat1]

If cancer research is affected by incidents like this, what's to say that climate science isn't similarly affected?

Perhaps but when I hear about incidents like this it seems like it nearly always involves the medical field or something like sociology or psychology, seldom the harder sciences. When I hear about it in climate science it usually seems to be the contrarians who are the ones being called out.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[chihowa]

I'm a scientist and I don't give two shits about any "authority" of science and have little unreserved trust in peer review. Likewise for "true science", whatever that is. Those are terms that apply more to religion or politics, which you can keep for yourself.

Science, as far as I'm interested in it, is all about well controlled variables and repeatability. I've seen plenty of published work that I'm skeptical about and what I take away from those works is that they can't be trusted. Implying that all of science (or the scientific method) is phony because some published results are fishy is incredibly simple-minded.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

We already know it is. Google "climategate".

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[MrL0G1C]

Yeah, I bet it doesn't even get hot inside greenhouses, it's just a ruse to sell more glass. ~

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

"...The only KNOWN thing is that the authors of the papers perpetrated fraud ..."
Nothing at all is known at this point. Without the names of all the involved Researchers, their hosting Institutions, and the content of the actual Papers themselves, we know _Nothing_.
This isn't Science. This is Gossip at the Water Fountain.
We know that Victor Ninov was a Fraud because great care was taken to expose him, well knowing that the careers and reputation of those working with him could and would be ruined. Unfortunately, that is sometimes how the Scientific Method has to work.
Until Springer releases the names, at a minimum, they have no more integrity than the National Enquirer.

(I knew, worked with, and quite liked, Ninov. Very few here can know of the disappointment, of the professional gut punch, of being taken in by this kind of Con Man. You expect this behavior maybe on Wall Street or in Washington. Not in the hills of Berkeley.)

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

The climate is one of the biggest ethical and moral issues facing humanity.

Now a question is, what is the biggest motivator to ethically minded scientists, money or morals?

Given the heavy moral weight resting on climate scientists and their work, do you think they can remain objective about all data and findings? Treat all questions with a cold hard gaze, uncaring about whether any finding and its interpretation, regardless of whether the interpretation supports or hinders the consensus view?

It is not rocket science that human judgement is always prone to bias, no matter how smart and learned people are.

As for money, I'd expect the world's energy supply is going to be big money and big business no matter which companies provide the energy and regardless of where the energy comes from and in what form. We are not talking about the mating habits of an obscure rare beetle.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Ol Olsoc]

The climate is one of the biggest ethical and moral issues facing humanity.

Now a question is, what is the biggest motivator to ethically minded scientists, money or morals?

Given the heavy moral weight resting on climate scientists and their work, do you think they can remain objective about all data and findings?

Being humans, some will and some won't. Does not change the laws of physics however. Certainly we understand what happens to morality when money is involved. And if an immoral person goes into a field like climate science, which is currently being eliminated in one country of note, the idea that they are doing it for money is amusing to say the least.

As well, you do realize that the scientist doesn't pocket that money. You have someone hwo is making a decent, but in most cases doesn't fit into Mitt Romney's version of middle class. Above 250K per annum. There is a lot more money at present by becoming a politician and taking the baksheesh from the industries that want the denial.

Regardless, that's science versus corrupt politica as is openly practiced. Physics won't change.

Treat all questions with a cold hard gaze, uncaring about whether any finding and its interpretation, regardless of whether the interpretation supports or hinders the consensus view?

All questions? Should I have to prove to everyone on earth that the sun is not a burning lump of coal? Or spend years to debunking the theory of Anaxagoras? Then again and again and again, not actually accomplishing anything, but paitently answering peopel who have no intention of believing - only hindering me?

The onus is on the questioner at some point. It is trivially easy to prove that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and that you can as a human, release sequestered Carbon dioxide into the experiment (all it takes is introducing the gases form a vinegar and baking soda reaction into the enclosure, and measure the resulting change in heat retention.

What is more, if there is anything I don't understand, I can work my way backwards to the basic principles to verify them.

It is not rocket science that human judgement is always prone to bias, no matter how smart and learned people are.

As for money, I'd expect the world's energy supply is going to be big money and big business no matter which companies provide the energy and regardless of where the energy comes from and in what form. We are not talking about the mating habits of an obscure rare beetle.

And I note, we could round up the scientists, put them in a closed room and kill them with Carbon Dioxide gas, and search out and kill anyone that agrees with the scientists, and it wouldn't change the basic laws of physics. All the money in the world isn't going to change that, and not believing in science will not change it either.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, it gives an opening for people to point to as data for all science. Because if this, why not all or most? You can't trust what you can't trust. Examples need to be made of them.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

This so perfectly captured my sentiments on the march and what science needs.

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

The point is not to say that all science is fake, it is to say that as a matter of trust and integrity if this can happen, how far does it go? Trust needs to be brought back and examples need to be made. If you have 10 parts of a truth and 2 aren't or are half then people aren't going to trust it at all. Facts can stand on their own, they don't need "extra help" like this.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Bongo]

I think these are general talking points and they don't prove anything either way.

But I don't understand the claim that it is basic physics. Yes, a part of it is basic physics. But the rest of it is not. I gather many skeptics accept that CO2 on its own gives you about a degree of warming. Everything after that is largely modelled feedbacks.

How any why any particular scientific field and speciality might have gotten the theory wrong is a matter for sociologists and philosophers. We KNOW that particular fields can and do sometimes get it spectacularly wrong, like 100% the wrong way round, and that if those big errors could be prevented, people would prevent them, but shit happens. A big one has been, which has come to light recently, is nutrition and the theory that people should eat low-fat and eat mostly healthy grains. A view is spreading now amongst some scientists and doctors that that "low fat" public health advice wasn't just a bit off, it actually caused the obesity and diabetes epidemic. Sure it was supposed to be basic physics like, "energy in = energy out". Yet it was wrong and it is now costing the health services billions in people's poor health, all because a group of researchers back in the day, led their field down a particular path, where they were including evidence which supported their theory, and ignoring evidence which didn't. These were the top people in their field. The most influential and respected.

So sometimes shit happens. The problem is knowing whether it is happening now. There just are no guarantees.

Calling it "basic physics" is just a way to gloss over the fact that scientific truth is never easy to obtain. I totally accepted climate change (back when it was called global warming) because it is "science", until people started claiming it was all "settled" and "trust the authorities" and started calling critics "deniers". That's not science that's a public relations strategy, and a very bad one if the facts are really on your side.

