Fraud and deceit are a slippery slope
Story submitted by Bruce Webster
An article in the New York Times chronicles the descent of a sociologist into wholesale fraud. It is worth reading the whole article, because I believe it offers insight into some of the pressures, temptations, and self-rationalizations that many scientists struggle with.
Here is one key passage that will likely not surprise anyone here at WUWT (all emphasis in quoted text is mine):
Each case of research fraud that’s uncovered triggers a similar response from scientists. First disbelief, then anger, then a tendency to dismiss the perpetrator as one rotten egg in an otherwise-honest enterprise. But the scientific misconduct that has come to light in recent years suggests at the very least that the number of bad actors in science isn’t as insignificant as many would like to believe. And considered from a more cynical point of view, figures like Hwang and Hauser are not outliers so much as one end on a continuum of dishonest behaviors that extend from the cherry-picking of data to fit a chosen hypothesis — which many researchers admit is commonplace — to outright fabrication.
“Cherry-picking of data” is, of course, not an unknown topic in these parts. But here’s an even more intriguing passage:
Stapel did not deny that his deceit was driven by ambition. But it was more complicated than that, he told me. He insisted that he loved social psychology but had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results that journals found attractive. “It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty — instead of the truth,” he said. He described his behavior as an addiction that drove him to carry out acts of increasingly daring fraud, like a junkie seeking a bigger and better high.
And again:
What the public didn’t realize, he said, was that academic science, too, was becoming a business. “There are scarce resources, you need grants, you need money, there is competition,” he said. “Normal people go to the edge to get that money. Science is of course about discovery, about digging to discover the truth. But it is also communication, persuasion, marketing. I am a salesman. I am on the road. People are on the road with their talk. With the same talk. It’s like a circus.”
And finally how it all turned out:
…the universities unveiled their final report at a joint news conference: Stapel had committed fraud in at least 55 of his papers, as well as in 10 Ph.D. dissertations written by his students. The students were not culpable, even though their work was now tarnished. The field of psychology was indicted, too, with a finding that Stapel’s fraud went undetected for so long because of “a general culture of careless, selective and uncritical handling of research and data.” If Stapel was solely to blame for making stuff up, the report stated, his peers, journal editors and reviewers of the field’s top journals were to blame for letting him get away with it. The committees identified several practices as “sloppy science” — misuse of statistics, ignoring of data that do not conform to a desired hypothesis and the pursuit of a compelling story no matter how scientifically unsupported it may be.
A lesson for climate science. Be sure to read the whole thing. ..bruce..
Source of story : http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/diederik-stapels-audacious-academic-fraud.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0
You can forget about the climate if that makes you feel good, although one might want to consider things like for instance : since the industrial revolution, burning hydrocarbons has raised the atmospheric CO2 concentration by 38%, and 38% is quite a bit.
But anyway, again you can forget about that if you want, doesn’t change much regarding the fact that one if not the prime reason of current crisis that is only starting is due to below :
http://iiscn.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/laherrere_all_liquids_production_1900-2200.jpg
Ya know, there is a prestigious journal for scientists whose results could be considered questionable. It’s called the Journal of Irreproducible Results. Why don’t they use this widely respected avenue to publish their findings?
Stapel’s pensees on modern science may help make partial amends for his wrong-doing if he manages to raise awareness about what has been happening in the newly engorged field called climate science. We would benefit from a thorough investigation, across many disciplines, of the overblown scaremongering around CO2. It was, and still is, advantageous to many to support it. But it has been a dramatic loss to society overall, and peak-loss from it may not yet be in sight.
And by nailing Stapel we have arrived at “cherry picking” by our most respected press.
Because by publicly nailing Stapel they created the fiction of an unbiased press always prepared to jump into action when scientific abuse takes place. But if Stapel had been a climate scientist the press never would ever have touched him. And that’s the true lesson of the story.
So true de Haan. Steve Goddard has caught a lot of GISS data tampering of past temperatures when Hansen was in charge. I wonder if things are going to change now? See also “Hansen – The Climate Chiropractor“.
@yt75
You say
But 38% of not very much at all is even less very much at all.
