The replication crisis in science has just begun. It will be big.
By Larry Kummer. From the Fabius Maximus website.
Summary: After a decade of slow growth beneath public view, the replication crisis in science begins breaking into public view. First psychology and biomedical studies, now spreading to many other fields — overturning what we were told is settled science, the foundations of our personal behavior and public policy. Here is an introduction to the conflict (there is pushback), with the usual links to detailed information at the end, and some tentative conclusions about effects on public’s trust of science. It’s early days yet, with the real action yet to begin.
“Men only care for science so far as they get a living by it, and that they worship even error when it affords them a subsistence.”
— Goethe, from Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret
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Mickey Kaus referred to undernews as those “stories bubbling up from the blogs and the tabs that don’t meet MSM standards.” More broadly, it refers to information which mainstream journalists pretend not to see. By mysterious processes it sometimes becomes news. A sufficiently large story can mark the next stage in a social revolution. Game, the latest counter-revolution to feminism, has not yet reached that stage. The replicability crisis of science appears to be doing so, breaching like a whale from the depths of the sea in which it has silently grown.
See these powerful articles in the past month about the crisis. The first four discuss egregious failures of scientific institutions — with large public policy consequences; the last two are among the few articles describing this crisis for a general audience.
- “A Study on Fats That Doesn’t Fit the Story Line” by the NYT, looking at the long-hidden research suggesting that animal fats are not worse than vegetable fats. See #12 below for links to these studies.
- “The sugar conspiracy” by Ian Leslie in The Guardian — “In 1972, a British scientist sounded the alarm that sugar – and not fat – was the greatest danger to our health. His findings were ridiculed and his reputation ruined. How did the world’s top nutrition scientists get it so wrong for so long?”
- “How scientists fell in and out of love with the hormone oxytocin” by Brian Resnick at VOX — “Scientists believed a whiff of the chemical could increase trust between humans. Then they went back and checked their work.”
- “Cancer Research Is Broken” by Daniel Engber at Slate — “There’s a replication crisis in biomedicine — and no one even knows how deep it runs.”
- “Big Science is broken” by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry at The Week.
- Best so far: “Scientific Regress” by William A. Wilson at First Things.
This crisis emerged a decade ago as problems in a few fields — especially health care and psychology. Slowly similar problems emerged in other fields, usually failures to replicate widely accepted research. Even economics, with its high standards for transparency — has been hit. The landmark 2010 paper “Growth in a Time of Debt” by Harvard professors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff — used to justify austerity policies in scores of nations — was found to have serious errors in their spreadsheets. Even physics has been affected, as William Wilson notes:
“Two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years — the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border — have now been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published.” {See this about the former and this about the latter.}
By now it’s obvious that there is a structural problem in modern science, a deterioration of the always sloppy (as with most social processes) self-correcting dynamics of institutional research. Only small scale research has been conducted so far, so we do not know how broad and deep this dysfunctionality extends. The available evidence suggests that “large” is the most likely answer.
The stakes are almost beyond imagination. It’s not just a matter of time and money wasted when bad studies send research down blind allies. Science is one of our best ways to see the world, and effective public policy requires reliable research on scores of subjects, from health care to climate change. Trillions of dollars, the world’s rate of economic growth, and the health of billions can be affected.
Actions and resistance
Talk precedes action, and there are have several high-level conferences about this crisis. Such as the February 2014 workshop by the Subcommittee on Replicability in Science, part of the Advisory Committee to the NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences. They produced this typically thorough report: Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Perspectives on Robust and Reliable Science“.
Journalists describe the replication crisis as a “Whig history” — another step in the inevitable evolution and perfection of science. They seldom mention the scientists — and science institutions — resisting reforms, making the outcome uncertain (here’s an example in social psychology). This hidden side of the crisis is described by David Funder (Prof of psychology, UC-Riverside) at his website.
“It’s not just – or even especially – about psychology. I was heartened to see that the government representatives saw the bulk of problems with replication as lying in fields such as molecular biology, genetics, and medicine, not in psychology. Psychology has problems too, but is widely viewed as the best place to look for solutions since the basic issues all involve human behavior.
“It makes me a bit crazy when psychologists say (or sometimes shout) that everything is fine, that critics of research practices are “witch hunting,” or that examining the degree to which our science is replicable is self-defeating. Quite the reverse: psychology is being looked to as the source of the expertise that can improve all of science. As a psychologist, I’m proud of this.
Backlash and resistance.
“This issue came up only a couple of times and I wish it had gotten more attention. It seemed like nobody at the table (a) denied there was a replicability problem in much of the most prominent research in the major journals or (b) denied that something needed to be done. As one participant said, “we are all drinking the same bath water.” … {But} there will be resistance out there. And we need to watch out for it.
“…One of Geoff Cumming’s graduate students, Fiona Fidler, recently wrote a thesis on the history of null hypothesis significance testing {NHST}. It’s a fascinating read and I hope will be turned into a book soon. One of its major themes is that NHST has been criticized thoroughly and compellingly many times over the years. Yet it persists, even though – and, ironically, perhaps because – it has never really been explicitly defended! Instead, the defense of NHST is largely passive. People just keep using it. Reviewers and editors just keep publishing it; granting agencies keep giving money to researchers who use it. Eventually the critiques die down. Nothing changes.
“That could happen this time too. The defenders of the status quo rarely actively defend anything. They aren’t about to publish articles explaining why NHST tells you everything you need to know, or arguing that effect sizes of r = .80 in studies with an N of 20 represent important and reliable breakthroughs, or least of all reporting data to show that major counter-intuitive findings are robustly replicable. Instead they will just continue to publish each others’ work in all the “best” places, hire each other into excellent jobs and, of course, give each other awards. This is what has happened every time before.
“Things just might be different this time. Doubts about statistical standard operating procedure and the replicability of major findings are rampant across multiple fields of study, not just psychology. And, these issues have the attention of major scientific studies and even the US Government. But the strength of the resistance should not be underestimated.”
Conclusions
“But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!”
— By Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman![clip_image001[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/clip_image0011.gif "clip_image001[1]"){kind=small}
(1792).
This just touches on the many dimensions of the replication crisis. For example, there is the large and growing literature about the misuse of statistics — and the first steps to understanding the various causes of replication failure (almost certainly from structural issues, perhaps common to many or all sciences today).
We can only guess at how many of the sciences have serious problems with replication — and the methodological problems that produce it. This might be one of the greatest challenges to science since the backlash to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Depending on the extent of the problem and the resistance of institutions to reform, this might become the largest challenge since the Roman Catholic Church’s assault in the 15th and 16th centuries, putting the works of famous scientists on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (e.g., Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo). But this time the problems are within, not external to science.
The likely (but not certain) eventual results are reforms which strengthen the institutions of science, but the crisis might have severe side-effects — such as a loss in public confidence. America has long had a rocky relationship with science, from the 1925 Scopes “Monkey Trial” about evolution to the modern climate wars. With our confidence in our institutions so low and falling, news about replication failures in “settled science” might have affect the public’s confidence willingness to trust scientists. This might take long to heal.
Many sciences are vulnerable, but climate science might become the most affected. It combines high visibility, a central role in one of our time’s major public policy questions, and a frequent disregard for the methodological safeguards that other sciences rely upon.
Watch for news developments in this important story.
To learn more about this crisis in science
Some early articles about the crisis
- “Most scientific papers are probably wrong“, Kurt Kleiner, New Scientist, 30 August 2005.
- “Replication studies: Bad copy” by Ed Yong in Nature, 16 May 2012 — “In the wake of high-profile controversies, psychologists are facing up to problems with replication.”
- “How science goes wrong: Scientific research has changed the world. Now it needs to change itself“, The Economist, 19 October 2013.
- An excellent intro to the subject: “The Replication Crisis in Psychology” by Edward Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, NOBA, 2016.
Some of the many papers about the replication crisis
- An early warning that something was amiss: “Problems With Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST)” by Jeffrey A. Gliner et al in The Journal of Experimental Education, 2002 — “The results show that almost all of the textbooks fail to acknowledge that there is controversy surrounding NHST.”
- “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False“, John P. A. Ioannidis, Public Library of Science Medicine, 30 August 2005.
- “Statistical errors in medical research – a review of common pitfalls” by Alexander M. Strasak et al, Swiss Medical Weekly, 27 January 2007 — “Standards in the use of statistics in
medical research are generally low. A growing body of literature points to persistent statistical errors, flaws and deficiencies in most medical journals.”
- “What errors do peer reviewers detect, and does training improve their ability to detect them?” by Sara Schroter et al in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 1 October 2008 — Showed massive failure of peer-review on deliberated flawed paper submitted to the British Medical Journal.
- “Reliability of ‘new drug target’ claims called into question“, Brian Owens, Nature, 5 September 2011 — Internal study at Bayer finds that in only 14 of 67 target-validation projects did results match the published finding. These projects covering the majority of Bayer’s work in oncology, women’s health and cardiovascular medicine over the past 4 years. See the paper: “Reliability of ‘new drug target’ claims called into question“, Asher Mullard, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery,
- “Academic bias & biotech failures” at Life Sci VC, 28 March 2011 — “The unspoken rule is that at least 50% of the studies published even in top tier academic journals – Science, Nature, Cell, PNAS, etc… – can’t be repeated with the same conclusions by an industrial lab.”
- “In cancer science, many “discoveries” don’t hold up“, Reuters, 28 March 2012 — About Amgen’s study, “Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research” by C. Glenn Begley and Lee M. Ellis in Nature, 28 March 2012. They tested 53 “landmark” papers about cancer; 47 could not be replicated.
- “Weak statistical standards implicated in scientific irreproducibility” by Erika Check Hayden, Nature, 11 November 2013 — “One-quarter of studies that meet commonly used statistical cutoff may be false.” About “Revised standards for statistical evidence” by Valen E. Johnson in PNAS, 26 November 2013.
- “Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science” by the Open Science Collaboration, Science, 28 August 2015. Part of The Reproducibility Project: Psychology of the Open Science Foundation.
- “Records found in dusty basement undermine decades of dietary advice” by Sharon Begley at STAT, 12 April 2016. — Powerful but unpublished studies decisively refuted the consensus belief about dangers of animal fats. They were probably unpublished because they contradicted the ruling paradigm. The NYT also covered this. See these two papers in the British Medical Journal: “Re-evaluation of the traditional diet-heart hypothesis: analysis of recovered data from Minnesota Coronary Experiment (1968-73)“, 12 April 2016 — and “Use of dietary linoleic acid for secondary prevention of coronary heart disease and death: evaluation of recovered data from the Sydney Diet Heart Study {1966-73} and updated meta-analysis“, 5 February 2013.
- Investigating Variation in Replicability: A “Many Labs” Replication Project by the Open Science Collaboration. See a summary at National Geographic.
- List of replication attempts in psychological research. Many failed.
- The master website for anyone interested in this subject: Retraction Watch.
Larry Kummer…..Something missing here ??
” Talk precedes action, and there are have several high-level conferences about this crisis. “
Marcus,
Good catch!
Fabius Maximus
How can you replicate anything, when data is continuously altered by NOAA, GISS CRU and god knows who else?
But even that fades into insignificance, since for the only 400 years long observational record, for the only natural source of energy the sun, for its past variability, now we have the ‘NEW’ sunspot data, changed not by a tiny fractions, but -20% here and +30% there.
That has made all previous research work in the field obsolete and impossible to contrast and evaluate against supposedly ‘correct’ data.
@ vukcevic
I have always wondered about that. How can we possibly know accurately the short term and long term natural variation and trends in the solar irradiance at the top of the atmosphere over hundreds and thousands of years. I guess we have only been able to measure it directly the last few decades.