And besides if one wants to judge trustworthiness based on vested interests, then why not nuclear and say they have an interest in quietly promoting climate change as that will, inevitably, lead to the need to renew nuclear? It isn't like we a are going to turn the lights off. And I have no qualms about nuclear, maybe it is the best idea, but it would be maybe naive to think that the nuclear industry is incapable of quietly promoting climate change over a 38 year period since Three Mile Island, due to the massive public rejection they were facing?

I'm not claiming that has happened, just that the vested interests argument is moot when everyone has a vested interest. What matters is whether the science is open to scrutiny and calling everyone "deniers" is not a good sign. And it is not "basic physics". That's just more public relations spin.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[SNRatio]

Because this type of fraud is rampant in China and India (look at the author lists in the retraction note: all at Chinese institutions) and much more rare in the US and Europe.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[SNRatio]

If you would like to use this as evidence for a sweeping and universal hypothesis, shouldn't you at least have a brief look at the retraction notice that the story is based on?

https://link.springer.com/arti...

From a first glance, all of the papers come from China (click on affiliations to see which institutes they work at). China and India have been notorious as paper mills for decades. So why are you extrapolating this to work from countries where peer reviewers are ,a, very easy for editors to directly find and contact, and ,b, can usually be communicated with directly without the need for a translator?

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your own confirmation bias is not objective reality, numbnuts. That 'liberal bias' you're project onto reality is an amalgomation of your own conclusions superimposed on top of what you observe through your own tainted lens. Real, actual science has no bias of any kind. Rather, the conclusions made after observations are gathered have a high probability of revealing the biases of the observer unless careful methods (double-blind, etc.) are enacted to fiter those observation effects. But even then, some problems are so broadly stated that the conclusions made after experimentation should be thrown out as imprecise (or, possibly more accurately, improperly precise.) Nice try, but your own self-evident biases very effectively render your statement untrue. In short, you just proved yourself wrong in a single sentence.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[Ol Olsoc]

I think these are general talking points and they don't prove anything either way.

But I don't understand the claim that it is basic physics.

The basic physics behind this all is energy. A body in orbit around an energy source like the sun will receive energy from the star. This energy transfer might be used to perform work, or heat. A body such as Mercury, which gets a lot of energy for the sun, but has no storage other than it's rocky surface, will show huge differences between it's daytime temperature of 700 Kelvin, and it's nighttime temperature of 100 Kelvin. The amount of insolation that Mercury receives is understood, and the temperatures observed let us know what is the physical attributes of the planet.

The earth also receives solar insolation, but something is different. The earth has an average temperature that does not have the wild excursions that Mercury has, and also is higher than expected. Something is different. There is residual internal radioactive decay based heat but on the surface that is negligible except for localized sources like volcanos. So how is it that the night time temperatures on earth do not plunge like they do on Mercury?

First thing is that the rotational period of the Earth is much higher. A person on Mercury would only see one day every two years. But without some property that retains energy, every place on earth would freeze every night.

What is another big difference between Earth and Mercury? I'll cut to the chase here - atmosphere. The atmosphere consists of several different gases. Mostly Nitrogen, Oxygen, Argon, and Carbon Dioxide, and Water vapor.

As it turns out, by virtue of basic experiments, Water vapor turns out to have a lot of energy absorption. And by experiment, add roughly between 40 to 70 percent of the energy retention ability of the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide between 10 ant 26 percent, Methane between 5 and 10 percent, and Ozone between 3 and 7 percent. This is all verifiable by experiment and is reproducible.

Note that water vapor has a strong local variation, and that CO2 is actually not as strong a greenhouse gas as many others. Methane is more powerful in energy retention. It is a bit of a wild card at this point because recent large releases were not accounted for in earlier models. It also degrades in the atmosphere sooner thant CO2 - although it's still not considered short term. There are also gases known as anti-greenhouse gases, that have less transmittance of energy inbound than outbound, which is to say that they act to release more energy to space than they retain in energy. These typically come from volcanic eruptions, and in the form of sulfur aerosols. Nasty stuff, sulfuric acid. This is a short term effect, since the Sulfuric acid eventually rains out.

Now from basic experiments we come to comparing the laboratory effects to real life effects. They compare pretty nicely. So well in fact, that it takes an extraordinary effrot to refute them with any credence. The observed effects line up with the theory, which lines up with the observed data in the geologic order. and across more than one discipline.

Is it possible that there is no such thing as global warming by increased amount of Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Absolutely possible. But a whole hellava lot of basic physics would have to be discarded and rewritten. The situation is very simlar toYoung earth creationists. Ya gotta have something to replace all of the physics that must be abandoned and replace it with something else that looks exactly like the abandoned physics, except for that one single thing you don't believe in

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[david_thornley]

The science is open to scrutiny. What it is not open to is unreasoning carping and nitpicking. The "deniers" are people who refuse to accept that AGW is happening, and are immune to evidence to the contrary. They typically look for little inconsistencies and things that sound odd, and libel climate scientists. (After all, if climate scientists are virtually unanimous in saying AGW is going on, and the denier wants to claim it isn't, something has to be wrong about virtually all climate scientists.)

The basic physics isn't definitive, but it's strong anyway. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, meaning that it will absorb energy. There's more in the atmosphere than there used to be, and the CO2 in the atmosphere has, proportionately, less Carbon-14 than it used to. This is consistent with it being from burning fossil fuels, which will be very low in C-14 due to radioactive decay. (This is how we do carbon dating: we examine carbon in an object and note the C-12 to C-14 ratio, which is greater the older the object is.) Given more CO2, we have more heat retention.

Any theory denying global warming will (besides denying all the careful temperature measurements) have to account for this. What is the decrease of energy reaching Earth, and/or what is the mechanism for letting more heat out? Any theory denying the anthropogenic quality will have to show how the CO2 level is increasing from natural causes, and why burning fossil fuels shouldn't increase the amount of CO2 in the air, and why the isotopic concentration is changing. There's no sign of anything that would be increasing Earth's albedo in order to reflect more sunlight, lowering the amount of heat coming in (there are assorted proposals to do just this) to anywhere near the extent necessary.

The details of what happens with global warming are really difficult to figure out, but the general overview is simple.

Nutrition is a different issue. It's far more complicated than climate science, since the human body is more complicated than the Earth's surface. Earth is a mostly closed system, with sunlight being the main input and radiating into space the main output. The human body is not a closed system. I breathe in nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and some less common gasses. I exhale those and other gasses. I lose energy through conduction, convection, and evaporative cooling (radiation is probably not significant here). I lose potential energy by excreting stuff that contains chemical potential energy. The whole calories in == energy out is technically true, but not really useful. It would be necessary to account for all energy flows. Burning food in a bomb calorimeter and measuring the potential energy doesn't mean that's the energy that will be used by the body. The human body adapts in complicated ways to its diet, with two bodies not necessarily adapting in the same way..

