Guest essay by Dr. Patrick Michaels |
First, a disclaimer. I don’t listen to NPR. “State radio” bugs me. But I have friends who do, and I was bowled over when one sent me a seemingly innocuous story about the search for a pharmaceutical treatment for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis [ALS], the horrific ailment also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease.I knew something big was about to happen when correspondent Richard Harris led off with this zinger:
There’s a funding crunch for biomedical research in the United States—and it’s not just causing pain for scientists and universities. It’s also creating incentives for researchers to cut corners—and that’s affecting people who are seriously ill.
Predictably, NPR, itself a federally (and privately) funded creature, said the problem was a lack of funding, even titling the piece, “Patients Vulnerable When Cash-Strapped Scientists Cut Corners.”
Allow NPR its sins, because what’s in the article is one key to a very disturbing trend, not just in biomedical science, but in “most disciplines and countries.” It seems that negative results are systematically disappearing from science. Those words appear in the title of a blockbuster 2012 article by University of Montreal’s Daniele Fanelli, more completely, “Negative Results are Disappearing from Most Disciplines and Countries.”
Memo to NPR: Scientists are always “cash-strapped.” Just ask one. The reason is very simple, and can be illustrated by my area, climate science.
There are actually very few people formally trained at the doctoral level in this field (yours truly being one of them). One reason was that, prior to the specter of anthropogenerated climate change, there wasn’t very much money from the federal government. It was about a $50 million a year operation, if that much. We didn’t have enough research dough.
Now the federal outlay is $2.3 billion. Guess what: we’re all climate scientists now. So ecologists, plant biologists, and even psychologists hitched their wagons to this gravy train. Today’s shocker: we don’t have enough research dough.
What Harris found out about ALS really does apply in a Fanelli-like fashion. It seems that drugs that work fine on mice and rats flop miserably when tested on humans. It turns out that the animal studies were all pretty shoddy.
Story Landis, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, explained why. According to NPR, “There is no single answer, she says, but part of the explanation relates to a growing issue in biomedical science: the mad scramble for scarce research dollars.” She went on: “The field has become hypercompetitive,” and NPR added, “Many excellent grant proposals get turned down, simply because there’s not enough money to go around. So Landis says scientists are tempted to oversell weak results.”
“Getting a grant requires that you have an exciting story to tell, that you have preliminary data and you have published”, she says. “In the rush, to be perfectly honest, to get a wonderful story out on the street in a journal, and preferably with some publicity to match, scientists can cut corners.”
According to a research paper published earlier this year, corner-cutting turned out to be the rule, rather than the exception, in animal studies of ALS.
Stefano Bertuzzi, the executive director of the American Society for Cell Biology, says that’s because there is little incentive for scientists to take the time to go back and verify results from other labs;
“You want to be the first one to show something”, he says—not the one to verify or dispute a finding, “because you won’t get a big prize for that.”
Landis noted that “ALS is not the only example of this type of wishful science [emphasis added].” She found similar problems with other drugs for other diseases.
It’s too bad that NPR didn’t then go to Montreal’s Fanelli, because they would have found that similar problems are infecting science everywhere, which is why Cato now has a Center for the Study of Science.
Coming up: I’ll be posting soon on what this does to science itself. Teaser: if there’s little incentive to publish negative results, whatever reigning paradigm is operating in a given field will be very resistant to change. As the Center for the Study of Science’s Richard Lindzen has observed, there has been a remarkable lack of paradigm substitution in overall science as research budgets ballooned. Ironically, the more we spend on science, the more science can be harmed.
Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”
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“Getting a grant requires that you have an exciting story to tell, that you have preliminary data and you have published”, she says. “In the rush, to be perfectly honest, to get a wonderful story out on the street in a journal, and preferably with some publicity to match, scientists can cut corners.”
Yes, Pons & Fleishmann’s approach to cold fusion comes to mind, and we know how that turned out.
Curiously, the folks who claimed to have debunked their results didn’t use their experimental setup or their methodology, as the ink was barely dry on the press releases. They cobbled together their own lashups. But somehow, their failure to replicate was still valid. Go figure. /sarc
If Pons & Fleishmann had promptly fallen down dead from radiation poisoning their claim would be credible. But they didn’t observe the physics they claimed because they didn’t even get sick. No replication required.
Absolutely – the “failure to replicate” at MIT was through manipulating data that confirmed the effect.
The work of Fleischmann and Pons was a true paradigm shift. It threatened huge budgets for hot fusion research. The established recipients of funding got themselves organised to eliminate this threat to their research. And they were incredibly successful. Instead of a new and extremely exciting field of science opening up, it was rubbished. 25 years later there are a few brave souls still in the field, and there is now no reasonable doubt that a nuclear reaction, as yet not properly understood, can take place at low temperature, without harmful radiation. However, the field is still off-limits in established science.