What I think is funny is how they have a 95% certainty in their models and then alter the data and it remains a 95% confidence level, and the conclusion never changes. The other oddity is that in correcting errors the errors should be normally distributed, they are errors after all, they should show no bias, or if a bias does exist it should exist over the entire time series and either shift the entire data up or down. Climate “science” is the only field of science I know that has a near perfect record of making errors heavily skewed in a manner that favors their desired conclusion, and amazingly shifts at the midpoint of the data. Nearly and possibly 100% of their errors, when corrected, result in a greater slope in the temperature graph. Miraculously, the errors before the midpoint correct the original data downward, and errors after the midpoint correct the data upward. It is as if God chose that time-series himself.
As the science replication crises is too often a reality, the marriage of science and politics should be viewed with the utmost suspicion.
Hardly a “shotgun wedding”; more like an “arranged marriage” involving a very large dowry.
It appears the writer took a break and temporarily lost his train of thought.
Nice review, Mr Kummer, but it is mostly the politicians and bureaucrats who use “science” to carry out other goals that are dangerous. Most researchers cannot do anything other than diss their grad students who raise objections to their received wisdom.
Tom, would you were right. Unhappily, the patterns of bias and suppression of alternate views, effective or outright denial of funding, access to instruments, acceptance of papers for publishing is endemic in all science. That means that, unless through sheer luck the current preferred views are really adequate, and more importantly do not mask critical questions that actually would advance our understanding, any government funded research that simply adheres to the “consensus” view is more than likely wasting your taxes. The idea that someone or some bodies knows best how to allocate research money, and more importantly time and access to instruments is failure at the very heart of modern science. It has the potential to keep us in the dark and in ignorance for decades, even centuries longer than necessary. The fact that at times a crackpot might be funded is far less critical than the reality that researchers from Wegener to Arp are written off by holders of mainstream views as crackpots rather simply do the necessary empirical work to verify or falsify a critical observation. In climatology it has reached a point that “adjustments” to historical data are so common place that replication is not even considered. We have proceeded from an age of empirical discovery to one of scholasticism – academic science, the wheel will turn creakily with time, but it would better for us all if the hubs axels were better and more consistently lubricated.
Tom Halla, as someone who has spent his entire career as an academic staff researcher (not faculty), I have to observe that your comment has nearly zero correspondence with what goes on between research faculty and their grad students and postdocs.
Pat Frank,
Would you agree with the proposition that unrealistic estimates of error in scientific and mathematical processes have allowed the replication monster to grow?
Here are some of my experiences. I have long seen estimates of error and uncertainty done poorly or not at all. The known formalism of the propagation of errors is rarely addressed in some fields like climate. Error terms that are calculated from the Excel linear regression of the graphed final variables are somewhat irrelevant. They are certainly misleading if there is no estimate of biases to go with these precision style regression numbers.
It is difficult to replicate an experiment done by others when you truly do not know if you are working inside or outside of their error limits. Sometimes, the need to replicate is dictated by the size of the experimental uncertainty. Pulling an example from the air, realistic error estimates of satellite based sea level change could well show the total estimated error to be larger than the change. So, a replication method like tide guages is vital.
Further, on reading a paper with error envelopes, the quality of the overall paper and hence the need to replicate is often expressed by the quality of the treatment of errors. Far too many error estimates take little time to reveal themselves as duds.
The first internal report of my career was short titled “Quality control of chemical analysis of ores and minerals.” Date was 1973. That shows the importance I placed on it. In hindsight, it led to very accurate esrimates of ore grade in several mines, a business where slips can cost many million $$$. Apart from extractive industries, I doubt if many current scientists would be using such procedures today because they are onerous and time consuming and they often give danger signals that you do not want to see. They are seldom described in the climate literature I read.
So one of the main ways to attack the replication monster is simply to mandate correct formal treatment of error and uncertainty.
Geoff.
@ Geoffrey Sherrington
I think you draw attention to a very important point. I find it quite amazing, not to say frightening, that United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change failed to discover and acknowledge the only broadly recognized and freely available international guideline on quantification and expression of uncertainty:
ISO Guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement
I got several post on this failure At my site(Science or Fiction ):
– IPCC failed to notice an international guideline on the expression of uncertainty!
– This is how the climate industry should have reported uncertainty!
– IPCC don´t even know how to quantify uncertainty!
Both the assessment reports by United Nations climate panel, and many papers they rely on, fails to meet a proper standard in their attempts to quantify, express and report uncertainty.
Geoff, IMO you’re right in everything you wrote.
Physical error analysis is completely absent in consensus climatology. In all my reading and searching, I’ve never once found a climatology paper with that kind of analysis. The statistical estimates of precision that they do — and that’s all they do — are completely useless in providing an estimate of the physical reliability of their work.
You are also entirely right in the importance you attach to error analysis. The result is often grim but always necessary. All the best scientists I know pay attention to it (“best” does not mean most famous).
A few years back, I published a paper in Analytical Chemistry on sulfur in the wood of a Roman military ram from the first Punic War, recovered off shore from Sicily. In the SI, I did an error analysis to assess a calibration method that had been published by another group. People take that stuff with deadly seriousness in Chemistry, especially analytical chemists of the kind you clearly are. They all understand that until one knows the error limits, one doesn’t know anything.
SorF, I completely agree. The IPCC is completely remiss in physical error analysis.
The really scary and seriously disappointing thing for me, is that the physics establishment has not only let the IPCC get away with it, but has at least passively colluded with them in the incompetence.
Ironic, is it not, that The Guardian runs an article such as this, but is itself guilty of pushing the global warming/climate change garbage science and denigrating skeptics and doesn’t seem aware that it is part of the problem?
Almost as if there was a gentleman’s agreement to not look at each other’s work too closely.
Interesting essay. IMO the breach already existing (dietary fats, gluten, climate) will NEVER be healed. Eisenhower warned of this. Hijacked by special interests and political agendas. CAGW on a global scale, UN sponsored, seals the deal.
Humanity will move on. But ‘science’, NASA, and such trust will never be reclaimed. Ever. NASA foundering is but the canary in the coal mine.
Here is the clip
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o?t=1h2m8s
Rud: I hope you are wrong, but I have to agree. The major issue lies at the feet of our universities. Independent scholars must preserve and promote proper collection and analysis of data. If either cannot be trusted any results cannot be trusted. I reviewed many papers for several major journals over 40 years. If the data collection and analytical methods were not appropriate the paper was rejected -period. This has changed, as witnessed by the total garbage one can read in current “research”. It used to be difficult to get works published, and even if accepted, there often was a long delay before publication. The proliferation
of journals hasn’t helped the quality of research.
Of greater importance is the long-term restructuring of the universities. A massive production of graduate students (a glut in many disciplines), the increase in soft-money “institutes” (all claiming to be centres of excellence), the upward cost-spiral of universities, and the concomitant increase in “overhead” extracted from institutes all are contributory. Universities used to be managed by scholars – now they are just businesses. This was painfully obvious in the white-washed hearing after the release of climategate emails. Tenured positions still are coveted, but they are rare, so many graduates must look for government employment. Once there it simply becomes piper and tune because they have not been properly trained, and survival trumps ethics. The fact that there isn’t a massive uprising among university staff over the legal wranglings to silence opposing views says it all!
What opposing views? Academia is 97% Democrats (actually, it may be only 95%).
How do you replicate a “science” based on consensus?
+1
Bullseye! Well done.
Get the same people to agree!
Simples!
One of the greatest failure by United Nations climate panel was to impose the strive for consensus on it´s working groups:
PRINCIPLES GOVERNING IPCC WORK
10. In taking decisions, and approving, adopting and accepting reports, the Panel, its Working Groups and any Task Forces shall use all best endeavours to reach consensus.
This is the UN/EU way. All their meetings have to agree on consensus. It is considered bad manners to disagree. You must find something to agree with or the meeting is adjourned until the next time. Once the members can agree on one thing, they move on to the next contentious issue and so on and so forth. It turns meetings into boring polite gabfests where everyone has to have something positive to say.
Consensus is an idea that belongs to politics as in “the people have voted and the consensus is that Donald Trump should be President”.
In contrast, science is a dictatorship of the facts. For it matters not at all what people would like the facts to be, nor even if they are politically correct. It matters not whether some six year only in a primary school discovers some new scientific fact or some eminent professor at the end of their career. Science is blind to who discovers the facts, how many people wanted the fact to be discovered or even whether we’d rather not know it.
So, that CO2 is a greenhouse gas – is an unwanted fact, just as that CO2 is a relatively small bit player is also an unwanted fact. And no matter how many people would vote in some consensus poll to change these facts – mother nature has the only vote in science.
“That CO2 is a greenhouse gas – is an unwanted fact” is exactly the type of doublespeak that leads to shoddy science. That CO2 is a radiative gas is a fact. The greenhouse moniker is what started this mess. Looking at the temperature profiles of Venus, Earth, Titan, Mars proves CO2 is not well suited to building greenhouses which is why manufacturers stick with glass.
as in “the people have voted and the consensus is that Donald Trump should be President”
Let me fix that for you:
as in: the people have voted for Donald Trump as president, but the consensus among corporate controlled politicians is that he should not be.
Absolute Genius, pure, 100%, 99% Confidence Level genius. That captures the absurdity of calling this a “science.”
From “Scientific Regress” by William A. Wilson at First Things (listed above): “What they do not mention is that once an entire field has been created—with careers, funding, appointments, and prestige all premised upon an experimental result which was utterly false due either to fraud or to plain bad luck—pointing this fact out is not likely to be very popular. Peer review switches from merely useless to actively harmful. It may be ineffective at keeping papers with analytic or methodological flaws from being published, but it can be deadly effective at suppressing criticism of a dominant research paradigm. Even if a critic is able to get his work published, pointing out that the house you’ve built together is situated over a chasm will not endear him to his colleagues or, more importantly, to his mentors and patrons.”
So not only do practitioners of the consensus science fail to acknowledge the failure to replicate they actively and successfully suppress efforts to point that out.
A great scientist once said, “Why should I let them have my data? They just want to find something wrong with it”.
Will,
That is a great quote, illustrating the problems that will get uncovered — probably declared obvious — when the replication crisis hits climate science. The exact quote…
My first reaction on reading that quote was “What! Did he miss the class on the Scientific Method entirely?”
Big red flag that he was not doing science.
The issues with peer review are related to the non-replicability issues.
I will note, that sometime replication issues stem from the original researchers missing a condition in their original work that was important. Like micro fractures increasing the surface area for a phenomenon that no one realized occurred on the surface of the electrode. 🙂
Didn’t realize the guy was a billionaire. Nice of him to self-fund 25 years worth of science for furthering the cause of humanity.
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o?t=54m44s
To this day that’s one of the most deeply unsettling comments I’ve ever heard.
‘We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?’
How in heavens sake could THEY work for 25 years without ever showing data neither defending the theory!
I don’t think “A great scientist once said” anything of the sort. Only an extremely mediocre scientist would say something like that.
Sarchasm.
I suppose it depends on the meaning of “once”.
How wide is that sar chasm?
Then he turned around and proceeded to “lose” the raw data that was the basis of his years of work.
…what’s amazing…is watching The Economist trying to become relevant
Latitude,
Remember the old saying: “an article in The Economist can be interesting or accurate — but never both.”
I think the Economist is (re)discovering that toeing the line makes for zero readers.
“climate science… combines high visibility, a central role in one of our time’s major public policy questions, and a frequent disregard for the methodological safeguards that other sciences rely upon”
Which may the best reason that climate change could wind up being a “YUGE” teachable moment in modern history. Just imagine what will happen if the global temps start dropping in the near future. So many highly visible institutions have had so much invested in climate change. If it gets exposed as a fraud to the degree where it’s no longer being discussed (like global cooling in the 70’s) there is the potential for a great cultural shift in the acceptance of the sciences. EVERYBODY has heard about climate change and if it turns out they were all wrong about it? People will readily be able to say they were wrong about climate change, so maybe they’re wrong about psychiatry or economics (or what ever else), too. In our time, i don’t think we will ever see a greater false paradigm than climate change. Hopefully in the near future, humanity will have the opportunity to put this false paradigm to good use…
“Actually, Mann et al’s “hockey stick” work has been replicated by many different groups, some using independent mathematical techniques: …”
“Not only that, the hockey stick is required based on fundamental physical laws, as I proved here:”
____________________
A blatant lie – independent techniques – he too never showed his data, no one dared asking for the methodology.