There's always been "these people live on that diet and they're a lot healthier than you'd think" issues. Nutrition has always seemed to me to be shaky at best. Climate science is pretty solid by comparison.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[david_thornley]

Until proven otherwise, I think we'll have to take any and all academic research with a really big grain of salt.

If you're talking about individual papers, that's the right attitude. If you're talking about science more generally, it isn't. Science, like all fields, has always had its little corruptions. Science, however, has ways of dealing with these and finding things out regardless of mistakes and fraud. Some researchers will always screw up, some will be positively deceptive, and the majority are doing good science. If a paper is published that is wrong, it will not fit into the growing body of knowledge, and it will eventually either be ignored or found out.

There are fraudulent cancer papers. Treatment of cancer has gotten far, far better over the last fifty years anyway. There are presumably fraudulent climate science papers, but we're still warming up. There are presumably fraudulent computer science papers, but our knowledge of computers keeps getting better. (Computer science is not the same thing as programming, any more than physics is the same thing as making a machine.)

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[david_thornley]

Religion isn't objectively verifiable. You can look at source documents, but there's no reason to think they're more accurate than, say, Aristotle's physics. If you trace what people say and write back, you'll find that there isn't any sort of objective standard. You may have some sort of spiritual sense, and you can evaluate religious claims based on that, but that's hardly objective.

Science is objectively verifiable. You can look at source documents, and you'll be told what the observations were and what they apparently mean. You can't check all of any significant scientific field, since it's far too big, but you can spot-check whatever you like, assuming you can understand the lingo. (Twenty-five years ago, I found that I could easily understand what experimental psychology papers meant, but not a lot of the papers on physics.)

Re: Could climate science be affected, too?

[david_thornley]

107 incidents in one journal doesn't indicate a serious systemic problem. How many papers in that journal were examined? How typical is that journal out of how many journals? How much influence do these papers have? If influential, how long before someone gets conflicting results and throws things into doubt that will eventually be resolved?

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[david_thornley]

The effects of vaccination and global warming are things you can look into yourself. You don't have to take those things on faith. Look into them as much as you like. There is no religious war of AGW acceptance, although there seems to be one for denial (which is less than the political war against it in the US). There is no religious war for vaccination. It's all a matter of people looking at the evidence and drawing conclusions. If you don't like the conclusions, you're welcome to look at the evidence yourself.

Fortunately for your karma, Slashdot has no (-1, Really Really Stupid) mod.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[slashrio]

The effects of ... and global warming are things you can look into yourself.

This remark moved the goal post from anthropogenic GW to GW in general. Of course we can measure GW. Attributing it to anthropogenic causes is a bit more difficult. Simulation models are no rigid proof and they also don't convince me.
So, to me attributing GW to 'A' is a bit of a leap of faith, rather than hard evidence, especially in light of all the uncertainties around our understanding of what exactly is going on.
So, I don't agree with 'the conclusions'.

There is no religious war for vaccination.

Before large scale vaccination (in the Western world) started, the morbidity and mortality from infectious diseases were already going downhill very rapidly due to improved hygienic conditions, nutrition and general welfare. Attributing the further decline solely to the vaccination campaigns seems a bit spurious to me.
Since the USA ramped up the vaccinations childhood death is one of the highest among the developed countries. Now I know this isn't proof of vaccine damage, but it surely could make one think about it.
And insisting that the Disney World Measles 'Epidemic' was caused by unvaccinated persons is also a bit funny if a large number of people who contracted the measles were fully vaccinated. So there's still a lot of room for discussion, now that you mentioned it...

Now if you want to talk about vaccines in underdeveloped countries, then I could agree with you that there is room for disease control using vaccines. But history shows that it might also be a good (or maybe better?) idea to just improve the living conditions of the people in those countries and see a steep decline in epidemics.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[david_thornley]

You can look at the evidence for yourself. The basic physics behind AGW is dead simple. If you don't bother, and just go on vague generalities, don't expect us to pay attention to your opinions.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[slashrio]

The problem with the 'basic physics' is that we still don't know whether that's all and what negative feedback loops we have missed, or what loops still don't exist but will suddenly occur when temperature rises one degree, or more. It's all very non-linear, which makes it very complex and difficult to model and even more difficult to accurately predict. If you call this vague generalities' then maybe they are, but I stick to it nevertheless.
My other problem with AGW is that Al Gore wants me to pay for it so he can earn money off of it, which makes his propaganda a bit suspicious, and then there is this.
To be honest, I think we are being played and I smell a rat which they are trying to hide behind a huge pile of incomprehensible 'science'. Incomprehensible at least for the normal person.

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[david_thornley]

The basic physics says that, when we burn fossil fuels and raise the CO2 content of the air, we'll warm up without a corresponding decrease in solar input and/or an increase in what we radiate into space. The naive conclusion is that burning lots of fossil fuels creates global warming. This should be comprehensible to most people. Some of the other things are understandable: more energy in the atmosphere causes more severe weather, the melting of land ice increases sea level (there's also the increase from the oceans getting warmer), and it changes the climate from what it historically has been. Are you having trouble with these concepts?

Your other problem with global warming is that you don't like some politicians? And some sort of investor website ignores the science involved? You do realize that you can get summaries from actual climate scientists, don't you? And that a politically or financially motivated scientific conspiracy that involves scientists the world over is really, really far-fetched? And that any climate scientists who comes up with other theories that fit the evidence will win big in their careers?

Re:Could climate science be affected, too?

[slashrio]

Sorry about the link.

Sharpen the saw.

[denbesten]

Good to see the Journal is doing their job. Hopefully they are hardening their proactive procedures to catch these shenanigans before it turns into more bad PR for their own publication.

Re: Sharpen the saw.

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it 'doing their job' if these very questionable papers got through in the first place? Wouldn't 'doing their job' have meant that these would have been detected right away?

Re: Sharpen the saw.

[Plus1Entropy]

Wouldn't 'doing their job' have meant that these would have been detected right away?

No, because this is a partially iterative process which requires feedback from past mistakes to correct itself.

Re: Sharpen the saw.

[denbesten]

Detecting ones own errors and humbly correcting them are respectful virtues. Never making mistakes is beyond the capabilities of us mere mortals.

From TFA,

Tumor Biology ... open about the past instances of peer review fraud, and ... have already introduced new robust peer review practices expected from all SAGE journals.

