Over on the thread The folly of blaming the Eastern U.S. heat wave on global warming there is a lively discussion going on between people that think the Eastern US heatwave hype by media and a few activist scientists is just bunk -vs- the defenders of the faith that insist it is a signature of global warming climate change climate disruption. Generally, these defenders are people that only look forward using model projections and pronouncements made by the IPCC, rather than look back at historical data and the propensity for nature to create such extremes, such as the nearly identical weather pattern that led to the 2010 Russian heatwave in which “climate change” was found blameless in a peer reviewed paper by NOAA.
In that thread there’s a comment by Gail Combs in response to the defenders of the faith (typically hit and run anonymous cowards) that I though worthy of elevating to a full post.
Gail Combs says:
Mr. B. says: July 7, 2012 at 6:48 pm
The IPCC and the National Academy of Science believe global warming is real and directly related to human activity. Over 95% of Scientist worldwide believe global warming is real and directly related to human activity. If you don’t want to believe it you don’t have to. But I for one am more willing to listen to the conclusions of people who have devoted their education, time, study and energy to this issue than to some guy with a blog……
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As a scientist, I KNOW other scientists will lie through their teeth when it comes to money or their career. I have had plenty of direct experience of outright lying and falsification of data. I have also been fired more than once for refusing to falsify data upon direct order from my superior.
My personal experience with the “Honesty” and “Integrity” of scientists is that it is rare, most will go along with the herd or with higher authority rather than stick their neck out.
In my entire career I found only one other person willing to stand up for what was right instead of going along with what was easiest. She was also fired for her honesty. Most people are followers not leaders. I have read somewhere only one in two hundred is actually a leader and to control a group all that is needed is to identify and break that leader. That is what saying there is a “Consensus” and the labeling and denigrating of those who don’t go with the flow is all about. That practice alone should make people wonder about “The Science” Real science is about the quest for truth and facts not following “Authority” not being a member of the “A” list.
Here is the current state of “Honesty” in Science:
…..Survey questions on plagiarism and other forms of professional misconduct were excluded. The final sample consisted of 21 surveys that were included in the systematic review, and 18 in the meta-analysis.
A pooled weighted average of 1.97% (N = 7, 95%CI: 0.86–4.45) of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91–19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Meta-regression showed that self reports surveys, surveys using the words “falsification” or “fabrication”, and mailed surveys yielded lower percentages of misconduct. When these factors were controlled for, misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others.
Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct.
More articles about the lack of honesty in science.
A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform
ScienceDaily: US Scientists Significantly More Likely to Publish Fake Research, Study Finds
A few individual cases:
LISTINGS:
.naturalnews.com:Scientific fraud news, articles and information
Many here at WUWT have a degree in science, engineering or the maths. That is why we smell something very fishy with the IPCC and “The Science”
This is what Forty citizen auditors found when they looked at “the United Nations’ Nobel-winning climate bible.. the gold standard.”
…Contrary to statements by the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the celebrated 2007 report does not rely solely on research published in reputable scientific journals. It also cites press releases, newspaper and magazine clippings, working papers, student theses, discussion papers, and literature published by green advocacy groups. Such material is often called “grey literature.”
We’ve been told this report is the gold standard. We’ve been told it’s 100 percent peer-reviewed science. But thousands of sources cited by this report have not come within a mile of a scientific journal.
Based on the grading system used in US schools, 21 chapters in the IPCC report receive an F (they cite peer-reviewed sources less than 60% of the time), 4 chapters get a D, and 6 get a C. There are also 5 Bs and 8 As…. http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2010/04/14/climate-bible-gets-21-fs-on-report-card/
Sorry, the more we dig, and look at the data we can get our hands on (as any true scientist is required to do) the more it stinks. “The Team” knows this and that is why the data was not released upon simple requests, Freedom of Information Acts and when push finally came to shove the data was “Lost”
Phil Jones: The Dog Ate My Homework
From the “A goat ate my homework” excuse book: NIWA reveals NZ original climate data missing
Lonnie and Ellen, A Serial Non-Archiving Couple
If you want more on the supposed “Integrity” of those you seem to believe in see: WUWT Climategate links
Related articles
- Alarmists Use Extreme Weather to Revive Man-Made Global Warming (theaveragejoenewsblogg.com)
- Now That the Weather Is Going Crazy, Americans Believe In Climate Change … – Slate Magazine (blog) (slate.com)
- Stockholm sees coldest June day in 84 years (thelocal.se)
- Hank Campbell: IPCC Gives Up On Science, Makes Grey Literature Official (junkscience.com)
- Comment On “Levitus Data On Ocean Forcing Confirms Skeptics, Falsifies IPCC” At Niche Modeling (pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com)
As another scientist…I’ll second the notion that scientists are not above flat out lying to get grant money or some other support. You have to even be careful when faculty come up for tenure. Unfortunately, happens more often than you would think (at least in chemistry).
I was told in grad school once that was just how the game was played.