The least ‘independent’ knew about using tree rings, no one knew about that one and only sample making his hockeystick that drastically.
Wikipedia claims Wahl & Ammann 2007 replicated Mann’s hockey stick and so did D’Arrigo, Wilson and Jacoby — that’s Rosanne “you had to pick cherries if you want to make cherry pie” D’Arrigo.
AS a refresher for the layperson like me Bishop Hill had a clear summary of events surrounding the Wahl & Ammann paper:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
That is 100% pure nonsense. A monkey would randomly type the Bible before “Mike’s Nature Trick” to “Hide the Decline” would ever be independently replicated. Mann’s Hockeystick was completely different from all previous temperature reconstructions. The only way to replicate it was to take the original data used, the original model used and simply run it again. That isn’t replication, that is simply plugging in the numbers into a formula. Have an open source temperature reconstruction replicate the Hockeystick and then you have something, but you will never see that.
http://a-sceptical-mind.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Comparison-charts.jpg
I see climate change as the biggest scientific fraud in all history. Other theories, such as phlogiston, were the result of ignorance and replaced once counter-evidence was provided and a superior theory came about. But climate change is different. There has already been plenty of counter-evidence which has been rejected out of hand. Evidence has even been falsified.
Perhaps it is time to let the whole sorry mess collapse into the stinking pile of bovine excrement that it is. Yes, people’s naive trust in Science will be crushed. Just like two hundred years ago, when their belief in God was crushed. But something good would come out of it. A more eyes-open kind of understanding of what science can and can’t do.
I agree with ‘biggest fraud’. What concerns me is that the fraud is a product of devious minds who will examine their successes and failures to convince, and refine their techniques for their next assault on liberal democracy and capitalism.
“Evolution” is the original “consensus science”, it seems to me. Once that was accepted, the door was left wide open for what has since entered . .
Climate change is a fraud with multiple personalities and simultaneously virulently OCD. It’s a horrible disabling plague on science with government mandating everyone be infected. It has gone on too long…
“Just imagine what will happen if the global temps start dropping in the near future. ”
With a ‘fungible’ hypothesis like AGW? Nothing will happen except that all the proponents will proclaim,
“You see, it’s exactly what we told you would happen all along.” or, they will readjust all the temp ‘data’ (which isn’t data anymore) yet again to ‘cool the past’ even more and tell us that, even tho it feels like it’s cooler, it’s really getting warmer
Well… Maybe, maybe not. I imagine a whole thread could be on this topic alone. What will be coming out of the ipcc if we see sustained cooling? If “proponents” no longer have the ipcc or science on their side will the charade continue for very long? We’ll see what happens, but you’ve gotta think this whole mess could very well go under…
For a future issue of Retraction Watch
There is no viable mechanism for retractions in climate science. Theories and results rise, become famous, attract rebuttals, and are moved offstage — still legitimate to cite, but “old news” and so de facto immune from rebuttal. As shown by this recent comment by David Appell from a thread at Climate etc:
While the replication crisis is real and significant for the affected fields, climate ‘science” is uniquely well insulated from the problem and much less vulnerable than psychology or the social ‘sciences’.
One has to remember that the replication crisis refers to failure to reliably reproduce the results of actual experiments and observations. Climate ‘science’ involves essentially no experiments and relies primarily on model results and prediction / projection of future conditions. Even measured climate data is typically buffered from reality by multiple layers of models, adjustments, and statistical manipulation to the point that “observations” can be whatever the researcher wants / needs them to be.
The climate modelers have not had any problem producing generally consistent [though quite spurious IMO] results despite using quite different assumptions regarding key climate parameters. Why would future models produce different results except to confirm that “it is worse than we thought”?
Cheers
Yeah, but their models all fail to predict reality. In any non-politicized field, the term that would apply is “refuted”. If (or when) the temperature curve bends downward, there will be much eating of crow. Because we’ll stuff it down their throats. Starting with the news media.
If the claim, disclosures, and descriptions were such that invention could not be replicated an examiner would not, could not, give approval to the granting of a patent.
___________________
As one already said patents aren’t given on functionality but on singularity.
Joseph,
We can only guess at this, but I’ll take the other side of the question. Climate science’s vulnerability lies in its predictions, especially in the increasingly lurid papers outside the IPCC’s consensus. Time will prove these right or wrong, eventually. It might take decades, but there will be an accounting.
The current crisis in other fields involves some high-profile research from the 1970s and 1980s. While embarrassing, these fields appear to be escaping without serious consequences. If those predictions prove false, I doubt climate science will be so fortunate.
What might be the results of the public policy climate wars? My guesses: Imagine the horrific fate of the losers after the climate policy debate ends.
Note: matching observations to a model’s projections using a scenario with close to actual emissions => a prediction, per the IPCC’s definitions.
There will be no horrible fate for the false prophets. They are now generally pitching their doomsday predictions for a time close enough to be scary, but sufficiently distant to avoid personal accountability when these predictions fail to eventuate.
The trick is to enjoy a successful career. Being right (or even decently wrong) is not a relevant consideration.
This is probably not the most moral of outlooks, but hey!, a fellow has to make a living.
I agree with sceptical lefty. The usual method of escape from an embarrassing position is to have a road to Damascus conversion, indicating admirable flexibility of mind and reasonableness. The result is retention, even enhancement of position in the hierarchy. Beware the Damascan convert.
The credibility of our most important institutions will be destroyed. Those that remained silent will be taken down with everyone else. The extreme level at which these leftist will push their misguided agenda is beyond belief. They will destroy everything for their short term political gains. Previous environmental nonsense didn’t harm the average person, and was limited to destroying single industries like CFCs and DDT. This climate change legislation hits home, and everyone will pay the cost.
https://youtu.be/EH_Izul6J5M
Destroying the DDT industry did result in many deaths, but since those deaths were occurring in places far away, they were easy to ignore.
I visited our local children’s museum and they had a wall panel talking about how DDT nearly killed raptors by thinning egg shells.
Some lies never die.
In climate science, the model runs are “experiments”. The difficulty is that, unlike physics experiments, the modelers come up with widely disparate results with little or no convergence after more than a decade of work.
However, taking seriously the claim that model runs are experiments might get your research banned, as Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading in England, discovered.
The anonymous reviewer stated his reasoning, “Actually, it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of ‘errors’ and worse from the climate sceptics media side.’’
https://climateaudit.org/2014/05/16/iop-expecting-consistency-between-models-and-observations-is-an-error/
Professor Bengtsson’s views on climate science follow:
http://uppsalainitiativet.blogspot.se/2014/05/guest-post-by-lennart-bengtsson-my-view.html?m=1
A concise summary of what many of us feel about the directions some scientific research has been taking for a number of years. Once upon a time we used to talk about “blue sky research”: research which was not restricted by constraints or conditions placed on funding and funding sources. Nowadays, with governments backing away from funding of research in tertiary education and other institutions, research is becoming more and more targeted to the desires and demands of those providing the funds. It has reached an almost piteous state when Larry Kummer can write “It’s not just a matter of time and money wasted when bad studies send research down blind allies.” because once upon that time, uncovering “blind alleys” was considered beneficial.
The problem of replication is likely to be the most significant failure in modern reporting of research findings, particularly when some authors are reluctant to release their primary information and/or methodologies. To be fair, some authors are likely to be constrained by confidentiality and proprietary information, but then, perhaps that work should never be published outside of internal reports.
Perhaps the learned journals should insist on something akin to the tests applied to patent applications in years gone by. If the claim, disclosures, and descriptions were such that invention could not be replicated an examiner would not, could not, give approval to the granting of a patent.
“The landmark 2010 paper “Growth in a Time of Debt” by Harvard professors Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff — used to justify austerity policies in scores of nations — was found to have serious errors in their spreadsheets. ”
Everything in this phrase is false.
First they didn’t wanted to justify what is called “austerity” this days – small deficit. They were even in favor of austerity favored by the Left : inflation, it was just mild.
Second the error doesn’t change their conclusion.
Alexis,
Quite the Reading Fail!
(1) “First they didn’t wanted to justify …”
I did not say the authors “wanted to justify” anything. I said their paper was “used to justify…”.
(2) “doesn’t change their conclusions”
The current consensus is that it does. The paper is almost never cited by economists without mention of the critique.
Both of these points are discussed in detail in the Bloomberg article I cite.
Great proof of the extreme bias and selective moral outrage. Show me any left wing nonsense were the press mentions a “critique.” Marxism and Socialism have an uninterrupted chain of failures, yet the left wing keeps cranking out that garbage unhindered by the press or academia. Show me one “peer reviewed” paper that mentions catastrophic problems of the Hockeystick, just one. The left wing find fault in a simple formula error and leaving out data for New Zealand and they totally reject the study because it doesn’t promote the left wing agenda. Catastrophic evidence like “Mike’s Nature Trick” to “Hide the Decline” is completely ignored. You can erase the Medieval warming period and Little Ice Age and the left won’t blink an eye.
http://a-sceptical-mind.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Comparison-charts.jpg
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o?t=59m42s
Editor of the Fabius Maximus website April 22, 2016 at 7:17 pm
Did you even read their paper? When it was first released, the authors made it very clear that it was an exposure draft that had not been through the peer review process. If you then took the trouble to review the critisism, you would have found that the “serious error” in their spread sheet was a summation grouping that failed to include the results from one country – I recall that it may have been New Zealand.
The consequence of that one error was that one data point changed slightly – since that particular summation produced an average, and New Zealand was a bit of an outlier to the rest of the results.
The consequence of that mistake was a slight change to their graph. As Alexis points out, this change made no significant change to the slope of the graph, which pretty much indicated that as government debt climbed over 90% of GDP, growth fell below 2% and continued to decline as debt levels increased. The data point that shifted was the 90% data point. Nothing else changed.
The reason that economists don’t cite this paper is the same reason that their much more detailed book “This Time is Different” doesn’t get cited much. This book delves into the causal factors behind the global financial crisis (GFC), and comes to a harsh truth that modern economists simply don’t like to hear. But then again, of all the many thousands of economists that cast their almost daily predictions, do you know how many were actually able to predict the GFC?
11! And that is 11 across the entire world. The paper that came to this conclusion can be found here:
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/15892/
A summary view can be found here:
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2009/07/15/no-one-saw-this-coming-balderdash/
Does any of this give you a sense of deja vu? The real problem appears to be that economic theory, as taught in the entire western world, is wrong. So, just like with climate science, economics is a field where consensus reigns supreme, but that consensus is just as fundamentally flawed.
I dream of the day when the Left Wing holds themselves to the same standard that they hold their critics. Hypocrisy, deceit, deception and selective moral outrage defines the political left. The right chooses to idolize leaders like Jesus and George Washington, the left chooses moral degenerates like Karl Marx, Saul “Blame others of what you are gulity” Alynski, Mao, Pol-Pot, Bill Clinton, John “Winter Soldier/Swift Boat” Kerry and Che as their heroes.
There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience.
A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.
– Vladimir Lenin
BTW, the left idolizes Bill Ayers. President Obama started his presidential campaign in Bill’s home. This is an FBI agent talking about the Weather Underground, the group Bill founded and led. Many people believe that Bill Ayers ghost wrote President Obama’s second book because of the extreme style similarities, and the extreme style differences between Obama’s first and second book.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2008/10/who_wrote_dreams_from_my_fathe_1.html
https://youtu.be/R2pMkkXIDrM
This is an article in the NYT published on 9/11/2001 where Bill Ayers stated that their terrorist actions didn’t go far enough.