To put this in perspective. Imagine a sports game where the attendance is 10,000 (in UK – a home game for Coventry City FC averages almost exactly 10,000. No doubt there are similar places in each country). Now divide the crowd into ‘CO2’ or ‘not CO2’ in proportion to the atmosphere.
Before the industrial revolution, CO2 would represent just 3 people in the atmospheric crowd and 9,997 would be other gases. Nowadays it is 4 for CO2 and 9,996 represent the other gases.
I do not plan to wet the bed very much over this increase.
nyt75:
Your post at April 30, 2013 at 2:37 am displays very muddled thinking.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/29/how-a-scientist-becomes-a-con-man/#comment-1292242
It says
Your first sentence makes five assertions; viz.
1.
People here may “feel good” by forgetting about the climate.
But people are here because they are interested in the climate so it would make them feel bad.
2.
Atmospheric CO2 concentration is something one “might want to consider” concerning climate.
True, “one might” but other things (e.g. geographical location) or more important when considering climate.
3.
Burning hydrocarbons has raised the atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Perhaps, and perhaps not. Other things may have caused the rise.
4.
Since the industrial revolution atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen 38%.
Yes, but so what?
5.
The 38% rise is “quite a bit”.
No, it is not “quite a bit”: it is very little.
The concentration rise is from ~0.0003 to ~0.0004 of the atmosphere.
138% of of almost nothing is still almost nothing.
Then your second sentence proclaims ‘peak oil’.
The abject and utter nonsense of ‘peak oil’ has been refuted many times on WUWT. Search the archives and learn for yourself the several reasons why it is nonsense.
But, for sake of argument, let us assume that all your assertions are completely correct and consider the implications of that.
Your assertions provide the following.
(a)
If ‘peak oil’ is true then there will be a cessation of burning hydrocarbons (see your graph).
(b)
If burning hydrocarbons is causing the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration then cessation of the burning will stop the rise.
(c)
If the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration is a problem for climate then stopping the rise will stop the problem.
In summation, your post only consists of muddled thinking so severe that it requires a member of the cult of AGW to spout it.
Richard
richardscourtney says:
April 30, 2013 at 3:36 am
I didn’t have the energy to address points you commented on, so thanks for putting them in the floodlight.
Latimer Alder says:
April 30, 2013 at 3:24 am
@yt75
“…
To put this in perspective. Imagine a sports game where the attendance is 10,000 (in UK – a home game for Coventry City FC averages almost exactly 10,000. No doubt there are similar places in each country). Now divide the crowd into ‘CO2′ or ‘not CO2′ in proportion to the atmosphere.
Before the industrial revolution, CO2 would represent just 3 people in the atmospheric crowd and 9,997 would be other gases. Nowadays it is 4 for CO2 and 9,996 represent the other gases.”
The problem I see is that the climate hysteric such as Weepy Bill tends to think of the original 3 fans as actually being members of the home team, and each new fan added to be one of the opposition, and surely in the near future the opposition will outnumber the loyal original 3 home team members creating devastation havoc and pain.
Having read the NYT article a couple of times now the thing that strikes me is that at least in Dutch psychology there are still a few students around who can detect fraud and have the guts to confront it.
I cannot see any of the AGW disciples ever doing that.
Poor man, he was in the wrong profession: he should have been an investment banker! Never let the truth spoil a good story..
Here is Paul Krugman “seriously” proposing that scientists should lie for a noble cause.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/27/quote-of-the-week-bonus-krugman-insanity-edition/
So I hold that scientists to not inadvertently become con-men but in full knowledge; remember Ur-warmist Steve Schneiders “we all have to choose the right balance between being efficient and being honest” quote.
These people know when they are lying.
@PaulH – I was drawn to this statement in your link: “The New York Times and TIME were both fooled by fake Stapel experiments in 2010” – I do not think it was hard to fool them. They wanted to be fooled because it fit their agenda.
He had to do it for the children.
Further evidence that psychologists are western society’s version of the witch doctor. Malcolm Muggeridge noticed it years ago
thelastdemocrat says:
“The social scientists are the ones who are having the greatest success in predicting and controlling the world.
“They have used science to re-engineer society, and we have not even noticed them doing this. Maybe these sociologists are not scientists, but they sure have been successful. You can discount them if you want. I do not, and am very concerned about how to counter-act these forces for the future of my children.”