The main argument used against cold fusion was that it is theoretically impossible – if D-D fusion occurs there must be neutrons. Experiments that showed excess heat commensurate with a nuclear reaction were ignored in favour of theory. Does that ring any bells with climate science? It seems in big-government-funded science, theory has to trump data in order to keep the show on the road.
@drjohngalan
You are being unfair to the physics community at that time. I lived through it and there was not one single physicist I knew in my center who was not excited and if he/she had in the lab some possibility of experimenting , tried it. From solid state physicists to nuclear and particle physicists.
The experiments were a) not reproducible and b) the energies were of the order of chemical energies, i.e. the palladium releasing energy stored in the solid state lattice and given up in the setup. At least that was what deflated the bubble for most of us at the time.
That said there are still physicists pursuing what is now called Low Energy Nuclear Reactions , there are even commercial applications, http://coldfusion3.com/blog/e-cat-owner%e2%80%99s-connections-to-genorth-carolina-company-revealed , with catalyst assisted fusion, which have not panned out. If the claims hold out commercially that will be proof enough.
@anna v
I was merely agreeing with D.J. Hawkins.
Understanding the enormity of the work they were doing, Fleischmann and Pons conducted experiments for five years prior to the infamous announcement in 1989. They funded this research from their own pockets. Within a few months the field had been very successfully rubbished. To quote D.J. Hawkins above, those “who claimed to have debunked their results didn’t use their experimental setup or their methodology, as the ink was barely dry on the press releases. They cobbled together their own lash-ups. But somehow, their failure to replicate was still valid.” However, replications were achieved by others at the time, demonstrating excess heat way beyond any chemical explanation and tritium production.
I knew Martin Fleischmann, and the ad hom attacks and accusations made against him were nothing short of disgraceful. To me, this also has a familiar ring to it, when compared to behaviours in the climate science field: when large grants are at stake, anything goes.
Pons & Fleishmann’s “approach” ? Their approach was to publish a paper with their results but their university insisted they make this big press conference – and we all know how that turned out.
No WE do not.
Yet in the end real science does win out. It is a shame it has taken this long and that so many frauds still haunt the field of LENR but MIT’s Peter Hagelstein & Mitchell Swartz have put on yearly conferences recently going over both theory and showing it working.
What is very concerning is the science community closing their minds. Peter Hagelstein gives a good breakdown of the various roads it has followed here.
Yep. There is present a global effort to research the phenomenon. They just don’t call it “cold fusion” anymore. A web search will reveal active research efforts in Italy, Japan and even the US (funded by military money).
The problem was never that Pons and Fleischman had mistakenly identified some experimental result as anomalous, the excess heat alone was adequate to raise the odd alert eyebrow. The real problem was that UoUtah rushed out the door to the press with what was a pretty unguarded speculation about what CAUSED the anomalous heat. There were and still are huge streams of money going to fusion research. Pons and Fleischman found an unexpected phenmenon in a table-top set up that cost a few hundred dollars at most. Worse, they were chemists. No nuclear physicist researching fusion could possibly sit still for that. It not only threatened their funding, it actually threatened their field!
You would think a new physical phenomenon in science would be a point of great interest, but quite reverse. Instead of asking that they not speculate about the excess heat as a result of fusion, the interested parties had a field day doing bad science and experiencing confirmation bias themselves. The Pons and Fleischman effect has now been replicated hundreds or possibly even thousands of times. The results are secure enough that various national research agencies in several nations who really want oil independence and a power supply that is reliable and costs less than a reactor have been pushing the effort quietly for two decades now. However because of the “gored ox” syndrome and the scientific clique syndrome there is very little “peer reviewed” publication. If the subject is too clear, the paper is automatically rejected. I suspect this sounds familiar to most skeptics of AGW.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
“In the late 1920s, two Austrian born scientists, Friedrich Paneth and Kurt Peters, originally reported the transformation of hydrogen into helium by spontaneous nuclear catalysis when hydrogen was absorbed by finely divided palladium at room temperature.”
Paneth was forced to retract and claim measurement error; as Germany under the Versailles treaty was barred from importing Helium or developing airplanes. Allied didn’t want German airships (that’s why the Germans had to use hydrogen in the Zeppelins, which made them obviously harmless in any military setting).
Paneth’s discovery would have enabled Germany to circumvent the import ban; so political pressure was exerted to suppress the discovery.
That implacable law of unintended? consequences is at it again.
I suspect a part of the problem is that universities are churning out graduates far in excess of need. More competition doesn’t mean better Science. In fact, there may be a sort of Gresham’s Law at work: incompetent scientists who are unable to get funding without cutting corners drive out those who refuse to do so. Science is in deeper trouble than anyone realizes.