So what this article is saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is that the Tumor Biology journal did its job in preventing scientific fraud and is now being punished in the media for it simply by having attention brought to their clean-up efforts.

Re: So what this article is saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how it was 'prevented'. It apparently happened at least 107 times. That doesn't sound like prevention to me. There wouldn't need to be 'clean-up efforts', to use your words, if true prevention had been taking place here. Prevention means stopping something before it actually happens. Prevention does not mean dealing with the repercussions of something happening; it's too late at that point.

Re: So what this article is saying...

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly.

It is the equivalent of saying that you prevented the attack because the perpetrator only stabbed 107 people.

These journals can directly affect people's lives and failures of due diligence are inexcusable.

Re: So what this article is saying...

[jedidiah]

In cancer terms, this is like calling a Bone Marrow Transplant "prevention".

Money corrupts

[Archtech]

You see the influence of money, and the power it commands, everywhere nowadays. Sportspeople who, 50 years ago, were forbidden to earn a penny from their talent on pain of exclusion for professionalism, can now earn millions in a few short years. Result: an explosion of drug-taking and other forms of cheating. Politicians who had no visible property and very little income when they began their careers seem to retire as multi-millionaires. Result: an explosion of dishonest practices, including treason. But the worst of all is the corrosive influence of money on science - which used to be the hallmark of reliable, objective truth. It's usually quite subtle, indirect, almost unnoticeable. But it leads to very clear and definite consequences. Scientists who challenge the established paradigms are no longer just up against intellectual inertia; they will be mocked, traduced, slandered and often find that strings are pulled to get them dismissed or ignored.

One good example (out of the thousands that could be mentioned) is the career of Dr John Yudkin, the British scientist who suggested 40 years ago that dietary fat was unlikely to cause disease, and that sugar was a much more likely cultprit. That ran directly counter to the gospel being preached (most profitably) by the American scientist Dr Ancel Keys, who told the world that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, strokes and cancer. Keys directly libelled and slandered Yudkin, with the result that his work was disgracefully neglected. Today it is perfectly clear that, in all essentials, Yudkin was right and Keys was wrong. But guess which of them died rich and famous?

"Pure, White and Deadly" by Dr John Yudkin https://www.amazon.com/Pure-Wh...

Re:Money corrupts

[Anonymous Coward]

You see the influence of money, and the power it commands, everywhere nowadays. Sportspeople who, 50 years ago, were forbidden to earn a penny from their talent on pain of exclusion for professionalism, can now earn millions in a few short years. Result: an explosion of drug-taking and other forms of cheating. ...

WTF?

I guess you're not aware that back in the 1800s, Tour de France organizers actually went through the trouble of creating posters that explicitly warned cyclists that they had to provide their own damn PEDs - Tour de France organizers weren't going to do it.

Or maybe you forget that there's sworn testimony that Willy Mays himself distributed amphetamines.

And you haven't noticed that half of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers are already dead from diseases all strongly linked to steroid overuse.

What planet are you on where athletes didn't cheat until recently?

Re:Money corrupts

[rmdingler]

Regarding professional athletes, enough information has been revealed to suggest the problem is systemic, and in many cases, it became necessary to use performance enhancers just to level the playing field.

Cheating in the Olympics extends now to even the site selection process; major league baseball didn't even have an agreement with the player's association in place to test for many PEDs until the release of Jose Canseco's book; and US football has seen the size and speed of its athletes increase to the point they no longer even resemble ordinary people.

It seems absurd that scientific researchers need follow in these footsteps, yet we find the same cheat-to-get-ahead mentality in our best and brightest people. Though science can do without the shackles of religious belief, it ought still be burdened with a basic morality.

Good research

[TheOuterLinux]

Good research is reproducible and those that conduct it should be able to defend any claims and not rely on peer pressure, social media zeitgeist, or half-baked statistics no one will check. Research isn't out to prove anything but to enlighten the capable and intelligent to make their own inferences and act on them. Problem is, anyone reading this on mobile device probably do not fit such criteria and should just stick with Facebook where it's safe and comfortable. Google search has a nice cookie/IP bubble for you too.

Re:Good research

[Pinky's Brain]

A ton of research is not reproducible without cooperation from the researchers without having to spend inordinate amounts of time, perhaps more than the original research.

If the intent of publishing was to help other researchers reproduce it, it would need massive changes. The paper would be more like an abstract ... the real meat would be in the data, the software, the hardware designs and perhaps most importantly the lab notebooks.

Re:Good research

[david_thornley]

Taking the authors' data and applying the authors' methods should lead to the authors' conclusion. That isn't reproduction. Reproduction is doing something independently (not necessarily the exact same thing) and getting compatible results. If you don't trust people to get things right, why would you think the data was properly collected and not deliberately fudged?

Re:Good research

[TheOuterLinux]

I would hope reproducing research would take longer because just reproducing it doesn't do anyone any good, you should want to use previous work to incorporate into your own hypothesis and eliminate any confounding variables the original authors may have in their discussion section. Most research papers are only 10 pages...maybe. I've come across a few that are about 40-50 pages long with no skipping on the math or setup. I think people don't go too much into detail because of the expense and time in publishing, or lack confidence in their work (college students are notorious for this), or the researchers have more future ideas that may lead to a patent.

As for me, I try to take down everything I can. Give you an example, I've been creating and maintaining my own Linux distro for personal research for a while now. Everything I do to it, regardless of whether I have a new release as of yet, goes here: https://github.com/theouterlin.... Any updates contradicting what I have said previously gets a note below it either as [See entry ...] or [Update "Date":] and so forth. I'm still kind of playing around with the format. But, I have this "journey journal" of sorts not just because it may help someone else create their own distro, but as a way to build trust.

I wish we could all see researcher's lab notebooks, as god-awful as most of them are.

Who reviews the reviewers?

[rmdingler]

With this flaw in the review system having been previously discovered, it highlights the desperation of researchers who seem willing to jeopardize their integrity, and probably their careers, for the short term gain of getting published.

This is indicative of a systemic problem in the way research is funded.

Re:Who reviews the reviewers?

[Barsteward]

People doing this should be jailed for faking health studies and reviews.

Re:Who reviews the reviewers?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are way too kind. Why don't we execute them?

Re:Who reviews the reviewers?

[Barsteward]

thats too easy for them... no time to rue the error of their ways

B-b-b-but SCIENCE!!!!`

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean "science" is conducted by humans with biases and flaws?!?!

WHO KNEW!!!!