Democrat,
Excellent observations. You’re describing the relentless assault on logic-based, values-based, capitalist-based Western culture.
The only thing missing from your observations is the fact that this assault was not the product of “science.” The successes of “social sciences” are really just codification of well-known principles of salesmanship. Identify and/or create needs in the rubes. Fulfill those needs.
The assault on our culture was the product of a finely-tuned covert influence apparatus run by a genius who understood the American psyche–Willi Muenzenberg.
Muenzenberg led a team of covert influence operators in the initial assault on America’s essence. He targeted the transmission belts of American culture–the media, education/academia, and Hollywood.
Into these centers of our culture, he introduced the message that has echoed through the decades, and has been reinforced and strengthened. In fact, Muenzenberg’s message is exactly the message of Michael Mann, Lewandowsky, McKibben, and all the other AGW cultists: “America is a racist, sexist, xenophobic, imperialist, capitalist hellhole. And it must be changed.”
This message was reinforced my Muenzenberg’s stroke of genius–he created “front groups.” These groups, with trained cheerleaders in control, repeated the message–over and over and over and over again.
Sound familiar? It should. It’s the exact message and method of operations of the AGW cult. And every other Politically Correct Progressive anti-capitalist, anti-normal issue there is. They all follow the Muenzenberg template. It works.
You ask how to counter act the operation?
First, you must recognize the tactics of your opponents, and the foundation of their belief system. Once we have this understanding, only then can we begin to win back our cultural foundations. We need to take back the media, education/academia, and Hollywood to scrub them of the PC-Prog stain.
Only then can there be an adult, logical conversation about issues like AGW.
Attempting to argue with PC-Progs with logic is useless.
Full details can be found in my book: Willing Accomplices,
http://www.willingaccomplices.com
The Scientific Method relies on replicability of observations. This can only be achieved with objective observers and the observation of objective phenomena. If the observer cannot divorce his own personality from the work, he cannot be objective. If the phenomena being observed cannot be divorced from personalities, the work cannot be objective.
Any field of study in which the ‘human consciousness’ is a key element cannot be reproducibly empiricized. For this reason sociology, psychology, and politics are not and can never be true sciences.
Ken Mitchell says:
April 29, 2013 at 6:43 pm
“Any discipline with the word ‘science’ in the name, such as ‘social science’, isn’t one.”
=========
any government with the word democratic in the name isn’t.
look at the definition of climate. climate is the average of weather over time. so, in truth climate science should not exist. it should be part of meteorology, the forecasting of weather. with “climate science” simply being the statistical analysis of weather.
the basic, unwritten assumption underlying all “climate science” is that weather is not predictable, but climate is. however, this has never been demonstrated mathematically. it is an assumption only. where is the proof that the average of a chaotic system is not chaotic? where is the mathematics showing you can average the unpredictable and achieve a predictable result?
think about it. if something is unpredictable, why should its average be any less unpredictable? if something has a predictable average, then it is itself statistically predictable from its average, which means that weather must be predictable. however, we know weather is inherently unpredictable. which means climate must be inherently unpredictable.
the IPCC at one time recognized this – that climate was unpredictable. before global warming and climate change became the end products of political correctness. however, with a change of leadership at the top, the IPCC threw this knowledge out the door and made bold predictions about climate based on computer models.
And these models told us what we already knew. that climate is no more predictable than weather given our current understanding of mathematics. maybe someday we will have the tools, but that day is not today.
the mistake is in trying to tie changes in temperature to observed events. any correlation will be simply coincidental. it is no different than witch hunting. something bad happens. the person standing next to the place must have caused it. the weather turns bad, the evil eye at work. the climate turns bad, many evil eyes at work.
yt75 says:
April 30, 2013 at 2:37 am
But anyway, again you can forget about that if you want, doesn’t change much regarding the fact that one if not the prime reason of current crisis that is only starting is due to below :
==========
Assume for a minute that what you say is true, that the source of CO2 (hydrocarbons) is limited and we are at the peak. Assume that is true.