Gresham’ s Law: bad money drives out good.
Money corrupts and yes science is in trouble.
Science is in deeper trouble than anyone realizes.
Hmmm, that sentence is a self-negating paradox.
Well said Jorgekafkazar. The Academia Bubble has many many unintended consequences from cut-rate research to ballooning debt loads underwritten by taxpayers. The whole bloated system is a malinvestment that needs to unwind and shift into productive labour. Without the free money gaurantee by the state, the real costs of academia will eventually drive out participation.
I believe Fanelli is a current colleague and co-author of Stanford’s John Ioannidis, who wrote a major article on the lack of replicable research in the medical literature. Ioannidis work, I believe, has been mentioned here previously. The Economist published a pretty good summary article of the issues. The intellectual integrity of academics apparently is not much different to other professions.
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21588057-scientists-think-science-self-correcting-alarming-degree-it-not-trouble
Here is a link to Ioannidis’ article claiming that most current published research findings are
false:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124
OK, I didn’t read all of those two papers, so I may have missed it, but — there is another possible explanation, which we have seen repeatedly in climate science : if a person or organisation does not like the result of a paper, they set out to disprove or discredit it. In other words, the paper subsequently found to be wrong may in fact have been honest and correct, while the later study “disproving” or discrediting it may have been biased and wrong.
Start ’em young. Understanding of the scientific method, critical thinking, morality, honesty all seem to be collapsing as the schools continue the march towards complete control of curriculum from Wash DC, and liberalism, and relativistic morality. We’ve got a whole generation of brain-washed kids that are now in the “making a difference in the world” phase of their lives and think they are scientists. It seems to be past critical mass now. I fear things will get worse before they get better. Honesty in science? Please! Science is what we need it to be to bring about the change we want, right liberals? The ends justify the means for most.
Yes there are rare exceptions.
Just read a paper on ozone science and the ozone hole fraud. Liberals turned scientists seemed to believe in the linearity of ozone concentration in the atmosphere and that’s what the models became. The models drove the discussion. Reality showed absolute disagreement, but damn the data, full speed ahead. Soon life protecting freon (refrigeration of food) is soon after banned and likely millions die as a result. Does any of this sound familiar? “Deja vu all over again” – Yogi Berra
Bruce
Plus the millions who died from banning D.D.T.
The rich and powerful in this country made it on the backs of the poor. They didn’t build it. They are dishonest and greedy. They lied, cheated and stole to get what they have.
If you were brainwashed into believing this, how would you go about becoming wealthy? If you’re told that successful people are only successful through cheating others, would that make you more likely to cheat?
.
Whenever a theory/hypothesis is put forward , the arguments for the hypothesis can be valid or invalid . But it’s more complex than that: It is important to know, that the arguments put forward may be valid but still only leading up to a scientifically untrue conclusion.
In terms of conclusions drawn from scientific illogical use of argument, the illogical usage hardly ever shines directly into the eyes of reader a “study”. The illogical usage can be there no matter which conclusions drawn. Each performed hypothesis / assumption is based on the subjective interpretation of reality hypothesis researchers / writers. As Gerhard Vollmer wrote:
”Die wichtigkeit oder Bedeutung eines Problems haengt immer auch von subjektiven, bewer tendens Elementen ab” Vollmer Gerhard, Wissenschaftstheorie in Einsatz, Stuttgart 1993
It is called analytical skills. There are many scientists/researchers who are good at gathering data but analyze the data incorrectly. Unfortunately there seems to be a growing number who graduate from Uni and cannot even gather the data.
Sometimes incorrect analysis is the result of not enough data even though the researchers will argue black and blue that they have enough. Case in point is the data for climate research. We really need hard data going back 1000 years. Even the CET is not enough to draw conclusions.
Analytical skills are important and not many people actually have them.
True in so many diciplines. In legislation, listen to congressional hearings on CPSAN on any subject and you’ll hear coherent analysis replaced with arguments on whose stomach should be fed the most. Apparently this is becoming more and more the case with science as well.
The steps I see in analysis are:
1. Gather Data.
2. Organize/catergorize data
3. Define relationships in the data.
4. Determine a working system or conclusion.
Climate science I think is a gross example in that it can’t even settle on Step 1 and then skips to Step 4.
It seems that negative results are systematically disappearing from science.
This is a natural outcome in a world where ‘self esteem’ is lauded but self respect is derided.
An activist ‘scientist’ that subscribes to the motto “One Fudged Data Table Is Worth A Thousand Weasel Words” and a $10M grant….. may have high ‘self esteem’ for his dubious financial success. An honest scientist is constrained by his self respect, which means he will report the data honestly when no one is watching, even if it means a set back to his career.
Given current American culture where we don’t keep score and everybody gets “attendance medals”, why should scientists have to have a good idea or favorable test results to get funded?