Re:B-b-b-but SCIENCE!!!!`

[Plus1Entropy]

If we weren't biased and flawed, we wouldn't need the process of science at all. Every anecdotal observation could be implicitly trusted.

What you are witnessing is the iterative scientific process attempting to correct for the flaws and biases.

Impact Factor

[Anonymous Coward]

2015 Impact Factor - 2.926
ololololol

Money stores value

[mi]

You see the influence of money, and the power it commands, everywhere nowadays.

Did you say "Nowadays"? The colonies nearly lost the war against Britain for lack of money — in the 18th century.

Over two millennia before that, in 5th century BC, Periclean's Athens — industrious and skilled in commerce — were prevailing against Sparta's famous warriors skilled in little other than battle thanks to wealth . It took Persian money for Sparta to win at the end...

"Nowadays" my tail... No, money — a store of value — has always been as influential as the value it stored.

The corruption of science we are observing stems not from the money itself, but from the government being in charge of so many more things, than it was even 100 years ago. When those funding and those deciding, how to spend the funds, are distinct groups — that's, when you get either sincere mismanagement and outright corruption.

Keys directly libelled and slandered Yudkin, with the result that his work was disgracefully neglected

Even in the way you tell this story, it has nothing to do with money... Our misguided "war on fat" was due to the government deciding to expand into dietary advice — which it never should have done.

Re:Money stores value

[Serge_Tomiko]

The American Revolution was primarily about the initial attempts of the British Empire to implement a gold based fixed exchange rate system. As the United States had no gold, it was unable to trade competitively or pay many British taxes. The American Revolution is proof that you are wrong, as they won the war using only paper money.

One need only read Plato's Laws to understand how money was always recognized as political, and the gold fetish was alien to Civilization. Plato wrote that possession of foreign currency, no matter what the type, should be a capital offense. The Romans too waged war against Carthage in no small part due to their own attempts at using gold for foreign exchange. Gold worship was routinely derided as weakness, and exemplary of a people without honor or social cohesion.

Money is not a store of value. It is a unit of political capital, the value of which is entirely dependent upon the power of the sovereignty that issued it. As soon as that sovereignty no longer can command the people to pay taxes in that currency, nor enforce private debts using civil courts, the money becomes worthless. Gardeners to this day dig up caches of Roman silver coins buried by people who though the Imperial government would return.

Re:Money stores value

[mi]

The American Revolution is proof that you are wrong, as they won the war using only paper money.

Nope. They tried using fiat money and quickly realized, that's a losing proposition. Hence the gold standard, which lasted until Roosevelt.

One need only read Plato's Laws to understand how money was always recognized as political, and the gold fetish was alien to Civilization.

Ah, I see, where you are confused... You took my post as advocacy for "gold standard" — which it was not. I merely objected to the GP's claim, that money is: a) inherently corrupting; and b) its importance is somehow new — he used the word "nowadays". The historical examples we both are citing defeat that claim handily — money always was important. Was it always dangerous? Yes — much like an energy-storing battery can explode and/or cause fire, the value-storing money can cause bad things to happen.

Money is not a store of value.

BZZZ, wrong. Whether fiat or backed by some medium (such as gold), money is a way to store value — among other things.

It is a unit of political capital, the value of which is entirely dependent upon the power of the sovereignty that issued it.

Here you are talking about a government's fiat money, which does indeed have the drawbacks you list. But that's irrelevant to my original point.

Re:Money stores value

[jcr]

The American Revolution is proof that you are wrong, as they won the war using only paper money.

Might want to brush up on your history a bit. They won despite the paper money, which was a major hindrance. Google for the phrase "not worth a continental". When the constitution was written, the memory of America's first hyperinflation was very fresh in their minds, which is why the gold and silver clause in the constitution forbids fiat currency.

-jcr

Re:Money stores value

[david_thornley]

The gold and silver clause forbids states from making anything except gold and silver legal tender. It isn't a restriction on the Federal government.

Yes. See E&E for example.

[Anonymous Coward]

But 99.9% or more is AGW denier bullshit, so they're written for an audience who doesn't care it's fraud, they only want to read how AGW isn't a thing and the IPCC are wrong, and that there's not going to be any greenies winning arguments or being right in the future.

So, yes, climate science has been affected. Gerlich and Tscheuner being a poster boy example.

There seems to be a clear pattern

[CustomSolvers2]

Most of (all?) the names of the authors of the last 107 papers seem Asian (Chinese?). And the Nature article about the previous 58 ones says that all of them were from Iran. These two issues are apparently confirming what seems the most probable reason for problems of this type (being discovered by the publisher): too permissive/greedy/keen-on-growing local authorities, universities or governments.

Oh Look...

[Anonymous Coward]

The list of authors with retracted studies looks like:

Zhang, J., Xu, F
Chen, X., Liang
Zhang, Y. & Liu, C.
Li, CY., Yuan, P., Lin, SS. et al.
Zhang, RC. & Mou, SH.
Dong, Y., Zhuang, L. & Ma, W.
Wang, J., Xu, Y., Fu, Q. et al.
Huang, Y., Liu, X., Kuang, X. et al.
Liu, C. & Wang, H.
Li, F., Liu, Y., Fu, T. et al.
Li, W., Wu, H. & Song, C.
He, J. & Xu, G.
Wu, D., Jiang, H., Gu, Q. et al.
Yin, Y., Feng, L. & Sun, J.
Xu, JQ., Liu, P., Si, MJ. et al.
Chen, H., Tang, C., Liu, M. et al.
Tian, X., Ma, P., Sui, C. et al.
Li, ZC., Zhang, LM., Wang, HB. et al.
Jin, B., Dong, P., Li, K. et al.
Sun, HL., Han, B., Zhai, HP. et al.
Xu, W., Wang, F., Ying, L. et al.
Luo, S., Guo, L., Li, Y. et al.
Chen, H., Zhou, B., Lan, X. et al.
Lv, S., Turlova, E., Zhao, S. et al.
Liu, C., Yin, L., Chen, J. et al. ...

But, you know, it's totally racist to say that there is a culture of dishonesty in China, and if you don't trust products of China to be what they say they are, you're a big bad racist.

Re:Oh Look...

[innocent_white_lamb]

And you can't trust that guy named Al. He's a co-author on almost all of them! :)

Re: Oh Look...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, ethics defined by whatever one can get away with.

Re: Oh Look...

[jedidiah]

That's pretty much the definition of ethics in the real world. That's certainly the ultimate definition of corporate ethics.

You can not expect people to not be greedy. Therefore you can't expect them to be immune to temptation and corruption. You have to police people. They won't police themselves.