That means there is nothing to worry about from CO2, because the supply of hydrocarbons will soon be decreasing, which means the amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere from industrial activity is self limiting. There is no need to pass any laws or any taxes to try and control CO2, because the supply is limited and will soon run out.
Thus, when people say there is something to worry about, that means they do not believe the supply of hydrocarbons will run out any time soon. That in fact they must believe that the supply is so large as to pose a serious threat. So what is it? Are hydrocarbons in short supply and likely to run out, or are they so plentiful that they may create a problem?
If hydrocarbons are in short supply then the market will replace them with something else that is not in short supply. Governments cannot do this because there has never been a single government that has withstood economic realities of the market, except through mass imprisonment, starvation and execution of its own population. In which case we have much more to fear from our governments than we have to fear from CO2.
Given that this was in the NYT, I’m betting (not an unsafe bet BTW) that if asked how this applies to AGW and Climate Science, they would argue tooth and nail that AGW/Climatology is different! Those noble souls could never do such a thing. Cognitive dissonance at its finest.
In other words there has been a trace rise of the trace gas co2. Head for the hills! In the past co2 levels have been well, well over 4,000ppm that’s well, well over today’s levels. Stay calm, and peace.
Fraud in the social sciences is not new. Think Sybil and multiple personality disorder in the 1970s. That was a total fake. Think of how many crimiinal court cases were pled on this premise, and won or dismissed.
Find the peer reviewers and sack them, too. A scientist who is a serial f r a u d is no less heinous than a serial pedophile in the clergy. It takes only one such to make the entire population suspect because it is that population that has failed to out the offender. The failure of a few good people to respond appropriately to these kinds of behavior should go on the public record. We have a right, as tax payers who fund this, to know of the ethical failures, who committed them and where, and who failed to do the right thing.
The co-author quoted above defending themself by saying, paraphrase, “I didn’t collect the data” is no less guilty by having unquestioningly used that data to create a complete fabrication. Forever after, in any peer reviewed literature, that person’s name shall include an asterisk along with all the letters of learning to indicate their part in fakery. Such is the burden of real crime against science funded by the public.
Richard Courtney, it is possible to agree on some matters while disagreeing about others.
You make a common mistake about peak fossil fuel ideas, naturally occurring liquid hydrocarbons (oil) being the most prominent. Peak oil does not say the world runs out, which your post asserts. It says the ability to extract more per year peaks and then declines at rates which are more or less predictable. That has already happened with conventional global reserves. The debate is only about when, not whether, that will happen with unconventional reserves including tight (shale) oil, tar sands (Orinoco), and bitumen sands (Athabasca). There is much hype in the press, and a lot of junk ‘science’ including by Maugerei, who used convention reservoir decline curves to estimate shale reserve potential. That is a much more egregious error than UHI in land based temperature records. Individual fracked shale wells decline from whatever initial production to stripper status in 3 years, resulting in the Red Queen problem. And, even taking the new EIA estimate for US shale TRR ( half from the Monterey, which is dubious given its faulting and folding) the potential for all plays in the worlds most endowed country ( yup, the US) is 24Bbbl. That is about 1/3 of the REMAINING reserves in Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field by itself.
And you probably also confuse resource in place with technically recoverable reserves ( independent of price). And you probably project vast increases in recovery factors from new more expensive technology that somehow overcomes the inherent limitations of reservoir and source rock geophysics. Heck, you might even believe in the abiogenic origins of hydrocarbons.
I have yet to see anyone at WUWT do objective science and fact based postings on any of that, unlike the excellent commentary on climate change to be found here.
FOR WHAT ITS WORTH, the IMF in 2012 published a review of peak oil plus their own mathematic and econometric models about it. Their conclusion is peak annual production in the mid 90mbpd range by about 2020 at a real ( in 2012 dollars) price of about $200/ bbl. IMF working paper 12/109, The future of oil: geology versus technology. One contemporary place to start an education.
As a researcher, I know full well how enticing it can be to present less than the full truth by cherry picking the results. You don’t even need malfeasance – only an eagerness to substantiate your own ideas.
But scientists are not lawyers. It’s not our job to advocate a position at almost any cost, but to present the truth even when we don’t like it. We must be our own work’s greatest skeptic. Not easy to do consistently.