Really – requiring actual good ideas and credible test results – are you sure you want to go down that narrow road?What comes next? Economists and psychologists won’t be allowed to do atmospheric physics?
What’s important is people feel good about participating in the process – regardless of the outcome.
I’d say “/sarc”, but this is exactly what we’ve been teaching our children for about 40 years; what should we expect?
ALS in many patients is genetically determined, unfortunately. There are of course a significant percentage that is sporadic due to random mutations that depend on genetic background. Recently Science Magazine had a research article on dipeptide toxicity in a intron repeat expansion in an open reading frame protein of unknown function that confers neurotoxicity:
The C9orf72 GGGGCC Repeat Is Translated into Aggregating Dipeptide-Repeat Proteins in FTLD/ALS
Published Online February 7 2013
Science 15 March 2013:
Vol. 339 no. 6125 pp. 1335-1338
DOI: 10.1126/science.1232927.
This IS good solid research. The kind that can move understanding forward in the field. The kind we must keep funding.
However, I have had the coffee-hour debate with many Liberal biomedical researchers on funding groups like this and their Progressive ideology versus the coming reality. They whole-heartedly support Progressive ideals that prevent any fixes or significant reforms to the 3 Big US federal government entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and SS. These 3 big programs are consuming ever larger parts of the US federal budget as the years go on, and by 2032 will be so large, nothing else will be able to be funded except debt service. These 3 are each 200 lb gorillas growing soon into 800 lb gorillas. Their appetite for money will be so voracious, that all other discretionary spending, like biomedical research, will become an afterthought. Biomedical research and all the the other discretionary programs will be fighting over crumbs that fall on the floor from the Big 3 Gorillas with their insatiable appetite for ever more tax revenue.
The Progressive are in utter denial. They believe that the progressive agenda can be maintain on social welfare programs, yet still they demand the US government also generously fund their grants.
I finally came to the conclusion that true hard-core Progressives, even many supposedly intelligent PhD-holding academics, are delusional in their understanding of simple economics and finite resources. They want it all.
I see many of them as Dr Zachary Smith’s (the Lost in Space doctor who had no morals, liked little boys, an arrogant superiority complex, and would sell-out his only friends for a promise from an alien (i.e. easily duped).
At 9:59 PM on 16 September, Joel O’Bryan had concluding his slagging of “true hard-core Progressives” with:
With all due deference to the character of Dr. Smith (which was to all intents and purposes created entirely by actor Jonathan Harris), it wasn’t so much that he “liked little boys” but that the ‘tween genius kid Will Robinson (portrayed by actor Billy Mumy) – the one and only boy in the crew – sought Dr. Smith’s company because everybody else aboard the Jupiter 2 obviously thought the little nerd was insufferable and strove to sideline and ignore him.
I would add that these same people that you so eloquently describe are the ones setting up graduate school programs in sustainability in Unversities all over the Western world. Some of these are the “School of Sustainability” (Arizona State) or “School of Global Environmental Sustainability” (Colorado State) or “Sustainability and Environmental Management Graduate Program” (Harvard). Meanwhile, these leftists, socialists and Progressives are incapable of voting to balance a national budget or adequately fund a public employee retirement system. Irony in such quantity as to make one weep.
Bad results get buried….regardless of what discipline you are looking at. Numbers are inflated when it leads to good results, and also deflated when it leads to good results.
When the numbers are just plain bad, bury it and move on.
I deal with this on a weekly basis when looking at energy conservation projects in buildings.
It is depressing…
The talk about disappearing negative results reminds me of an example…
In 2006, Church and White published, “A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise.” It got huge press, and to this day it is still frequently cited as proof that man-made global warming is causing accelerated sea-level rise.
However, their reported error bar for the amount of acceleration they found for the 20th century as a whole went all the way down to zero, and one detail that their paper didn’t mention was that all of the acceleration they found was prior to 1925 — which means it was almost certainly unconnected to anthropogenic GHG emissions.
In 2009, Church and White posted a new data set on their web site, but, mysteriously, published no paper about it. I wondered about that, so I reproduced their 2006 calculations using their 2009 data.
Guess what? All the 20th century acceleration was gone.
I shared my results with Drs. Church & White, and on June 18, 2010, Dr. Church cordially replied, confirming my analysis: “For the 1901 to 2007 period, again we agree with your result and get a non-significant and small deceleration.”
You can see why they didn’t publish a paper about their 2009 results. If they would have published such a paper, the title would have had to have been something like, “Oops, never mind: No 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise after all.”
BTW, before someone asks, I did publish my results:
doi:10.1007/s11069-012-0159-8
Dave:
Excellent job at critiquing better funded researchers and getting the results into the literature. It is also an excellent example of the issues raised by Michaels, Fanelli and Ioannidis. Surely intellectual integrity should require Dr. Church to publish an update and clarification to the earlier paper, if not a correction.