Re:Oh Look...

[Anonymous Coward]

This researcher "et al" seems to be a particular nuisance.

Re: Oh Look...

[Vadim Makarov]

I agree. They probably don't consider this to be a fraud or a big deal, because this is a kind of acceptable practice in that country at that time. I have seen citation spam from a Chinese referee: the review contained nothing but 10 suggested citations to his/her own work. I have seen a colleague professor from another country (not China but that region) copy-paste from other papers and thinking that was okay. The latter was a nightmarish scenario, I could lose my faculty position if this slipped through and got published. In the 90s in Russia it was fashionable to buy PhD degrees so many politicians and business leaders had theses containing blatant plagiarism, sometimes close to 100% the content. Now there is a grassroots-led crackdown on that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... but it's hard to strip the holder of these degrees, owing to various legal obstacles. Ethics is what one can get away with.

This is not to say the journal should have not acted. They did it right, at last.

Re:Oh Look...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was talking to a Chinese colleague recently about the obvious lack of ethics and morals in China, and the types of problems it causes. He said that people shouldn't make generalizations about a whole country based on the actions of a few people, and how if the same thing were done to a group of people in the U.S. it would be "racist", but for some reason it's OK to apply that type of label to Chinese in general...

I agree that stereotypes can be bad, but this is definitely not an issue of racism. I don't think most people today really understand what "racism" means. Chinese Americans don't do this type of thing. This type of stuff doesn't pop up in Singapore or Taiwan (where the dominant race is also Han Chinese). This type of stuff is only widespread in Chinese that were born and raised in China. It's a cultural problem, not a race problem. Applying the label "racism" to this type of stereotyping just dulls peoples' understanding of what real racism is.

Re:Oh Look...

[piojo]

But, you know, it's totally racist to say that there is a culture of dishonesty in China, and if you don't trust products of China to be what they say they are, you're a big bad racist.

China isn't all bad, but there is a huge culture of doing whatever you can get away with in China. That includes cutting in line, throwing parties in the Ikea showroom, noise pollution, abusing every type of product promotion, over-hunting for food (including non-game animals and even pets), pissing in the street, salespeople cheating their clients, stores lying about the products they sell, etc.

Personally, having known a ton of Chinese people, I think the problem isn't lack of integrity but rather, the habitual division of society into one's "clan" versus everyone else. And it's hard to hold anyone accountable, because their bosses and friends most likely ALSO divide the world into "us" and "them". Sometimes the police even do this--don't expect justice because the other guy's brother's wife's son is friends with the cop. As for what it's like within the "clan" group, the friends I've had in HK and China haven't seemed any different than American friends--they're not liars or cheats. Now, the dynamic of "face" and honesty/lies is a whole 'nother issue, which I won't touch here. Suffice to say that the issue of reviewer fraud is not related to face (embarrassment).

This is my armchair analysis, subject to biases and lack of large numbers.

Re:Oh Look...

[piojo]

Indeed, race is not a problem.

people shouldn't make generalizations about a whole country based on the actions of a few people

Unfortunately, when the amount of people committing an infraction is above 1%, this kind of judgment becomes hard to avoid. It's why women think men catcall and sexually harass them. (Some do! A small sample giving all of us men a bad name.) It's why a lot of Hong Kongers dislike Chinese people (racially identical): some few Chinese people (perhaps also 1%) do a lot of nasty, uncivilized stuff. The perception won't go away until the percent adds a few zeros. When 0.001% of Chinese people steal toilet paper from bathrooms or smoke in restaurants or let their babies defecate on the street instead of buying diapers, that reputation will go away.

3 words

[geoskd]

Science today has its own cancers.

Fraud is a felony.

Re:3 words

[Anonymous Coward]

3 more words:

not across borders

Rodeo?

[Hognoxious]

Can someone explain to me why TFS refers to it as a rodeo?

Re: Rodeo?

[Anonymous Coward]

The phrase 'not his first rodeo' means that somebody has done something before. It has nothing to do with rodeo events themselves when used like this. You could replace 'rodeo' with some other event and get the same meaning. It's just indicating prior experience of some kind. The summary uses it to indicate that this sort of debacle had occurred earlier, too, and so this isn't the first time.

Must be kidding

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not just google the reviewer. See if he is legit. And then contact him independently. And there is a need to make sure this scientists pay a large prize.

Scott Adams disagrees

[Nova Express]

Scott Adams would like a word with you:

Kahan found that increased scientific literacy actually had a small negative effect: The conservative-leaning respondents who knew the most about science thought climate change posed the least risk. Scientific literacy, it seemed, increased polarization. In a later study, Kahan added a twist: He asked respondents what climate scientists believed. Respondents who knew more about science generally, regardless of political leaning, were better able to identify the scientific consensus—in other words, the polarization disappeared. Yet, when the same people were asked for their own opinions about climate change, the polarization returned. It showed that even when people understand the scientific consensus, they may not accept it.”

Notice how the author slips in his unsupported interpretation of the data: Greater knowledge about science causes more polarization.

Well, maybe. That’s a reasonable hypothesis, but it seems incomplete. Here’s another hypothesis that fits the same observed data: The people who know the most about science don’t think complex climate prediction models are credible science, and they are right.

In fact, there's more incentive to lie about climate science than cancer research: More immediate funding is at stake, more groupthink applies, it will be decades before others can prove you wrong, and unlike falsified cancer research, people won't die because you misdirected searcher.

And as for saying "the fraud was in the review process, not the work itself," that's like saying "Well, Anthony Weiner was only caught sexting. He never actually cheated." The odds that the fraud we've caught is the only fraud committed by those willing to commit fraud would seem pretty low...

Re:Scott Adams disagrees

[religionofpeas]

More immediate funding is at stake, more groupthink applies, it will be decades before others can prove you wrong, and unlike falsified cancer research, people won't die because you misdirected searcher.

There's more money in cancer medication than climate science.

But if you don't want to wait decades, you can simply make a competing model that matches past observations, but predicts a different outcome, and publish it.

Re:Scott Adams disagrees

[Ol Olsoc]

Scott Adams would like a word with you

I've received my comeuppance, by no less than the ultimate authority on all things.

Re:Scott Adams disagrees

[Ol Olsoc]

More immediate funding is at stake, more groupthink applies, it will be decades before others can prove you wrong, and unlike falsified cancer research, people won't die because you misdirected searcher.

There's more money in cancer medication than climate science.

But if you don't want to wait decades, you can simply make a competing model that matches past observations, but predicts a different outcome, and publish it.