No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/11/books/no-regrets-for-love-explosives-memoir-sorts-war-protester-talks-life-with.html?pagewanted=all
Sodium. It has been well know since the 1970″s that Sodium is harmless and it is actually the chloride ion that causes human hypertension. Yet every cereal box lists the Sodium content and we are exhorted to low Sodium diets.
In this particular case with a 1:1 correspondence the error makes little effective difference, but the tendency to latch onto some partial truth very much resonates with the current fixation on Carbon.
Butter. Butter was supposed to kill you. Eat that dreaful tubstuff that even my dog rejected. That tubstuff is loaded with transfatty amino acids, which your liver can’t break up and which clog your arteries.
Butter is natural. Tubstuff is not. Eggs were supposed to be bad for you, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fL5-9ZxamXc Prof. Tim Noakes – ‘Medical aspects of the low carbohydrate lifestyle’
Attributing to sodium the dangers of chlorine could make a big difference, because sodium is more common in foods than chlorine, and sodium deficiency can cause neurological problems.
In 2005. I adopted a ‘heath food diet’ of unrefined food. I often woke in the night with painful leg cramps (calf muscle). Since I increased salt intake the cramps are so rare that I can’t remember the last event.
The role of nickel in food is unreported. A few claim that 15% of the US population suffer from nickel allergy (the health food syndrome), I have seen blog items, but have never seen a mainstream media item on the subject. Three dermatologists told me I was suffering from eczema and there is no cure.
I read a study by a Pakistani, switched to refined foods, and my skin lesions regressed in six weeks. I now use more dairy, including butter and fatty cheeses with dense German-style white bread for breakfast, my main meal. A year ago, my weight stabilized at slightly less than 10% above what it was at age 20.
Around 1960 I read a book about Kellogg’s brilliant marketing invention: use cereals as a way to sell sugar at an inflated price. I have eaten Kellogg and similar cereals a few times since then, but that book put me off sugar for life. Fructose is now added to almost all processed foods, especially drinks, which I have rarely used, preferring to get fructose from fresh fruit.
Now and then I wonder what has happened to my contemporaries, almost all of whom have predeceased me. I conclude from my experience, that the benefits of natural products revealed by ‘science’ are substantially enhanced by marketing wizards. And for processed foods with over 20% sugar by dry weight, marketing completely ignores the risks.
Frederick, not questioning your experience, but I am confused by what you mean by ‘unrefined’ vs ‘refined’ foods as well as the reference to ‘processed’ foods. It is my understanding that ‘refined’ foods are ‘processed’ foods. My understanding of ‘refined’ foods is that the ‘refining’ process strips them of nutrients, making them full of ’empty’ calories. Examples of what I understand ‘refined’ foods to be are, white rice, white bread (and what a wonderful marketing job they did with ‘Wonder Bread’ in the 50’s), white sugar, flour, and corn tortillas. Is this what you refer to when you reference ‘refined’ foods?
My personal experience is the opposite of yours. When I had my annual physical @ 50 I was stunned to find that I weighed in at 225 (I’m 6’1″). When I was 25 I weighed 175! I did some research and stopped eating cereals, milk, any soft drinks, donuts/pastries (and I dearly love jelly filled donuts), and grilled/fried meat/fish, and upped my exercise routine. That was 15 years ago. I am now 65, I weigh 190, and (due to my upped exercise routine) have a resting heart rate of 53, my arteries are almost clear, and take no medications for anything (a fact that is a never ending source of consternation to the geriatric doctors in the retirement community I live in -“are you sure?”). I attribute it to the change in diet @ 50 and the now rigorous exercise I do 6 days a week (I am a Dragon Boater – was on the US National 60+ team at last years World Championships) – in a typical 1 hour practice I will burn over 1000 calories and I practice 3-4 times a week, with Tabata type workouts, biking, swimming, rowing machine & weight lifting on days that I don’t practice.
Does Kellog’s sell sugar?
Fructose is added as a sweetner because congress passed a law that makes sugar in the US more expensive than fructose. Allow the US price of sugar to fall to the world levels, and the use of fructose would virtually disappear.
The next one will be cometary theory, for sure.
We’ve already had that one.
the replication idea applies to experimental studies and cannot be applied to climate science because it is purely an observational study. you can’t rewind nature and re-run it under controlled conditions.
however, i don’t think that climate science has paid due attention to uncertainty and statistical rigor and to the idea of reproducibility of results.
nature is a stochastic process of which we can observe only one roll of the dice. yet there are many different results that are possible under identical conditions. Valen Johnson has looked at the issue of irreproducibility of results in published research papers and called for a reduction of the alpha level in statistical hypothesis tests by an order of magnitude.
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/48/19313.full
Valen’s work, (as well as the problem of multiple comparisons described by Holm) has been ignored by climate science along with the existence of dependence and memory in nature pointed out by many authors including Hurst, Mandelbrot, Koutsoyiannis, and Barnet.
In general the quality of statistical analysis in climate science is unacceptably low.
For example, the IPCC acknowledges large uncertainties in the natural flows of the carbon budget but ignores these uncertainties in their carbon budget computations.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2654191
Another example of the low quality of statistics in climate science is the use of correlations between cumulative values. These correlations are spurious; yet, they are used to establish the alleged relationship between fossil fuel emissions and the increase in atmospheric CO2 and also the relationship between fossil fuel emissions and warming. please see
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2642639
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2725743
Yet another statistical weakness in climate science is the failure to account for the loss of degrees of freedom when using moving averages
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2662870
A classic case of the failure of climate scientists to understand the use of moving averages is the desperate (but failed) methodology to show increasing intensity of hurricanes. This incredible story of bad statistics at the highest levels of climate science is best told by Thayer Watkins in his own colorful way.
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/movingaveraging.htm
The fact that each day is unique and cannot be reproduced demands that data quality and integrity be paramount in climate science. Unfortunately, that demand is currently unmet.
I am unaware of any other field in which data “adjustment” and “infilling” are acceptable and common practice.
In fact, replicating science is considered to be UNETHICAL in some cases, most prominently when the research involves animals.
I did some research using mice. The study had been ongoing for ~15 years before I started working on it. It was a genetics study, and thousands of mice had been bred as part of the approach. The experimental techniques were well established, but we had to justify the numbers every year to the university iacuc. We had to use statistical analysis to specify how many mice were required to establish statistical significance. If the experiment worked, that was it. We weren’t even supposed to repeat the same experiment ONE time. If we did, it was considered to be a violation, and wasteful.
Given the absurdity of the policy, we would often split one experiment into two. We said we weren’t “repeating” the experiment we were “completing” it. At least then we had one opportunity to corroborate the results.
When the scientific ethicists are this strict about one lab, just imagine the fit they would have over trying to duplicate someone else’s work that was already published and peer reviewed.
On the other side of the coin, the university had gone through a week of PETA protests several years prior, and there are people out there who strongly believe that the only acceptable number of animals is 0. And these people clearly have influenced how science is done.
On the other side of the coin, the university had gone through a week of PETA protests several years prior, and there are people out there who strongly believe that the only acceptable number of animals is 0. And these people clearly have influenced how science is done.
___________________
The answere is easy done –
STOP CALLING IT SCIENCE and
stop going on – you save mices live, you risk peoples live!
___________________
cease reading here.
I occasionally go into the chemist and look at the labels on the perfumes. Almost invariably, they will have a big, bright label “NOT TESTED ON ANIMALS”. Somedays I wish I could scrape off the “on animals” part.
After all, if you’re not testing it on animals, you’re testing it on humans. As if humans aren’t animals.
But that raises another problem – that animal testing is actually largely useless. Time and again we have seen results from animal testing that bear no relation to what happens in humans, particularly with things like rats bred to be very susceptible to cancers given vast doses of things that are then declared to be carcinogenic. This cuts both ways – drugs are wrongly claimed to be hugely effective and safe substances are claim to be dangerous.
By the way – same people proud to care about mice to care about cats but careless with people. Perversion.
My first girl friend taught me the rudiments of Game in 1962 Very unusual. Girls normally prefer not to know that stuff. She knew what she liked. Thank you Joan where ever you are.
M. SImon,
I’ve read that the earliest writings about what we call “game” go back to the 1950s (perhaps earlier). But I’ll bet that women knew this stuff ages ago (it’s also seen in films, used by men such as Bogart and Errol Flynn).
You were fortunately to learn about it so early!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization
As one other reader pointed out the problem with your analysis is that climate science as an OBSERVATIONAL science doesnt really do many lab experiments that one might try to replicate.
The vast majority of the science is just analyzing data or running simulations.
here the questions are
A) can you reproduce the same result given the data and code.
b) does the analysis hold up, or are there other explanations of the same data.
c) how well did you model do and how can you improve it.
The only experiment being done is the uncontrolled experiment of putting c02 into the atmosphere.
We are doing that experiment.
One side predicts no bad effects based on past experience
One side predicts bad effects based on physics.
This experiment is not replicable, except in a simulation.
So basically you made a hasty generalization by failing to take account of the fact that climate science is NOT a lab science any more than astronomy is a lab science. There are no experiments to replicate.
There are only proposed explanations of the past and predictions.
‘the Forum concluded that it is likely to remain the case that several choices within the adjustment process
remain a matter of expert judgment and appropriate disciplinary knowledge.’
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/acorn-sat/documents/2015_TAF_report.pdf
So hard to replicate “expert judgment”. And apparently they use “World’s Best Practice”.
Editor of the Fabius Maximus website on April 22, 2016 at 8:42 pm
Mosher,
“climate science as an OBSERVATIONAL science doesnt really do many lab experiments that one might try to replicate.”
While your pronouncements are always fascinating — the Pope could take lessons from you in boldness and confidence — can you provide a published source to support it?
______________
It’s not on Mosher to give any hints – it’s on you to prove what you’ve said!
One interesting example of the adjustments made to Australia’s historical temperatures was even picked up by this German site:
http://notrickszone.com/2016/04/23/nasa-homogenization-infusing-more-error-adelaide-airport-cooling-turns-into-warming/#sthash.hQ13GEML.dpbs
Please note the highly scientific step function used to adjust all historical temperatures down by an entire 1.0degC before 1950. Then the equally scientific multiple step function used to homogenise the temperatures before 1985. The end result, for this particular station, which happens to be the city of Adelaide, is that 140 years of temperature records all showing cooling trends, corrected themselves to conform to much more acceptable warming trends!
Australians still have no published explanation of these adjustments and the homogenisation process from their Bureau of Meteorology.
Mosher,
“climate science as an OBSERVATIONAL science doesnt really do many lab experiments that one might try to replicate.”
While your pronouncements are always fascinating — the Pope could take lessons from you in boldness and confidence — can you provide a published source to support it? An expert saying that what you call “observational sciences” are immune from the replication crisis?
Many of the factors commonly cited as causes of the replication crisis might easily apply to common science: p-hacking, weak or misuse of hypothesis testing, shoddy peer-review, etc.
One obvious example: replicating model runs from early models has proven difficult for the few scientists who have attempted this — which makes it impossible to validate them by re-running them with observations made after publication (instead of scenarios) to compare their predictions to actual weather).
Time will tell who is correct.
Note: As usual, you don’t bother to quote whatever you’re condemning. I’ll guess it is “Many sciences are vulnerable, but climate science might become the most affected.” Right or wrong, my predictions with “might” just don’t have the impressive self-confidence that shines from your notes. I didn’t EVEN USE CAPS.
can you provide a published source to support it?
The appeal to authority card in all its glory.
Can you cite a single example of a climate science “experiment” which can be replicated?