So Dave Burton, is the present SL trend flat? NOAA gauges say it has been flat for 15-20 years.
mpainter, the present sea-level trend is inear, or nearly so, perhaps with a very slight deceleration. But it’s not flat. SL is still rising in most places, albeit very slowly.
The oceans slosh. The U.S. west coast (and our own Wilmington gauge, here in NC) have seen no sea-level rise in the last couple of decades. But the northeastern U.S. saw modestly accelerated sea-level rise over the same period. For the most part, the acceleration and deceleration trends average out to very close to simply linear.
BTW, w/r/t the apparent deceleration on the west coast of the U.S., and the apparent acceleration on the northeast coast, guess which got most of the press?
https://www.google.com/search?q=sallenger+hotspot+accelerated+“sea+level”
http://www.google.com/search?q=(decelerated+OR+deceleration+coldspot+“cold+spot”)+”sea+level”
Some of the sloshing seems to be roughly synchronized with the ~60 year AMO cycle:
http://www.sealevel.info/Amo_timeseries_1856-present.svg.png
The differences in sea-level accounted for by that sloshing are pretty nearly negligible — on the order of a couple of inches — but that seems to be no impediment to fevered headline-writers:
http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2012/06/25/sea-levels-rising-along-east-coast/
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/sea-rise-faster-east-coast-rest-globe
Oops, I botched those google search links, sorry. They should have been:
http://tinyurl.com/search-acceleration (1,000,000 hits)
http://tinyurl.com/search-deceleration (200,000 hits)
Reply to Dave Burton:
I have to say that west coast, Gulf coast and east coast NOAA mean SL trends are flat, and have been for 15-20 years with the east coast as far north as Chesapeake Bay where subsidence registers a false SL rise. You attribute this flat trend to sloshing claiming that SL is rising worldwide. Sorry, does not compute. Your slosh would have a periodicity of over 20 years. IMO NOAA tidal gauge data is reliable and SL cannot rise in the rest of the world yet remain steady in the eastern Pacific, the western Atlantic and in the Gulf of Mexico. This sea level business is full of fabrication and you must be very careful concerning what you swallow
– such as the U of Colorado data which is entirely invented.
Excellent work getting this comment published.
This is esentially the same as the results from the most recent Jevrejava paper which was discussed in detail here a little time ago.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/20/new-study-finds-sea-levels-rising-only-7-in-per-century-with-no-acceleration/
jevrejeva 2014 fig.8 showing their own results compared to Church and White.
http://climategrog.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=945
However, the authors similarly chose to hightlight the “acceleration” in the abstract with no mention of the total absense of acceleration over the last century.
“We calculate an acceleration of 0.02 ± 0.01 mm·yr− 2 in global sea level (1807–2009). In comparison the steric component of sea level shows an acceleration of 0.006 mm·yr− 2 and mass loss of glaciers accelerates at 0.003 mm·yr− 2 over 200 year long time series.”
That inconvienient detail is buried in the text, near the end of the paper.
This what the main article here is about, The need to ‘sex up’ the results to get attention, rather than reporting the facts.
Greg Goodman quoted Jevrejeva writing, “… over 200 year long time series.”
Yes, the key part is the length: 200 years. They find acceleration over that time span because some (though not all) of the best long-term tide gauges saw a modest acceleration in rate of sea-level rise in the late 1800s and/or early 1900s, roughly coincident with the end of the LIA.
If human GHG emissions were affecting sea-level rise, you’d expect to see acceleration starting around the 1940s, since that’s when the big anthropogenic rise in CO2 levels commenced. But that hasn’t happened.
Church & White 2006, 2009 (data but no paper), and 2011 all used different sets of tide gauges. C&W’s 2006 and 2009 data both showed post-1925 deceleration in sea-level rise. C&W’s 2011 data actually showed a very tiny (statistically insignificant) post-1925 acceleration for that set of tide-gauges, but if projected out to 2080 it would increase sea-level by less than an additional inch, compared to a linear projection. That increase is much smaller in magnitude than the reduction in sea-level rise projected from the 2006 and 2009 data, as compared to the linear trend.
BTW, the code and data to do those calculations and create those graphs are all on my server, along with the article preprint. Scroll to the bottom of the page for the download link.
DaveBurton, thanks for the links …
the original paper was cited 366 times, according to the Wiley page …
any idea how much citations you got ?
ducdorleans
Please say why you ask that.