Gary Pearse says:
July 8, 2012 at 10:05 am
I entered the thicket and set off a heart-stopping thundering and billowing of thick red dust that was like hot ashes as I roused a huge flock of sleeping warthogs (Hausa muslims don’t eat pork) who took off, thin gray-skinned tails with black paint brushes on the ends sticking up straight as they fled. I came back out choking and had to settle for the shade of a large rock at the foot of the ridge. Now that, folks, is what 40s “feels like”.
Sounds like a balmy day in early May in Iraq. Just substitute camel spiders and/or scorpions for the wart hogs, and you’d have felt right at home, Gary!
95% of scientists, BS and for one simple mathematical reason . Given the total number of scientists are not know its impossible to say what % of scientists are represented by a what is know as a sub-group of the whole not matter what its size. Simply maths really but to the AGW faithful whats a claim as entered the dodgem , no matter how poor it is , them its unchangeable and unchallengeable an approach standard in religion but one with zero scientific validity.
Let me be a
climateweather alarmist and lets extrapolate from here. These are signs of global cooling. Get ready for the next next ice age./ SARC
You see, two can play silly games.
This is what Forty citizen auditors found when they looked at “the United Nations’ Nobel-winning climate bible.. the gold standard.”
I was one of those auditors. Donna really bent the rules to give the benefit to the IPCC — and it was much worse than she reported… Just sayin’
[SNIP: Your snark and attacks on Anthony Watts are getting tiring. Discuss the science. If you can. -REP]
You’re all so sure of yourselves, but you just won’t bet on it…
https://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/?eventGroupId=7620
Many excellent comments here. Fortunately, I was already employed by a prestigious research laboratory upon graduation from college. Anyone who works in a raw data research lab knows how easily data is ‘cooked’ to look good. We generally did not do that, but it did occur in situations where the chips (i.e. funding) were down. Personally, I witnessed this on many different occasions, the best technique being that of omission: if some of the experimental data doesn’t fit, ignore it, thereby making the remainder look better.
Less fortunately, a situation arose where I discovered the cause of death of scores of children who were immuno-suppressed for the treatment of leukemia. Upon discovery, I was warned by my superior, a PhD/MD, not to divulge the information or we could lose our funding and be shut down. I was young, intimidated, and didn’t like starvation, so I kept my mouth shut. The company responsible quietly went about correcting the problem, the parents never knew what killed their children, and I went on my way out the door back to college and to launch my career in business. The decision to leave was mine, out of disgust.
The moral of the story? Many scientist’s experiments and findings become biased once under contract since they will do whatever is necessary to continue the government-sponsored gravy train. Always look behind the reports at the raw data to decide for yourself. To me, the raw data does not support CAGW in any manner whatsoever. Those who decry CAGW and look to the government for solutions are lemmings being led to the river bank.
Thanks for elevating Gail Combs’ comment to a headline post!
Gail’s integrity, combined with an understanding of the scientific method, is what I was looking for when selecting “independent” scientific experts for various product and process design reviews I was responsible for.
paul kr~ I am still hoping to see your response to Rockwood, re Arctic ice during the massive heatwaves and droughts of the 1930s.
feet2thefire says:
July 8, 2012 at 10:03 am
….This all has made me so untrusting of ALL science. I’ve gotten to the point of this: If you scientists don’t let me personally see every bit of your work, I don’t believe a word you say. Even if much of it is over my head, I still want to be able to see it all.
____________________________
GOOD!
Steve that is how ALL science is SUPPOSED TO BE DONE, PERIOD. No ifs, no ands, no buts, no hiding data, no hiding methods or codes or anything else. If you do not want to let it all hang out then fine it becomes a “Trade Secret” and IT DOES NOT GO INTO PEER REVIEWED journals. It is either a “Trade Secret” or it is peer reviewed science it can not be both and that is what the Post Modern Science group is trying to do, have their cake and eat it too by hiding the data.
If scientists and journals were ethical the first article that tried the “hide the data” crap should have been shoved back at the guilty party(s) and told FIX IT or shut up. The fact the journals, editors and reviewers did not say “Where is the data?” is a big glaring neon sign of collusion to hide dicey results in my book. I do not have to know a thing about the science involved to smell a big fat rat. If there is no data to back it up it just plain isn’t science. That put Nature and the other guilty journals in the same category as the National Enquirer.
Actually I have more respect for the National Enquirer than I do for Nature. At least the National Enquirer does not have its nose stuck in the air in a “Holier than Thou” attitude while they trash the reputation of science and they try to ram down my throat political policy that will bankrupt my country. The Science Journals are no longer anything but political propaganda outlets and should be boycotted by all scientists with integrity.
95%? it’s been adjusted the wrong way, ‘the team’ will not be happy. Obviously just a minor modelling error that is easily correctable. But then we all know in reality it’s just a random number pulled from an extremely uncomfortable place.
…..and I don’t mean the back of a Volkswagen.
There is more at stake than just honesty. What do these (real) cases have in common? An archival employee stealing documents from an important historical collection and selling them on the market, a medical doctor imitating Jack the Ripper and kiling his female patients, and a scientist who fabricates his data.
As a scientist, I’d like to believe that we are superior in honesty and intellect. Compared to politicians, this would certainly be true. However, scientists are people too. As a general rule, we “don’t bite the hand that feeds us.”