Per Einstein, all you need is one.
The rest of your argument is equally wrong. There is no replication crisis. Falsification in science is speeding up. Per Planck, science proceeds one funeral at a time. In other words, everything to do with cherished beliefs rather than replicable expeirments. Cherished beliefs remain in place in the face of replicable experiments to the contrary.
Consider that the notion that we could see by virtue of rays that shot out of our eyes reigned supreme as settled science for hundreds of years. Generations upon generations were taught settled science that could be falsified by asking why you can’t close your eyes and see the backs of your eye lids. The speed with which bad science is falsified has sped UP. It no longer takes centuries, or even life times in the majority of cases.
As I’ve said countless times, the easy solution to all this data manipulation and back room dealings of the self anointed anointed Climate “Science” “Peers” is an open source temperature reconstruction and climate model. transparency will destroy climate “science.” Basically one man, Michael Mann was able to define climate “science” with an bogus chart, and one man was able to destroy it, Steve McIntyre. Imagine is the whole world had the view Steve McIntyre got? Here is a clip of the work Steve McIntyre did. It is totally devistating to the field of climate science.
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o?t=57m38s
That is true, climate “science” is much like economics. That however doesn’t mean you can’t apply the scientific method to the data. Test any ice core data and you will see that you will Never reject the Null hypothesis that man is not causing climate change. The temperature data recorded in ice cores demonstrates that the past 50 and 150 years of temperature variation is well within 2 std deviations from the norm, they also demonstrate a Minoan, Roman and Medieval Warming, and a Little Ice Age. Current temperatures are well below the peak of the previous 600,000 years, and the Holocene. Over the past 600,000 CO2 tends to LAG temperature by about 800 to 1,500 years which is consistent with Henry’s Law. Most of the warming that has occurred over the past 50 years has occurred in the oceans, and the IR absorbed by CO2, 13 to 18µ doesn’t penetrate or warm water. We have also been setting record daytime temperatures and CO2 and IR 13 to 18µ won’t/can’t cause a record daytime temperature. Only incoming radiation can increase a temperature, trapping outgoing IR can never warm anything, it can simply slow cooling. The MODTRAN program demonstrates that CO2 in the lower 100 m has no impact on the energy balance if you double the level of CO2, None, Nada, Zip. Lastly, what “controls” we do have in the field of climate “science,” are the very dry deserts and very very dry inner Antarctica, neither of which show temperature increases over the past 50 years. The absorption of IR by CO2 has a logarithmic decay to it, meaning that small increased to CO2 mean very very very little, and even doubling it does very little. Don’t take my word for it, simply enter the numbers into MODTRAN.
@CO2isLife
Thanks. It is exactly this false premise as a defense that is so irksome.
When Mosher writes “One side predicts bad effects based on physics”, it is as misrepresentative as the constantly changing historical temperature record.
You correctly cite the limitations drawn from physics as it relates to CO2 and water. There is nothing changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration can do to impact ocean temperature. Thus, when Karl etal conjure up new temperature calculations (SST) in the ocean, they are actually disproving AGW because CO2 cannot be the cause of increased ocean temp.
Using data (increasing SST) as validation of AGW that fundamentally cannot be caused by CO2 and then claiming that one side is “based on physics” is the height of hypocrisy.
If the highly suspect upward GST trend from NOAA, GISS, etc. is the result of ocean temp changes, we know unequivocally that CO2 is not the cause and has no impact on global temperatures. Robinson & Catling show this as well across numerous planetary temperature profiles.
Thus, one side predicts bad effects by ignoring physics and logic, yet claims the high ground.
Bingo!!!! That is why I’m so convinced this is a hoax. They are “adjusting” things in a manner to tell a story what isn’t supported by the theory or science. It requires a complete ignorance of the AGW theory and underlying physics to accept what they are doing. Unfortunately they know that most people won’t put 2 and 2 together, so warming oceans helps the AGW cause, regardless of the real science.
@CO2isLife
This post quoting Dr Roy Clark really puts it in perspective
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/can-co2-warm-the-oceans/
The pseudo-science for CO2 forcing on ocean temperatures when quantified shows that the “scientific” 2 w/m2 supposed DWLIR increase from 120 ppm more of CO2 is dwarfed by increased evaporation generated by even a 2 mph wind.
Any theory that falls over from a puff of wind is beyond fragile.
@ FTOP_T, the other smoking gun is that the marginal absorption of energy by CO2 shows an exponential decay. The marginal energy “trapped” by CO2 changing from 100 to 200 is far more than the energy “trapped” by CO2 going from 300 to 400, even though both change by 100ppm CO2. They are using absolute amounts of CO2 (ie changes of 100ppm) when the should use multiple (is CO2 changed by a factor of 10). CO2 has a linear/geometric graph/increase over the past 150 years. The level of CO2 isn’t what is important, what is important is the marginal amount of energy “trapped” which is non-linear. If the CO2 AGW theory is correct CO2 would in fact cause warming, but as CO2 increased, the impact on warming would become less and less, the temperature graph would show a slowing of the rate as the CO2 level increases. In other words the temperature chart would be curvilinear and follow CO2 energy absorption, not CO2 level. The “adjustments” they are making to the temperature data are made in a manner to make temperature more linear to match the linear CO2 level. They are making the Temperature is a function of CO2 a linear relationship when it isn’t. Using the top graph you would expect a linear impact on temperature, using the bottom chart you would. The Madoff style “adjustments” are to make the bottom chart fit the temperature chart. That is the wrong chart, and by making it fit, it will disprove AGW.
http://clivebest.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/radiative-forcing.png
http://alanbetts.com/image/1/1200/0/uploads/co2_data_mlo-1274143728.jpg
“While your pronouncements are always fascinating — the Pope could take lessons from you in boldness and confidence — can you provide a published source to support it?”
As with the Pope, Mosher’s pronouncements – no matter how fanciful – are infallible, so he has no requirement whatsoever to justify them by linking to confirmatory sources.
The man is a legend in his own lunchtime.
“One side predicts no bad effects based on past experience
Yes, A sensible prediction.
“One side predicts bad effects based on physics.”
No, those following real physics predict nothing much will happen from CO2
Your “sales” pitch is again a failure.
You are trying to sell a lemon… and the way you twist your words shows that you KNOW that to be the case.
Your need for employment is really stunting your credibility.
Find another job before what little there is left, has all gone.
Steve this is pure BS Lab science or not when you have a guess and state that guess as to what should happen and after a period of time the data gathered after time does not support that guess yet you stay with that guess that is not science. When you model fail every time in a prediction of what will happen in the real world and the data comes in and does not agree with the model that is a fail, If you than change the data to fit the data that is fraud, and for some reason there a lot of data changing in the climate field. IF the data does not fit as gathered that is a fail, your guess and assumptions are wrong.In you case I need to repeat when you model something and the model fails you guess is wrong. The AGW scam should have ended when the upper atmosphere warming did not occur as the models predicted that the upper atmosphere warming should have occurred, here we are twenty years later still pursuing a failed guess. My father always ask this question in your case you need it to be ask a long time ago and often. Steve are you sure you understand all you know about that, in your case that is climate and modeling. From my view point you understand so little I really question that if you have any real knowledge. Anyone that has work with computer understand their limitation and any how has to come up with guess and than has to run with those guess to get the job done has to be able to understand a wrong guess is a dead end. If I had done what you do in climate science nI have repaired computer for 35 pluse years running from mainframes to desktops, the computer that my customer relied on to get work done would have been broke a very long time because often my first assumption was wrong, in my case my test failed so I move on with a new guess in Climate science that did not happen of course in my job would have been fired for sticking with the wrong guess but in climate science and most of academia you get rewarded for the wrong guess, My guess is Paul Ehrlich must be your hero, even though he was wrong on everything, yet he made million from fools so has the climate scam champions..Al Gore anybody somehow global warming and ocean rise did not keep him from buying beach front property. That should give and intelligent person some indication that he was putting out pure BS.
No. There are many branches of science that are historical. The question becomes one of analytical validity. Were the analyses replicable? Did others see the same necessity for adjustments? Just because you can’t run the earth backwards doesn’t mean you can’t draw different conclusions.
Paleontologists used to say, “pterosaurs couldn’t fly” and “dinosaurs were cold blooded”. Wrong, with no new experiments, just different analyses.
Einstein put in the cosmological constant to hold the universe static. Wrong. Not static, but still useful and descriptive. The re-analysis can be in the middle.
The. Climate datasets exist, in raw form, and can be re-analyzed. Models can be re-written, from zero, to see if similar outcomes result. I see so much “modeling” in climatology that would be immediately trashed in physics, due to unphysical results. Instead they are published. It makes me weep.
Don’t get me started on “ocean-acidification” experiments, which can be picked apart and repeated. And they’re crap. They shouldn’t be, but they are. Nature has done these experiments for us, and that data is largely ignored.
There is nothing I have been able to find in climatology that is so unique, so special, that any competent physicist, meteorologist, some engineers, couldn’t call shenanigans on poor analyses. What is disappointing to me is that the climatologists don’t police their collective output (with precious few exceptions).
Most of this malaise is caused, imho, by the publish/perish/funding structure. It’s hard for any normal person to say that they were wrong. Even harder if it impacts their financial prospects. I’m a plasma physicist in industry. I’m wrong all the time. Doesn’t matter, so long as we eventually make things that work. It must work, everyday, 24/7/365, or you fail to get paid. It’s easier to admit you’re wrong when you need the result that works in order to get paid.
The entire field of climate “science” is one giant cosmological constant. It is all about fudging the data to get the results that you want. Climate “scientists” keep getting the answer that they don’t want, so the simply change the data and model to get the result that they think is right, not the one supported by the data.
A model is NOT an observation.
A computer model is a robotic FANTASY.
Computer programs are designed to be repeatable, even when totally wrong. Repetition means nothing about correctness.
A computer model of misapplied misunderstood and incomplete physics is worse than useless, as some fools will believe it.
Computer models simply put are not science, they are games. Games we hope have a connection to reality, but “Hope is not science. -E.M.Smith”
This is what I find most amazing about the field of climate science. They are like a bunch of 1st year econometric students, just discovering what a computer can do. Wall Street and every economics firm are very very very familiar with the modeling techniques used in the field of climate science. Modeling the S&P 500 is very much like modeling the climate. They all use multi-variable linear regression modeling techniques. People in the fields of finance and economics have decades of failed market and economic models, and have learned not to put too much value in a forecast model, or a model based on selected past history. The climate “scientists” are trying to model something infinitely more complex than the S&P 500, and throw around terms like 98% certainty. That is pure 100% nonsense. If these nit-wits could models the climate 100 years in the future with 98% certainty they would all be working on Wall Street, and easily be the wealthiest people that have ever existed. The modeling certainty that is claimed by the climate scientists simply doesn’t exist, and anyone that had the skills these nit-wits claim to have would be rich beyond imagine and owning Wall Street, not working for a government salary.
https://youtu.be/ZTFJocQBLyE
“This experiment is not replicable, except in a simulation.”
But simulations aren’t experiments. This is why I always say that climate science is a half science at best. If you can’t do experiments (real experiments with a control group), it isn’t science.
Here’s a simple experiment you could do with climate science. Take four planets:
1) keep it the same CO2 level. this is the control
2) increase the CO2 level
3) decrease the CO2 level
4) do anything you want to. After all, this is the one you’re living on.
After, say, each 100 years, carefully observe what has happened to each of the first three planets. If the results are inconclusive, repeat the experiment.
That’s real science.
Steven Mosher says
“climate science is NOT a lab science any more than astronomy is a lab science. ”
This is misleading
Astronomy uses physics both Newtonian and Relativistic mechanics to make predictions of the orbits and tides etc to extreme levels of accuracy and replicability.