Richard
@ur momisugly richardscourtney September 17, 2014 at 1:43 am
in a discussion about wishful science, I just would like to know the difference in “success” between the politically correct paper and the correct paper
Church & White 2011 finally included a simple average of tide gauges plot in a spaghetti graph of various virtual sea level plots, extracted here with an added trendline, showing no human influence:
http://i51.tinypic.com/28tkoix.jpg
I think this is the most important plot in the whole debate, for it busts alarmist headlines, and also reveals [no] extra heat hiding in the oceans causing extra thermal expansion.
to = no
Nik:
I see only a black line and a red trend line?
Thanks for that, NikFromNYC! How did you manage to extract just that component from their graph?
(Drop me an email, pls!)
this link: http://www.sealevel.info/
at the end of your paper: http://www.burtonsys.com/climate/jnathaz1/
isn’t working correctly
it leads instead to: http://www.sealevel.infol/
it appears there is a typo in the hyperlink
Thank you, ferdberple!!!
Fixed.
Why is the Aviso version of the satellite altimeter trend radically different in the last few years from the version you published?
{Sorry for the delayed response, Billy, I forgot to click “Post Comment.” -DB}
Billy Liar asked, “Why is the Aviso version of the satellite altimeter trend radically different in the last few years from the version you published?”
There are four reasons:
1. I changed the color of Aviso’s light yellow Envisat graph to orange, so that it would be visible. (It appears to me that they graphed it with a nearly-invisible color because it showed a very low rate of sea-level rise.)
Here it is as I downloaded it from their site, so you can see how they colored it:
http://www.burtonsys.com/climate/jnathaz1/MSL_Serie_ALL_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust.bak01.png
The Wayback Machine has a similar version from a few months earlier:
http://wayback.archive.org/web/20111015071934/http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/fileadmin/images/news/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_ALL_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust.png
Here it is with the light yellow Envisat graph changed to orange (the version I used):
http://www.burtonsys.com/climate/jnathaz1/MSL_Serie_ALL_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust.png
(Note that, in addition to graphing the Envisat data in light yellow, Aviso also started the graph way above the baseline, to obfuscate the fact that it measured much less sea-level rise than the earlier Tpoex/Poseidon & ERS2 satellites had.)
2. The 2010-2011 sea-level decline at the end of my copy of Aviso’s graph subsequently proved to mostly be a transient fluctuation. Subsequently, sea-level recovered to close to the linear trend line. (AFAIK, the cause for that fluctuation is not fully understood, but I understand that part of the reason is thought to have been heavy rains in Australia, which temporarily sequestered quite a bit of water on land.)
3. Aviso retroactively “corrected” the Envisat data. Their changes tripled the rate of sea-level rise that it had measured over the preceding decade; compare the before and after versions. (That’s one of the reasons I don’t trust the satellite sea-level measurements: even if the correction was correct, it stands to reason that if it took a decade to discover an error that big, there’s a good chance that other major errors remain uncorrected.)
4. The default Aviso graph parameters add a bogus 0.3 mm/yr GIA “adjustment” based on Peltier’s estimate of how much sea-level should be falling due to hypothesized post-glacial sinking of the ocean floor. That’s useful for some purposes, but the sum is not sea-level. So I used the version without that adjustment.
Here’s Aviso’s current version, without the GIA “adjustment.” Of course it extends a bit longer, but note the dramatic change in the light yellow graph of the Envisat data, compared to the earlier versions:
http://www.aviso.oceanobs.com/fileadmin/images/news/indic/msl/MSL_Serie_ALL_Global_IB_RWT_NoGIA_Adjust.png
Let’s cue up Ike Eisenhower’s farewell address. Not the “military-industrial complex” part that is often cited, but the part where he warns against the hordes of government-funded, computer-based scientists growing increasingly dependent on government funding.
“Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.
“In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
“The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
The Old General was spot-on in assessing the danger of government-funded research programs that inevitably support government-vested programs.
We now face a multi-billion-dollar annual behemoth of government-funded echo-chamber “climate science” that works hand-in-glove with multi-billion-dollar annual “non-profit” organizations and multi-billion-dollar annual media organizations whose sole purpose is to destroy capitalism and foster socialist/communist institutions.
Today’s environmentalists are the ultimate “watermelons” – green on the outside and red on the inside. The Communists have merely changed agendas, but their goals are the same as in the 60’s – “We will bury you”
Just come across this news item – Anthony, you may wish to transfer it to a different thread.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/25008660/sea-level-rises-due-to-climate-change-could-cost-australia-200b-climate-council-report-finds/?source=wan
oh..will steffen again..
mans sooo embarrassing.
crap like this..
“If you look at some of our most vulnerable areas, and the Sydney region is one of those, you would say toward the end of this century that a one-in-100-year flood is going to be happening every few days,” he said.”
really? scuse me laughing
The best way to solve this problem is to get the Federal government completely out of the scientific research funding game and make funding all 100% private sector with individual States being allowed to fund whatever they please as granted in amendments 9 & 10.