Wow. Well done.
What about the hot weather in northern Canada on these maps? Is this real or is there a lack of observations there to base it on? I seem to see this on every map.
The IPCC models are plain wrong, It’s not me saying this but the American Physical Society’s guide to atmospheric physics: http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/hafemeister.cfm
In Eq 17 the authors show the IPCC assumption, lower atmosphere DOWN emissivity = 1, gives excess energy. The way they solve it, reduced emissivity, is a fudge because you must also reduce the earth’s emissivity: the problem has no solution.
The error [333.[1-0.76 W/m^2] is 50 times claimed AGW. To fix it requires major surgery of incorrect physics. One way the models pretend to work is to use exaggerated low level cloud optical depth. They double it: http://www.gewex.org/images/feb2010.pdf [page 5]
This settled science is nothing of the sort. No IPCC model can predict climate.
The link to the Russian heat wave refers to a team led by Dr. Hoerling (among others). He has put a series of papers claiming that extreme events are caused by blocking patterns in the jet stream. Here is the quote from the press release accompanying his paper:
The heat wave was due primarily to a natural phenomenon called an atmospheric “blocking pattern”, in which a strong high pressure system developed and remained stationary over western Russian, keeping summer storms and cool air from sweeping through the region and leading to the extreme hot and dry conditions. While the blocking pattern associated with the 2010 event was unusually intense and persistent, its major features were similar to atmospheric patterns associated with prior extreme heat wave events in the region since 1880, the researchers found.
Unfortunately, they didn’t examine the possibility that the formation of these blocking patterns is linked to changes in Arctic sea level pressure trends (SLP), which alters the behavior of the jet stream. That kind of analysis is beyond what this group considered. They looked for a direct correlation with 2010 sea ice extent, but didn’t consider the recent decades influence of reduced sea ice pack on jet stream patterns.
The recent meteorological theory proposed by Dr. Jennifer Francis can explain a lot of the changes in jet stream patterns that cause extreme events. And the more regional seasonal temperature data is examined, in light of these theories, the more it seems that increased numbers of blocking patterns in the jet stream are causing more and more extreme events.
The odds are very high that the shift in jet stream patterns caused by higher Arctic pressures resulting from reduced Arctic ice (due to polar amplification), caused the duration and intensity of the Russian heat wave.
Yes … well … one may have to grant Gail some leeway in her continued use of hyperbole; it is endemic to her style and no doubt, while there is probably some basis to her observations she should be cautious in extrapolating her observations into the rest of the world let alone other ‘fields’ and various ‘industries’; my own experience certainly does not mirror hers, but then design reviews, ‘cross checks’ of the data taken on product/devices etc with separate instrumentation works to ensure compliance with quality standards and minimize cheating.
It does look though, that the higher the monetary stakes (the multi-billion dollar ‘climate research’ industry not to mention carbon-credit trading exchanges) coupled with minimal supervision and only ‘pal’ review and given unverifiable within-the-strict-confines-of-a-laboratory ultimate ‘projections’ (forecasts in any other vernacular) decades into the future (2030 – 2050 even to the year 2100!) that the field of cli sci is ripe for hucksters of many makes to bluff, counterfeit, feign, fake, pretend, profess, put on, omit and sham in ‘activities’ involving quite-frankly outright fraud, organizational-level effusion, wholesale dissembling all the while obstructing (e.g. refusing to archive or outright refusing to make available raw datasets for analysis) those in honest pursuit of the truth …
.
I had procrastinated my too terse and trite retort to scientists. Science is a way of thought that may lead to truth and not a title and certainly not a self-assigned epithet. See Karl Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Believe nothing that you read or hear without verifying it yourself unless it fits your preexisting worldview.
I’ll just leave this here.
http://youtu.be/yRc3Ev05QiM
Anthony You are so wrong don’t you see the “global warming” moved across to the Sahara from the USA its right there for all to see LOL
I think the trees were telling the truth. Anomalous readings are hiding the truth, the decline is real.
You should get out more often ssupak.
What about debates? Oh, here you lose too. Get of the good ship global warming while it’s sinking.
Robin says:
July 8, 2012 at 10:20 am
….It even had IBM overseeing the report. I guess providing those needed mainframes and software and consulting services is consistent with its Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities business model for future revenue.
This is the report that refers to people and their behavior as sociotechnical systems in need of new mindsets and behaviors that reflect sustainability.
It rather gives me the creeps to keep running into tech companies funding and advocating transformational changes in education and the supposed necessity of a Green Economy….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Robin it will give you more creeps when you read these:
Counted for Persecution; IBM’s Role…
….survivors filed suit against IBM
Thomas John Watson, Sr.- … Watson’s pursuit of profit led him to personally approve and spearhead IBM’s strategic technological relationship with …. Germany during the 1930s. He was the IBM chairman and CEO at the time. His connections are interesting especially his interest in “global commerce and international peace”
Thomas J. Watson, Sr. Encyclopedia Britannica’s sanitized version.
Technology of course is neutral, it is the use to which humans put it that is either good or evil.