Exactly. Now that climate research is being actively suppressed, and even the word is verboten, and the leader of the free world wants the names and workplaces of all of the scientists who don't agree with the USA's now official truth that Climate change is a plot by the Chinese - exactly what awesome advantager to the climate scientists have?

Now that politics and ideology have once again shown that the laws of physics are no match for the triumph of will, in much the same way as communism proved that Lysenkoism was the correct science over thouroughly debunked genetics. Sounds more like the start of a good old fashioned pogrom than the evilz scientizzzs taking over the world.

Re:Scott Adams disagrees

[slashrio]

... you can simply make a competing model ...

He'd never get the funding for that...

Re:Scott Adams disagrees

[religionofpeas]

He'd never get the funding for that...

There are plenty of deep pocketed interest groups that would like to be able to deny climate change with a legitimate model. The oil & coal industry, and the new administration, for instance.

Re:Scott Adams disagrees

[slashrio]

Ok, sorry about that hyperbole. It would be difficult to get that research funded and the papers approved through peer review and journal editors.

Re:Scott Adams disagrees

[david_thornley]

You're making that up. The US is not the world, and the political positions here aren't reflected worldwide. Even if US climate science was somehow corrupted, there's plenty of institutions all over the world that aren't subject to US politics. There is no worldwide conspiracy, and there is a worldwide consensus.

Some journal would find work debunking AGW to be worth publishing, because anyone involved in publishing a paper that significant would gain immensely in reputation. Other scientists would join in to be at the forefront of new research.

Re:Scott Adams disagrees

[slashrio]

The US is not the world...

Please show me where I involved the US, or mentioned any conspiracy (although those things do exist...).

debunking AGW

Yes, there are some papers that try to 'debunk' AGW, and they themselves don't seem to be debunked themselves much.

Re:Scott Adams disagrees

[david_thornley]

Most claims about the difficulty of publishing papers against AGW are based on the political climate of the US, so I may have jumped to a false conclusion about your reasoning, in which case I apologize.

I followed your link, and found nothing I could readily understand. There was a list of papers, claimed to be in peer-reviewed journals, mostly classified as "rebutted", with no context. If these are anti-AGW papers, then it would seem that anti-AGW papers can be published, contrary to what you were saying. It is not important to debunk every paper that has bad science in it, if that's what you're thinking.

progress exists

[Anonymous Coward]

Every new generation of scientists votes with their feet about what they believe is good science or bad science. Cancer research has been all over the map, and many trends are abandoned. Climate science has been making solid progress. Aids research has been making progress. Individual papers and individual scientists come and go, but science endures.

Even Bernie Madoff would tell you that while fraud can profit you for a while, it does not last forever.

Re: progress exists

[Anonymous Coward]

'Climate science' is making great progress. It's finding exactly what liberal politicians want it to find: a 'justification' for carbon taxes!

Organizations?

[jasnw]

What these journals need to do in retraction lists like this is to group the articles by the organizations at which the lead author works. That might generate some higher-level angst than just calling our the authors.

Re:Organizations?

[SNRatio]

Actually what Springer and Elsevier (the publishers of the majority of science journals) could do is explain that in the case of papers coming from offending organizations, a translator would have to be hired and asked to directly contact and vet the suggested peer reviewers. This would be at the expense of the institution/authors.

Re: one journal is not a huge number

[slashrio]

...58 papers were retracted from seven different journals...

But 58 is. And then there is this, and this.

Re: AGW denier bullshit...

[slashrio]

Something tells me you're not completely without bias.

Editor sock puppets

[Anonymous Coward]

On the flip side, I have received emails from "student researchers" asking questions about my publications. When I attempt to engage in technical discourse, they go dark. Couple weeks later, I will get a peer review request from the journal editor. Sheesh they could just try asking.

Peer Review is a Joke

[sexconker]

Peer review is a joke. Journals barely glance at shit the reviewers all engage in favoritism and favor trading.

Fuck peer review. How about peer escrow?

Submit your paper, a full and complete set of instructions for replicating the experiment, and the complete and raw data you collected during your experiment.
The journal reads it and gives if it passes a basic bullshit test, puts the experiment into a queue.

Then the journal pulls different experiments from the queue and presents them to you (only the experiment, not the data or paper). You have to replicate an experiment before your paper can be published. (Different weights can be added for cost and time, and things can be categorized so you don't get biologists doing physics.)

Once you replicate an experiment and submit the complete and raw data, the journal compares both data sets and determines whether or not to publish the original paper associated with the experiment you reviewed. Likewise, once someone replicates your experiment your paper may be published. (Depending on the type of experiment, they can require more than one replication, have different levels of review and different tolerances for discrepancy.)

If a paper is published, everything is published. The paper, the experiment description, and all data from the original submitter and all the replicators.

If you're not doing repeatable experimentation, you're not doing science, so fuck off. If your data contains sensitive info, such as HIPAA, anonymize it. It's not hard, though people claim it's hard when they want to prevent you from seeing their bogus data.

Re:Peer Review is a Joke

[Vadim Makarov]

Requiring an exact replication of every experiment won't be doable. Reasons are multiple but to begin with this would have doubled the cost of science and slowed it down. What works in practice is that important published experiments that do not replicate eventually get noticed (as people try to build on the published results), and the reasons they do not replicate are found. Sometimes the reasons are interesting and uncover new effects and new science. Rarely the reason is fraud, in which case the group and authors who did it acquire a reputation (and may lose a career). The process takes time, but we have not found a more efficient way to conduct science. If the fraud were more prevalent we might need to resort to your scheme. However an outright scientific fraud is thankfully rare.

Re:Peer Review is a Joke

[Anonymous Coward]

I was doing well at this, until I got to the part where I had to build a 22km hadron collider before my theory paper could get published...

One thing about cancer I know is..

[Neuronwelder]

Oncology is Big Bucks$$$

100% chinese authors.

[Anonymous Coward]

the other batch has some other non-US nations as well. (Iranian).

How about a prominent article listing the fakers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like it would be of benefit to society to shine some light on those who keep attempting to perpetrate scientific fraud.

Re:How about a prominent article listing the faker

[Anonymous Coward]

Followed by some trials for the felony of fraud.

Re: I'm a scientist

[slashrio]

Me too. You're taking me wrong. Or I didn't explain myself properly. Also a possibility.
I didn't say that all of science is phony.
What I meant to say is that apparently we can not put blind trust in the papers 'because they are peer reviewed'.
What I also meant to say is, that people who postulate that peer reviewed published science can be generally trusted are wrong, because look: here is one example that falsifies their theory.
Thanks for making me clear that my explanation was lacking clarity.