Much of ‘Climate Science’ is fake as is indicated by the complete failure of the so called ‘climate models’ to offer realistic predictions of climate trends.
Mosher’s pleading for his new found religion or is it a better salary that teaching English.
In physics we make a prediction based on the model and then test that prediction with reality. We do not test the reality, call it wrong, and say that the model is therefore correct.
The vast majority of climate science prognostication is from MODELS, and crap ones at that. Unnecessary adjustments are also very easy to replicate as the removal of data from databases. There are many many aspects of climate tech (I can’t bring myself to call it science) that could be tested, replicated.
Let’s wait and see. I can’t wait for that moment when it is busted wide open.
Consider “Dr. Mike “one tree” Mann. One can re-analysis his paper if one has access to the data, methods, and computer code that he used. We don’t have to drill holes into the trees all over again. And yet, where are the data, methods, and code?????
In a field that relies on statistical mumbo-jumbo for most of its “experiments”, it would be the scientific method in action to allow any others transparent access to everything you did. But not in climate “science”.
It looks like the Mosher Way would be happy if some “scientist” published his “proof” of big-foot, which would be observational, but refused to release all relevant data. (and if NASA/NOAA was involved all records would be under constant revision anyway)
“One side predicts bad effects based on physics.”
Because you know the entirety of climate physics.
Of course you do, And you are not making any gemeralisations, Oh no not at all.
The actual point sceptics make is that we know almost nothing about the physics and to want to change global economies in fundamental ways based on massive ignorance is stupid.
Mosher
“Climate science as an Observational science”.
—————————
Then they go right on to the next step of changing/adjusting the “observations”.
Think about that. Climate science is based on observations but all they have doing lately is adjusting the observations. That is just weird and almost hard to believe.
And that is exactly what this article is about. Too many studies which routinely play around with their data (or just make it up in many cases). These studies can then not be replicated of course.
None of us are able to replicate the adjusted observations of climate science either. There is room for replication in climate science but peer pressure to conform to the consensus means that even the replications are adjusted.
Berkeley Earth comes to mind of course with Mosher as one of its operators now – a sort of replication. But its main breakpoint snipping algorithm removes all the downtrends in the temperature record. Changing the “Observations” again. Climate science is an observational science yet Berkeley Earth’s main focus is to just change the observations.
Climate scientists do not have enough integrity to make it a real science again based on the scientific method.
Steven,
You forgot the side that predicts no bad effects based on physics, ie, the low CO2 sensitivity faction.
Both astronomy and climastrology make predictions. Astronomers don’t predict the earth crashing into the sun and then fail to reexamine their model assumptions when it doesn’t happen.
“Even physics has been affected, as William Wilson notes:
“Two of the most vaunted physics results of the past few years — the announced discovery of both cosmic inflation and gravitational waves at the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica, and the supposed discovery of superluminal neutrinos at the Swiss-Italian border — have now been retracted, with far less fanfare than when they were first published.”
That is just nonsense. Both of those are examples of science working exactly the way is is supposed to.
There does seem to be a replication crisis in fields that depend on statistical studies of human subjects (medicine, nutrition, psychology). But most of the issues do not affect the physical sciences, such as chemistry, physics, and climate science. There are indeed problems with the physical sciences (especially climate science) but the expression of those problems is very different from what happens in statistical studies. They may have common sociological roots, but this article does not really say anything about that.
Climate Science heavily depends on statistics, and the outcome to most research is largely predetermined, for continued funding! Very little is replicated, even the models are so varied they are useless, lacking any ability to forecast or hindcast (a basic use and purpose of modeling in any real engineering application). The friend review process is slowly rendering this discipline to a pseudoscience, conform or be destroyed, no open minded or reflection of test results or conclusions. smh……
Mike,
“Both of those are examples of science working exactly the way is {sic} is supposed to.”
The replication crisis itself can be considered to be “science working exactly the way it is supposed to. But the concern is about the road getting there — too many retractions, with work that in retrospect looks undeserving of the initial hype.
However you nicely echo the resistance that Professor Funder describes. The initial reaction to every field of science affected has been “not us!’. So far that has proven incorrect, but (as I said) only time will show how many fields are affected — and to what degree.
Fabius Maximus,
“The replication crisis itself can be considered to be “science working exactly the way it is supposed to.”
That is stretching things since many of the problem studies went unchallenged for years. The physics examples were corrected within months.
“But the concern is about the road getting there — too many retractions, with work that in retrospect looks undeserving of the initial hype.”
Again, that hardly applies to the physics example. Certainly not to the superluminal neutrino case where the initial hype was essentially zero: “we’ve got this result that is probably wrong, but we can’t find the problem”.
“However you nicely echo the resistance that Professor Funder describes. The initial reaction to every field of science affected has been “not us!’. So far that has proven incorrect, but (as I said) only time will show how many fields are affected — and to what degree.”
Bullshit. I never said anything remotely resembling “not us”. I only pointed out that your article is focused on a specific type of problem that applies in fields doing a specific type of study (and therefore inapplicable to other fields) and does not address the larger problem. You should not attribute what you don’t understand to the ignorance or ill will of others.
Mike,
You make some good points. Time will tell about physics — as it will about the sciences in general.
Two small details. First, the hype in the neutrino study was not by the authors — much like in climate science, where the IPCC’s WGI reports are cautious, but by the time climate science hits the headlines it’s quite sensational. Second, I use “echo” in a literal sense (my sloppy writing). By “not me” I didn’t imply that you were defending your personal research.
How many times need it be said that Psychology, Epidemiology (medical census-taking), and Economics are not science? Science is falsifiable deductive theory and replicable empirical result. Which of those named fields have either of those criteria, much less both of them?
Those fields may have a replication crisis, but that crisis has nothing to do with science. The two physics examples are mere hyperventilation about nothing. Interesting results turned out to be spurious on immediate further examination by physicists. Wowzers. How unusual is that?
The last really crock-physics was N-Rays, and look what happened to them.
When actual fraud happens in an actual science, such as with Jan Hendrik Schön in Physics at Bell Labs or Mark Spector in Biology at Cornell University, they were pretty quickly discovered by other scientists who could not replicate their work.
Most of the ‘science-is-broken’ idea is a fantasy of sociologists and lit-crit post-mods who want to bring a hammer down on the idea of objective knowledge. After all, if something can be truly known, all their fanciful theorizing goes right down the drain. Can’t have that — how would they get tenure without a narrative?
William Wilson’s article in “First Things” is long on Psychology, Epidemiology, and speculative critical hermeneutics, and short on any evidence of a problem in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geology or Astronomy; in any actual science in other words.
Let’s note, too, that “First Things” is a religious advocacy magazine, founded by Richard Neuhouse, a Catholic priest. “First Things” have a special peeve about scientism, which is, you know, all about those arrogant scientists who claim to know things that contradict what should be the provenance of religion, such as human
originscreation, or of philosophy, such as humannature, essence.Science shrinks the arena of the ineffable. Too bad, guys.
One other thing about science that separates it from the socio-literary fields: it doesn’t get breathless about nonsense and looks askance at those that do. For that sin, science is not forgiven by the arts.
Pat,
“How many times need it be said that Psychology, Epidemiology (medical census-taking), and Economics are not science? ”
(1) Cosplay much as Pope of Science? So all the scientists in those fields are wrong about their work, and you’re excommunicating them from Science?
(2) The cites show that several biomedical fields are affected (not just “medical census-taking”) a — fields whose research is much more tightly run than in almost any other field. They also discuss the factors involved in the replication crisis, several of which affect a broad range of fields.
My judgment is in terms of science as theory and result, Larry.
It takes no pope to make judgments when the criteria are objective. Psychology, Epidemiology and Economics all fail those criteria.
Reject that evaluation, and pope-status devolves upon you, along with the corresponding diagnosis of given to irrationalism.
The biomedical fields you propose as science are mere double blind tests. Nicely organized when done ethically, but nevertheless a branch of Epidemiology.
You haven’t a case, Larry.
the world needs more welders. good ones.
we could use more really good masons too
This from New Yorker in 2010…..http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/13/the-truth-wears-off
rob,
That is a great article! Thanks for the cite.
Yeah, EotFMW, kind of reminds me of ferdinand engelbeen…
View “The Oiling of America” on Youtube to understand the fraud perpetrated on the American people and the world by those supporting polyunsaturated oils and carbohydrates while denigrating saturated fats and animal protein. It’s the sugar from carbohydrates that cause diabetes and atherosclerosis, Cholesterol is a healing chemical which is why so many people in trouble from carbohydrate and polyunsaturated intake have high cholesterol. In fact, we now know that men with high cholesterol live the longest. We are 95% carnivore, which means we eat meat and animal fat. Vegetables and fruits are seasonal and transitory. It is only since the advent of agriculture that humans had carbohydrates and plant oils available all year round, which is patently unhealthy.
NSIDC caught out “adjusting” Arctic sea ice charts.
http://realclimatescience.com/2016/04/nsidc-busted/
From your link- the map showing more sea ice is week 41 of 2015.
Both are from 2015 week 41.
Both are NSIDC maps of the same week.
They have “adjusted” the original map and tried to delete all knowledge of it.
Read the full post, and engage your brain next time..
If you think that’s bad, try cosmology and astronomy …
… and race.
The standards of peer review are currently so bad that, to take an example recently, Michael Mann seriously argued that researchers should be able to pick their own statistical technique to get the outcome they want, concerning a paper about hockeystick temperatures in Australia over the last thousand years or so.
Thankfully, the reviewers didn’t agree with him, and the paper was withdrawn, but the mind boggles at just how badly entrenched this sort of corruption is, when scientists think that it’s perfectly acceptable to get publication in a journal by manipulating statistics to get a pre-determined outcome you want, rather than following universally accepted rules and procedures.
If that is the standard, everything Michael Mann had published is suspect.
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o?t=57m39s
That they call the CMIP5 runs “experiments” is all that outside scientists (non-climate related) need to understand the lunacy and pseudoscience quackery of Climate modellers and their outputs taken as “data.”
http://cmip-pcmdi.llnl.gov/cmip5/experiment_design.html
They’ve been doing this way for 35+ years, so they don’t see their own insanity, it’s nonsense insanity institutionalized.
And the whole time the problem of reproducibility is staring them in the face with the graphical splay of possible temperature outcomes (their “data”) that range from stasis to thermageddon.
Climate science is the science of data that aren’t and models that don’t.
Richard Feynman says: “I told you people from ~1935 onward that science is derailing. Didn’t bother to listen, he! Who’s stupid now, hahahaha…….”
Cargo Cult Science (1974): http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.pdf
Michel Salomon says: “We did our best, at least we made an effort.”
Heidelberg Appeal (1992): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidelberg_Appeal
Who’s next ?
Bezorgde Burger (Concerned Citizen) Greets from the Netherlands.
PS: I ‘m pardoned, signed the Heidelberg Appeal 🙂
CAGW zealots have abondoned the Scientific Method in pursuit of government grants, donations, fame, fortune and political agendas.
Under the rules of the Scientific Method, CAGW is already a disconfirmed hypothesis, because hypothetical global warming projections already exceed reality by 2+ standard deviations for 20 years, which is sufficient disparity and duration to toss the CAGW hypothesis in the trash.
In 5~7 years, the disparity/duration will exceed 3+ SDs for 25+ years, which is the point where it should be laughed and ridiculed into obscurity… But, alas…
The ONLY way to restore scientific integrity and return to a strict adherence to the Scientific Method is to completely end almost all public-sector funding of science and replace it with private-sector funding. Constitutionally, public-sector funding for advanced Defense Department weapon systems is fine, but other than that, all public-funded research must end. Period! (TM).
$TRILLIONS of private-sector wealth is being wasted on fraudulent public-sector funded “science” and on compliance costs of government policies implemented based on these contrived, unsupported and false “scientific” assumptions.