Federal funding of military R&D would be the exception, as running a military is one of the few powers granted to the Federal government…
In addition, the FDA should be shut down and insurance companies would set pragmatic standards for new drug approval protocols.
It now costs about $1 BILLION per drug to get through the FDA approval process… Last year, only 27 new drugs were approved by the FDA… If the private sector regulated drug approval, there would be 100’s of new drugs approved each year at a fraction of the cost and many drugs for diseases that afflict few patients would be developed since the developmental costs would be greatly reduced.
Yes, under private sector regulation, there will be the occasional mistake, but that’s the cost of progress.. We still get deaths from approved drugs despite pharmaceutical companies spending $1 BILLION to get FDA approval.
I question your $ billion claim. This reads like drug industry propaganda.
With regard to the observation that “It now costs about $1 BILLION per drug to get through the FDA approval process…,” at 10:51 PM on 16 September, mpainter had posted:
Would that your suspicion correlated with reality. For every new drug application (NDA) approved by the FDA’s Office of New Drugs (OND), a manufacturer sustains an average cost in the vicinity of one billion dollars.
Add on the costs associated with gaining marketing approval in jurisdictions other than that of our republic’s federal government. The greater part of the expense is imposed by the requirement to prove efficacy, particularly efficacy comparative to existing standard of care in pharmacotherapy.
That’s a pretty solid estimate for drug approval costs, and some in the industry use even higher numbers.
I still question that figure. You rely on industry sources and the industry would love to have a free hand in introducing new products- in other words, they would love it if the FDA disappeared. I will not be convinced as long as you use industry figures. I should say that the drug industry does not impress me as trustworthy. You need to do better than repeat unsubstantiated claims.
Continuing to express his disbelief in SAMURAI‘s observation that “It now costs about $1 BILLION per drug to get through the FDA approval process…” but obviously not bothering to look into the matter himself at 10:25 AM on 17 September, mpainter writes:
Being a physician, I myself “would love it if the FDA disappeared,” though the established actors in the pharma industry would be devastated, inasmuch as the FDA is part of the government mechanism which preserves a cartel market for these large-cap corporations. They’d very much like the OND meatgrinder to run a bit more to the manufacturers’ purposes, but they assuredly want it to continue running.
What mpainter fails to understand is that the entities who make up the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) are all limited liability corporations which seek investment capital in the financial markets regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As such, they must comply with SEC regulations in the publication of annual reports and quarterly Form 10-Q filings, all of which become matters of public record.
As such, not only does such reporting satisfy the officers of the Commission but they also inform investors about the financial health of these companies, including ongoing operations, planning, expectations, and so forth.
While it must be admitted that corporate officers who would “cook the books” on key aspects of clinical trials might well perjure themselves in their companies’ SEC reporting, there’s really nothing else to rely upon as the best possible source of information on the costs associated with the average successful New Drug Application (NDA) submission.
If mpainter knows of (or suspects) a better source of information on this subject, he’s invited to cough it up.
[Meanwhile, I must apologize for delays in my posts. Not my fault. Mr. Watts and his cadre of moderators have me on “permanent double secret probation” for the sin of having jumped with too much vigorous eloquence on the climate catastrophists and other leftard “Liberal” fascist blithering idiots who misrepresent themselves as sane and honest disputants in this forum. I view the process as akin to debridement, in which you cut – literally – until the blood flows. Mr. Watts et alia apparently don’t like even the metaphorical sight of such sanguine results.]
[And we read all of the double-secret moderated list postings first! (It’s the triple secret unmoderated ones that take a few minutes … .mod]
I would not trifle with Human health-rather, I would replace the Federal FDA with State versions (initially block-granted, but soon weaned), with a mandate when a drug clears a given supermajority of States (such as 3/5), ALL States must accept the drug.
Hmmm…no – this would lead to big-time smuggling (just like cigaret taxes). Say your job keeps you in State A that does not allow a drug that will save your child’s life. However, State B allows the drug. Your choices are (1) let child die; (2) move to State B without a job and hope things work out; (3) smuggle drug from State B to State A.
Samuari,
I agree completely. As soon as you get taxpayer funded science, it becomes political and stops being scientific. Stop all taxpayer funding of all science. Private individuals will fund science that is useful and that works. Everything else is intellectual masturbation …
Remember, Ike’s penultimate job was as president of Columbia University–soon after Vannevar Bush, at the behest of FDR, provided the book (similar in effect to IPCC reports) that institutionalized the federalization of science. Ike saw it firsthand, which is why he wrote so eloquently about it.
Another example of why I reach for my revolver each time someone utters the phrase, “science-based medicine.”