In the Age of Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

The editor in chief of Lancet, Richard Horton:

        Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”. The Academy of Medical Sciences, Medical Research Council, and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have now put their reputational weight behind an investigation into these questionable research practices. The apparent endemicity [i.e. pervasiveness within the scientific culture] of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of “significance” pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale. We reject important confirmations. Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent, endpoints that foster reductive metrics, such as high-impact publication. National assessment procedures, such as the Research Excellence Framework, incentivise bad practices. And individual scientists, including their most senior leaders, do little to alter a research culture that occasionally veers close to misconduct.

***

Editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell:

        It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

Any questions?

Re:One thing about cancer I know is, Fraud

[Anonymous Coward]

The other thing about Oncology is that it's a big fraud. Most people treated for cancer don't have cancer, that's why they appear to have a miraculous recovery. Then they later die from the horrible complications from treatment. If they did have cancer, they will do anyway, but be tortured to death in hospitals. If you try to get a second opinion the doctor can remove your children from you and force them to be treated. They are monsters.

Re: I'm a scientist

[chihowa]

OK. I see what you're saying and I agree with you.

As the other reply said, though, disproving the postulation that peer review can be generally trusted isn't exactly a revelation. After taking part in the peer review process from either side, even with the high-end journals, you really lose a lot of faith in the process. Statistically, it's certainly better than no peer review at all, but there's no guarantee that a paper will be improved by the process. In a lot of these fly-by-night journals, it's a total joke.

I don't mean to totally bash your point, because it is a revelation to the general public who have been (or are being) sold on the integrity of the peer review process.

Science march to be peer reviewed

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2017/04/22/science-march-to-be-peer-reviewed/

Re: trouble with concepts

[slashrio]

Wasn't I being clear? I said we don't know whether it's all.
You describe a mechanism that would heat up the earth, but you assume there isn't a mechanism that counteracts it. There are too many instances where climate scientists find mechanisms which they hadn't found before, but that still doesn't keep them from communicating definitive conclusions, although they don't have yet a totally comprehensive insight in what's exactly and totally going on.
If you want to exercise 'science', then you have to exclude that any (or enought) cooling is going on. It's not sufficient to describe some cooling effects that you have found and then 'convince' others that that's all. No, you have to prove it.
Ok, that is one of my main problems.

Then there is politics, and the climate science 'thought collective', and how easily that is manipulated.
Take the example of nutrition. Sugar. Saturated fat. Biochemically quite simple one would think, no? Or comparably complex to climate, no?
Yet the nutrition thought collective had it all wrong in following Ancel Keys and destroying (yes: href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin">destroying) John Yudkin, who had it all right, while Ancel Keys cherry picked the countries on beforehand and got the result he wanted because of that.

People like Al Gore and who knows who more with all kinds of scary agendas are clearly out to profit off from the climate scare narrative.
Just like the sugar industry successfully launched a campaign to profit off from the saturated fat scare.
It's not that I don't like Al Gore, the whole climate change debate is getting just a bit too religious to my likings and it is profitable.
'Believe the priests of science, or else doom will come over us and it'll be all your fault!', seems to be the main narrative now.
I simply don't have time to follow all the developments in climate change, but I sure as hell also don't believe anything that any collective pushes upon me as science. Too many interests involved and opposition is squashed.
And you don't need a 'conspiracy', 'thought collective' does it quite well.
No thanks, you have it your way if you like, I'll have it my way.

Re: trouble with concepts

[david_thornley]

I've described a simple mechanism that heats things up. Therefore, since we are burning fossil fuels, we'd expect the planetary surface to heat up. That's also what our thermometers tell us, and we see other effects that we'd expect from global warming. It's conceivable that there would be some sort of effect to counteract the warming, but we haven't found one.

Your argument seems to be that we should ignore basic science and obvious conclusions, since there are possible ways the conclusions could be wrong, and figuring out those ways and eliminating them would take more complicated science.

I suspect that you believe many things simply because a collective pushes them on you as science. Do you think there are galaxies out there? Ever seen one that looks like a galaxy with equipment you controlled? Do you believe that stars are powered by fusion? That dinosaurs existed tens of millions of years ago?

Re: trouble with concepts

[slashrio]

Do you believe there is no negative feedback?
Do we fully understand how the climate works, and do we understand the non-linearities that will affect the current theories once things have heated up 1 degree?
No, we don't. So there's no certainty that all those doom predictions will actually come true.
Yes, there are some nice elaborate simulations, but they are limited by the incomplete knowledge they are based on.
Political interests and greed are too much driving this discussion, so I smell a rat and say: "No, thank you".

Re: trouble with concepts

[david_thornley]

There can be negative feedback, sure.

However, the basic science has the planetary surface heating up. That's the naive result. Clearly, it's more complicated than that, but given no clear evidence to the contrary the assumption has to be that we'll continue to heat up, not necessarily regularly, as we burn more fossil fuel.

Political interests and greed wouldn't affect approximately every climate scientist in the world similarly.

Re: trouble with concepts

[slashrio]

Political interests and greed wouldn't affect approximately every climate scientist in the world similarly.

No, but if you're in the right position you can manipulate them all, or almost all.
Take for instance Michael Hulme, head of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Studies at the University of East Anglia, when it was formed in the 1990's. It's members constitute numerous participants in the IPCC.
In his recent book 'Why we disagree about climate change', he wrote:

The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us.

Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.

We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilize them in support of our projects.

These myths transcend the scientific categories of 'true' and 'false'.

So, according to one of the 'important' and authoritative persons in the climate change discussion, it's ok to let climate change work for your 'personal projects' and mobilize the people by just telling them some 'stories' and 'myths', and it doesn't matter whether they are true or not, because they 'transcend' those scientific categories.
Sorry, but after reading this, I think I know enough. Thank you very much...

Re: trouble with concepts

[david_thornley]

In other words, instead of addressing any part of the science, you're going to pick out individual climate scientists and base your opinions on bad things you hear or read about them.

Re: trouble with concepts

[slashrio]

As I said, I don't have the time and means to re-construct the whole climate science.
But the behaviour I see from leading climate scientists and non-scientists, together with the faults in logic regarding modeling and incompleteness of the theory, give me rat's smell and fishy feeling.
My main scientific argument however, is that the models *can not* predict parameters outside their range of calibration, that the theory isn't complete, the feedback loops aren't all understood or not even invented yet, and the financial and political incentives are too big to make me 'believe' in the so called science, which in my opinion, as has been shown in many other fields of science, is very prone to 'community thought'.