The way to apply the scientific method to CAGW is by applying the scientific method to the data:
1) Null Hypothesis: Man is not causing CAGW
2) Test the hypothesis against the ice core data for the Holocene
You will see that the Null is not rejected, and that the temperature variation over the past 50 to 150 years is well within the norm of the Holocene, well within 2 standard deviations, far from the peak, and well off the bottom.
OO2islife:
CAGW’s hypothesis is that manmade CO2 emissions will cause at least 3.6C of catastrophic warming by 2100 if fossil fuel emissions continue at current levels…
CAGW hypothetical projections (based on that premise) now exceed reality by over 2 standard deviations for 20 years. which is sufficient disparity and duration form reality to disconfirm the hypothesis. It doesn’t work…
The physics and empirical evidence show CO2’s forcing is most likely between 0.5C~1.0C per doubling by 2100, LESS the effects of the Grand Solar Minimum, which will likely start from 2035 and, plus or minus other natural variables..
Because CAGW’s hypothetical projections are so far off from reality, the hypothesis is statistically disconfirmed. In 5~7 years, the disparity/duration will likely exceed 3 SDs for 25 years, despite 33%+ of all manmade CO2 emissions since 1750 being made over the 25 years…
CAGW is already a joke..
Gee I am shocked, totally shocked!
But I have noticed this problem years ago in Astronomy.with their many deduced mathematical abstracts. The big bang,dark matter,string theory and so on,all hypothetical entities without empirical support. Meanwhile they treated Halton Art like a leper for his fine work.
I lost interest in speculative Asstronomy after that.
“Truth never triumphs — its opponents just die out. Science advances one funeral at a time”
Max Planck
This has been a problem for a very long time and yet it hasn’t stymied progress. I would say that once financial gain becomes an issue, science suffers. The poster child for this would be all the bogus drug trials.
I urge everyone with an interest in the scientific method to read the guardian article referenced in the main article:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/apr/07/the-sugar-conspiracy-robert-lustig-john-yudkin
I know. The Guardian. Amongst all the guff about “settled science” an article about how the scientific orthodoxy got it wrong for 50 years and how, when challenged they attempted to discredit the opposition. All without a hint of irony. The parallels with climate science are remarkable ( and here I am using the term science in its loosest sense).
Martin
“discredit the opposition” – may I suggest you read my “book”: “The Academic Ape: boundary re-enforcing behaviour and aggression in academia (available free on my wbesite).
Listen carefully about what is said about Steve McIntyre in this clip.
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o?t=57m37s
Yes, the similarities are remarkable.
This is the 5th time in this thread that you have posted this link. Would you please stop?
the cancer research link was surprise ,to me at least in terms of drawing parallels with climate science.
“Begley blames these failures on some systematic problems in the literature, not just in cancer research but all of biomedicine. He says that preclinical work—the basic science often done by government-funded, academic scientists—tends to be quite slipshod. Investigators fail to use controls; or they don’t blind themselves to study groups; or they selectively report their data; or they skip important steps, such as testing their reagents.”
Well funded “Climate Science” has largely become a means to an end. Connie Hedegaard, speaking for the EU, spelt it out very clearly:
“Let’s say that science, some decades from now, said ‘we were wrong, it was not about climate’, would it not in any case have been good to do many of things you have to do in order to combat climate change?.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatechange/10313261/EU-policy-on-climate-change-is-right-even-if-science-was-wrong-says-commissioner.html
As Eisenhower foresaw, the fire hose of funding deployed to save us from global warming has become the tool for fueling fear in a positive feedback loop that has now escaped all bounds of reason, let alone the scientific method.
The problems around replicability and replication are, so far, confined to empirical studies. While it is true that the statistical standards in climatology are relatively low, the majority of climate research is model-based and thus unaffected.
What you are arguing is that because most of the “science” in climate isn’t based on what is actually happening it doesn’t have a replication issue.
But what do we find in the very few instances, where the models can be compared to actual data – I don’t think their is one predicted “outcome” that actually occurred from increasing floods, droughts, hurricanes, etc.
The only “predicted” changes are things like CO2 which are an input to the models not an outcome and for example everyone knows they failed on the single most important “outcome” which is global temperature.
The models are the hypotheses of this “science”. Mother Nature shows no approximation of replication. Additionally, the modellers refuse to examine hypotheses that do not involve CO2 levels, thereby betraying their bias. They are attempting implication- not replication. Dozens of models that don’t replicate even with fudged data and outright lies -and no questioning of the underlying assumptions? C’mon, Mann!
Well….no. Climate Science models have that “this” will happen in so many years. Those years have passed and “this” didn’t happen.
I understand that this post is concerned with replicating a result in a lab.
Climate models said “such and such” would happen. Nature did not replicate what the models’ said.
The output of a computer model in any field can be a valuable tool and asset. But their output is not “gospel”. When it doesn’t match reality, you should trust it less, not try to “adjust” reality to fit the model’s “virtual reality”.
I’m sure the “ambulance chasing” type of lawyers would love it if that approach was taken in designing and implementing safety features on planes, trains and automobiles.
I have a strong, visceral dislike of being told what to do for my own good – childish I know – but very few commenters here have discussed what could be the response of governments, funders, NGOs and other busybodies to this crisis on the conduct of science. It is possible that – since this crisis appears to be fairly recent – it has arisen out of the increasing involvement, Eisenhower-wise, of government et al in funding and regulation. Typically in such a situation the response from government is more oversight, regulation, rules and, of course politically correct ‘initiatives’. This, as the General said is ‘gravely to be regarded’ and we should be considering ways in which science itself can clean up its act without being sat upon…
Thanks Anthony.
I was trying to explain to an academic why engineers are better scientists – and for obvious reasons they were finding this difficult to understand – because they have been brought up in the modern anti-engineering culture of Universities (& media like BBC) which asserts that only academics are “scientists” and engineers are very third rate jobs which are scientifically illiterate.
A much better term would be “Highly scientifically educated professional practitioners”, a group that would also include medical practitioners, engineers, weather forecasters. My post went as follows:
Engineers are scientists who can make science work in practice.
It takes far more skill and knowledge to be a good engineer than an academic. Indeed, you can take any wet behind the ears post graduate and turn them into a PhD in three years, but it would take 20 years for them to learn how to be a good engineer.
That’s because there is far more to engineering than just knowing the science. It also involves economics, sociology, quality, people skills, organisational skills.
The best engineers are by the nature of their job extremely self-reliant as they tend to be amongst the few people in the world with their expertise – but for commercial reasons there can be no co-operation with other similar experts, so they have to be very competent. They also shoulder the welfare and future job prospects of thousands of people on their shoulders. If they make a mistake people die, or at least lose their jobs.
In contrast, if an academic makes a mistake – they just withdraw the paper. There is no come back, there is no need for high quality standards.
So, the culture and ethos of engineering & other similar professional like medicine is extremely high – no mistakes are tolerable.
In contrast, academics can and will make mistakes all the time. They can and do use poor quality data, they don’t care [or don’t know] who suffers when they use poor quality advice based on poor quality data. [They don’t care] Because they FALSELY think that the law of negligence doesn’t apply to them.
That was true, until academics started doing the engineering role of giving life and economic critical advice. Now, all those academics with their extremely poor quality standards and very narrow focus on a small bit of the science, have left themselves open to be sued for a $1trillion lawsuit.
That’s why engineering science is so cautious. That’s why engineers are inherently hostile to new untried, untested, poor quality work with significant amounts of fraudulent work/data as we see in the area of climate.
The whole ethos of engineering is “do your science in a way you can prove you are not negligent in court”. That is something that becomes second nature to engineers … good science, securely backed up by data.
The whole ethos of academia is “no one is going to sue us for being wrong on the science”. That has allowed many to “adjust” what they say to match their own personal politics. Engineers can’t afford to dabble in politics – their strength is the data, their integrity and neutrality – it’s a weakness to dabble in politics.
When this global warming scam finally goes to court – as it will inevitably do so given the constant assertion that “you must follow our (poor quality) advice from academia” … and the massive amount of money involved and the cost when the advice is even mildly wrong … academics will discover they can be sued just as easily as engineers.
But unlike engineers … they lack the necessary “defence culture” to win in court and for example, they will not have the necessary documentation to prove they were not negligent and they will have a mass of evidence of poor quality, low standards and general lack of care that will damn them.
I believe that Mann’s approach to sharing data and code and his “slow walking” the legal process to delay/avoid discovery demonstrates that he understands potential culpability.
Everyone I knew over the years respected the engineer or the practitioner of whatever. If some subject came up in my group that had little or no real consequence we would say it was merely accidemic. Not worth a hill of beans in other words.
A few academics come along in each century that make a big difference. Just a few. (I have heard some say only one in a 1,000 years but that seems a little over the top to me)
Mr. Kummer,
There is no such thing as “climate science”: there is only science.
What you refer to as “climate science” is (as stated by Samurai) a “disconfirmed hypothesis”. It was and still is a waste of life itself.
Regards,
WL
This article has put into words exactly how I have been feeling about science the institution.
I knew Physics Astrophysics and particle physics were and are in big trouble.
As Tesla said, and I hope it was actually a real quote 🙂 that scientists stopped performing repeatable experiments and built their world from mathematics instead, which is to me, trading the real world for a virtual reality, and obviously if your science resides is within the confines of a concept, it can never disprove it
Why is no one bothered by the fact the Higgs Boson was never detected yet Nobels were handed out?
CERN dont share their data and technical information, no one can repeat their experiment either.
The “god ” particle is most likely utter nonsense, two extra photos were all that were confirmed, no particle was ever seen
The supposed particle doesn’t even exist long enough to be detected and it is claimed it was detected.
A long standing law of of thermal equilibrium which planck also incorporated into his quantum theory has been invalidated.. yet the scientific community carries on like it never happened and we will have to literally wait for all the big hitters to pass away before the scientific institutions accept new data.
Imagine trying to convince people Hawking Gal-Yam and Einstein are wrong when the whole NASA Astrophysics enterprise is founded on those theories, no chance.
Most scientists today are the most morally weak of humans, but then again most of us dont build careers on misconceptions we later have to defend 😀
Well Climate Hustle is due for release on My 2nd, and that may well stir things up a little in the field of climate discussion and criticism. And the attempts to rubbish Morano and the film will be good too, as the shrill cries will demonstrate the warmists fear of criticism. CFACT have a new trailer for the film too, which is better than the last efforts:
http://www.climatehustlemovie.com
Although I prefer the extended trailer that was in the Daily Mail article, as it it much more informative:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3554461/The-man-Climate-Hustle-antidote-Al-Gore-s-Inconvenient-Truth-worked-Rush-Limbaugh-counts-Sarah-Palin-fan.html
R
Who was the genius that put Sarah Palin on the bill here? That’s the equivalent of Ronald McDonald commenting on nutritional science. Total fail there!
Just to add to a few comments. There was a dramatic change in the way science was conducted after WWII. Before WWII, science was largely a “gentleman’s club” – that got by whilst engineers and manufacturers did the main development such as the Spitfire.
As a result of WWII – and probably seeing the way the Germans had nearly produced some extremely advanced weaponry and how atomic weapons became reality through science and fearing the USSR, Science was turned into the modern “sausage machine” process.
Before WWII, much of the emphasis of “science” was on the philosophy of the subject. So, e.g. Physics was called “Natural philosophy”, after WWII – the philosophical element was removed – and along with it any skill at judging the ethical or philosophical basis of “truth”.
So, WWII was a significant change and resulted in a large “dumbing down” of science in order to allow it to be scaled up. So very much from a “cottage industry” at a few select & prestigious Universities to a “production line” of “effective” but not very “thinking” … “drone” workers. People who can perform the mechanistic actions of science, without necessarily understanding why they are important (and who in subject like climate can convince themselves they are not important).