Then there is the appeal to authority “Doctors are highly trained” and the appeal to consensus “They wouldn’t give you this medicine if there was something better.” Funny how the ones who call themselves rationalists are the ones being taken for a ride – and persuading you to join them.
Some of you already know, but some of you would be more than shocked at what is behind the HIV-AIDS curtain.
And this article shows, once again, that you don’t need to show conspiracy to show corruption. Conspiracy is not the only method that aligns so many people at so many levels in the wrong direction. Sometimes people don’t even know they’re doing it.
At 10:29 PM on 16 September, Karim D. Ghantous has posted:
Actually, the term you seem to be looking for is “evidence-based medicine” (EBM).
One of the problems with EBM is its high valuation of information gathered in reviews of randomized blinded clinical trials to produce guidelines structuring diagnosis and treatment, but its advocates – perhaps necessarily? – avoid treating with the influences of corruption on the design, conduct, and reporting of those trials.
EBM assumes that the research upon which it depends had been devised impartially and honestly, and as many of us in clinical medicine have learned over the decades, “It ain’t necessarily so.”
For my own part, I’ve found that Primum non nocere isn’t enough. There’s also need for more than a little bit of “Доверяй, но проверяй”
Hear, hear!
The chase for funding affects all branches of science and, ultimately, distorts results. This classic article, “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False,” is an excellent discourse that applies to climate science as much to medicine.
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124
C.S. Lewis pointed out something he saw with his literature students. When they faced a problem that would take work to research, the cleverer they were, the more easily and the more likely they were to come up with some clever, interesting theory, but not do the work to verify it.
Call that lazy science or call that undisciplined science, the point is that if you don’t have the discipline to check all those great ideas, you will usually end up out in left field.
Of course, Dr. Michaels, you realize – as should everybody else reading here – that the transnational progressives and other partisans on the political left will screech and scream that the Cato Institute has such a Center only because it suits the nefarious purposes of the Kochtopus for Cato to produce “anti-science” propaganda.
Is it even necessary to insert a “[/sarc]” tag here?
This is one reason climate science has Mike Mann. He was admitted to Yale’s theoretical nuclear physics program but switched into climate research when he realized the future of physics research funding looked bleak. After attending a climate talk he realized the much larger funding potential of a growing field.
My own advisor looked for creative ways to get funding for his research. He tapped everything from the Air Force to biologic research (he had nothing to do with biologic at all) to fund his research. At the end of the year he would get very creative in pretending he used the money the way he promised in his proposals. In academia the truth is very flexible and resilient; it can be twisted and contorted to fit a lot of needs.
Sometimes negative results still get out, but they are camouflaged as positive results – for example, this hilariously regretful announcement of good news from German Biologists studying the effect of ocean acidification on algae.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/09/14/climatechange-oceans-idUKL5N0RD40520140914
To their horror, they discovered that when they bubbled CO2 through seawater and warmed it up, the algae responded by growing more vigorously.
Anyone with a swimming pool could have predicted this result – in Summer time you have to get pretty handy with the chlorine, or else your pool very quickly turns into green slime. But to be fair, the people who produced the study are German biologists, so their swimming pools probably never get that warm.
They most likely don’t have swimming pools other than at the local sports and aquatic centre … they’d have no practical knowledge of swimming pool maintenance just like ‘climate scientists’ have little practical experience with weather.
There is so much money pumped into this, the research budget part that is not spent on propaganda will be eventually be transformed into truth showing that increased trace gas CO2 emissions cause no significant change on climate. A bit more worried about eventual reverse and global cooling scare like in 70s coming within ten years given natural oscillation in ocean currents, solar activity and cycle 24 with less radiation hitting earth, precession for northern hemisphere over long haul, lower earth magnetic field, the truth will come out soon for manipulated temperature government records which is despite still statistically insignificant. Joke – ice age returning started 800 or 10,000 or 2,000 years ago, unfortunately in 100 years they will be spending/wasting huge amounts to reduce trying to directly manipulate atmosphere against natural trends as opposed to now where it is a political issue with propaganda and manipulate science most people do not care about as opposed to pure science issue. Truth is coming with temp record (RSS satellite as opposed to manipulated/”adjusted” land surface), can not keep adhering to a spurious correlation on CO2, i think organic food consumption as an explanatory variable may be more significant than CO2 emissions.
“We’re all climate scientists now”
True. You even have psychiatrists and Alzheimer’s doctors, who while proclaiming “The Myth of Alzheimers” insist on believing in the global warming nonsense and “preparing” their patients for climate change quality of life issues. “Everybody’s got to get into the act” – Jimmy Durante
Anthony, what is going on here? Since I had a satirical comment deleted by a moderator yesterday, Everything I post vanishes. Not held for moderation, just gone.
I was not informed of any other action being taken that the “snip”. Could you check and clarify, please.