I think this is true for the UK, the government took over scientific research for the war and never relinquished control
The fed gov funds 75% of research and much of that is provided by the pentagon with first dibs on results.
I blame De Grasse Tyson, and others like Kaku for dumbing down science for the public. You used to get physics (even if you didn’t understand it all) but now you get ludicrous analogies that mean nothing and hide the problems with theory. Discovery science actually has a lot to answer for, for pushing theories as fact and leaving out competing theoretical ideas, this has been science media all over.
If you are going to educate someone on a theory for educational purposes you must provide all alternative scientific explanations and science media never does this.
Some of the tosh I read on science daily is an eye opener, or Phys.org.
Science media is a very big part of the problem as it pushes scientific narratives on the public as the only possibility.
Science is not about consensus. It’s about disproof, disbelief and skepticism. It’s not about consensus. When you’ve got consensus, you’ve got trouble”
You just gotta love the selective moral outrage of Fabius Maximus. There are countless garbage economic paper supporting Maxsist/Socialist economics and he picks the one free market smaller government paper that had a small error in a formula that then fixed showed no material difference. Does anyone really think government debt, spent on welfare and other productivity reducing incentives helps growth? Did building Solyndra and inefficient wind and solar farms help growth? Did shutting down fracking, coal, oil and rail help growth? Did shutting down the SUVs to build Volts help growth? Did driving the price of gas and electricity through the roof help growth? There are no reproducible studies in climate science because there are no studies, all they have is a theory and computer models, and MODTRAN shows that CO2 has no impact on the lower atmosphere, zero. Simply double the level of CO2 looking down from 100 meters. BTW, the editor of the Fabius Maximus website justifies he support for climate change because the IPCC’s has deemed it so. He clearly hasn’t ever bothered to study the results of their models.
http://www.nber.org/papers/w15639
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21576362-seminal-analysis-relationship-between-debt-and-growth-comes-under
I find the following article amusing in that it unwittingly reveal much of what is wrong with United Nations climate panel, It is written by a proponent of IPCC, but well worth a read.
As summarized by Jungletrunks at climate etc. “Although the intent of this piece was to serve up an apolitical chronological history describing the roots of climate science, it also illustrates the path leading up to how the scientific method became hijacked. One can readily see in this essay how consensus building and standardization in science began and how it evolved to cooperate synergistically with politics, including persuading governments to spend billions on research.” Here´s a link:
The Evolution of International Cooperation in Climate Science by Spencer R. Weart, American Institute of Physics.
A little golden nugget found in the article: “A steady diet of fresh scientific perspectives helps to maintain regular doses of funding, helped in turn by an endless round of conferences”
“replication crisis”
I have been following the crisis in modern “science” in several fields. Medicine, big-phrama, and biology have been the areas that I have spent the most time reading about and looking at papers.
We live in an era where government money and the influence of industry money has all but ruined science. These forces set the dogma and woe unto the poor young scientist that ever says, “wait, none of this even passes the laugh test!”. They learn early, “don’t rock the boat kid”.
I have read accounts of experiments and studies that could only have been designed to push one particular answer or we would have to believe that utter morons were in the lab working on the problem. No, they are not morons — they are bunco artists.
I wager that most of what I have been told about human health in my lifetime is junk science.
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Well, got to go take 10 expensive pills now. ( /sark )
Along the same lines as the topic of this post is a post by Mike Smith going over some topics covered by Steve Mcintyre.
More Climate ‘Science.’ Moving the Goalposts
“When Secretariat defeated the field in the 1973 Belmont by 25 lengths, even contemporary climate scientists did not dispute that Secretariat ran faster than the other horses. –Steve McIntyre”
This is a great read, and at the end he urges you to read Mcintyer’s article in full. I think most here would enjoy reading Mike’s short synopsis.
http://www.mikesmithenterprisesblog.com/2016/04/more-climate-science-moving-goalposts.html
I was their only 3 hour ride from Montreal. Saratoga Racetrack, for his second stakes win in as many tries. Sept. 16, 1972: … Feb. 26, 1973: With Secretariat having been named Horse of the Year.
That is why I’ve been promoting these ideas:
1) Scientific Transparency, the Open-Source Temperature Reconstruction and Climate Model Project. Allowing overtly biased individuals like Michael “Hide-the-Decline” Mann and “Jim “chain me to a bulldozer with Darrel Hanna” Hansen is simply insane. A single person, Steve McIntyre, destroyed the most critical chart in the field of climate “science,” the Hockeystick. Imagine what would happen if these models and data were opened up for all the world to see. It would be like Toto looking behind the curtain.
2) A oversight agency to verify through double blind testing the validity of government funded research. Right now “peers” with conflicts of interest determine the “validity.” We need an SEC/FDA/FTC style agency to police the funding, granting and validity of research funded by the tax payer.
BTW, Eisenhower warned about what we are seeing happen today. I tagged the Eisenhower clip (it starts a 1 h 2 m and 6 s), but the entire last 30 minutes of this video are worth watching regarding this subject.
https://youtu.be/QowL2BiGK7o?t=1h2m6s
After the warmest month evah, it is pelting heavy snow in Helsinki right now, I can see no further than 200 years from my window atm.
No doubt NOAA will cook up some heat from somewhere, like smearing one data point over 1200sqm of area on their maps.
They cool an area by 2c with adjustments and claim it is now 2c above normal. Hilarious.
Hi Mark
Well at least you can enjoy a snowball fight.
Here in UK forecast for next week is two degrees C below normal and no one is talking about imminent onset of a new Ice Age.
If a forecast was 2 degrees C above normal I don’t need to say what media headlines would be screaming about.
Ontario, Canada has been running 6 degrees below normal all of April !!
I was lalking with a professor of environmental science some weeks back who proudly told me how they were actively teaching ‘science communications’ at universities as it was so important to ‘communicate’ their work to the wider world, particularly via the media.
In partial response I expressed some skepticism about the wisdom of that approach beyond a certain point, i.e teaching students to be able to do a competent presentation etc and then made a comment about the potentially corrupting influence of the least publishable unit (LPU) culture where funding was attached to published papers and so the LPU was monetarised.
It appears to me that after some natural selection generational cycles we have a culture in cetain parts of science where there is a detachment from science for the sake of the science and it is now overwhelmingly about the careers of the scientists as the prime focus and how their career advancement translates to the benefit of their institutions. PhD’s are the new black.
I think we are trending towards a situation where a large section of the science cadre is a bit like the disconnected staff officers who unleashed the slaughter of WW1 a centuruy ago largely due to their utter disconnect from the visceral experience of combat and having advanced in their careers from within the ‘staff ‘ sheltered, privileged system set up in the late 19th century.
A connection to one side of the political elite is a clear symptom of this defective arrangement. The arrogant and roghteous self reference of mush of the work and use of terms like deniers to characterise those of a differeing opinion is another and far more telling sign.
Thanks for the great review of the issues. I will keep this and send it to friends (and enemies) when the subject comes up. There’s a lot of useful reading to do here.
The problem is the output institutional organizations funded by government becomes political.
There are so many reasons for the replication crisis that there won’t be a simple, single solution that can be used across all of science.
1. Confirmation bias (unconscious; benign)
2. Lack of reporting of negative findings
3. Poor knowledge, or deliberately improper use, of statistics
4. Political bias (conscious yet not publicly acknowledged; malicious) among researchers and funding agencies
5. Overhyped reporting of findings
6. Money (see 1., 2., 4., and 5. above)
In many cases, it’s not a big deal. If somebody gets something wrong in astronomy, oh well. But when somebody gets something wrong in medicine, people die. Medicine is the rock on which this problem is going to be broken wide open. My gut tells me it’s mainly a problem of too many effects being searched for in too few samples, which results in misleading statistical results, combined with lack of reporting of negative results. All these problems can be dealt with, because medicine is basically using controlled experiments (though often with small sample sizes). It will require real courage to reform the publication process in medicine, but I believe most doctors and researchers are acting in good faith and that reform can happen.
For climate science, as Climategate showed, that festering pile of offal is filled with the more conscious problems, possibly including outright lies. When so many of the practitioners in a field are morally and ethically compromised, I don’t know how the field can be reformed. Further, climate science is not amenable to controlled experiments, so you’ll be dealing with trying to counter assertions based on models tuned to deal with altered data of the past and designed to give a predetermined result for the future. Possibly the best one can hope for is that the field is increasingly ignored and the funding eventually shrinks to negligible levels.
As a database architect and developer with 25 years in the field, what strikes me is the apparent complete lack of competency in climate science in maintaining and preserving the temperature data in a pristine form. You absolutely have to have a “gold copy” of your data somewhere that it will never be lost or altered, so that you can always reset back to the starting point when you desire. My heart went out to the anonymous DBA from the Climategate emails who bemoaned how he’d worked on their data all weekend and thought he was making progress, only to discover yet another inconsistency late in the day.
Here’s how a DBA sees the problem: the surface area of the Earth is 510 million square kilometers. If you had a well-sited temperature station in every square mile and took measurements every hour, at the end of the day you’d have 12.24B records containing latitude, longitude, elevation, time and temperature. If we assume 32 bytes of storage for each record, a day’s worth of data would be around 391 gigabytes, a year’s worth would be just about 142 terabytes, seven years to reach a petabyte, and 7000 years to hit an exabyte.
While that is a lot of data, it’s not an unbearable amount of data (and we wouldn’t have a record every square kilometer, either), and the fact that we don’t have a better handle on the sheer amount of data generated every year is a crime.
I managed to switch from km to miles up there, but of course I mean km for all units.
Steven Mosher wrote on April 22, 2016 at 7:31 pm:
“The only experiment being done is the uncontrolled experiment of putting c02 into the atmosphere.
We are doing that experiment.
One side predicts no bad effects based on past experience
One side predicts bad effects based on physics.”
With all due respect (not meant sarcastically) let me humbly adjust that last sentence for you:
One side predicts no bad effects based on past experience covering many millenia
One side predicts bad effects based on physics-based models which each replicate only a tiny portion of an immensely complex natural mechanism, the complete workings of which are unknown and presently unknowable.
For now, science-based conclusions which veer away from past experience may only be drawn after at least a few more centuries of experience and observation.
I offer this not as an aggressive gesture toward Mosh, but as a simple statement of how things look from the perspective of an ex-engineer.
Never underestimate Mosher’s physics. His latent [heat] of water vaporization never changes.
Grrrh … latent heat of water vaporization.
Only one side has both experience and physics on its side. We have 600 million years of geologic records showing that CO2 as high as 7,000 never caused catastrophic warming. We have ice core data showing that the recent temperature variation is well within the norm for the Holocene. We have IR absorption data showing that CO2 has an exponential decay in the amount of radiation absorbed/unit. We have MODTRAN that shows that doubling CO2 in the lower 100 m of the earth’s atmosphere has an immeasurable impact on W/M^2, and we have warming oceans and day time temperatures, neither of which can be due to CO2’s absorption of IR between 13 and 18µ. One side has physics, history and the scientific method on its side, the other has politics and a misguided social movement.
co2islife,
That quote should read:
“One side predicts no bad effects based on past experience
One side predicts bad effects based on bad physics.”
Every climate science paper that tries to use physics, inevitably gets the physics wrong – either starting with the wrong physics model or using simplified functions that do not get the physics of the atmosphere right. And since the entire debate is around 2W/m2 out of around 1350W/m2, it doesn’t take much for errors to accumulate.
For those who haven’t seen it before, this paper by Hermann Harde is still the most comprehensive one that I’ve found:
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijas/2013/503727/
And where was that CO2 before it was placed in those things that man is taking it from and putting back in the atmosphere?
Is it wrong to put water back in the desert, dry lands? Should we stop all irrigation?
I have published research, and with just a Master’s degree. Not bad. I am also a one-hit wonder. Not good. But neither of these things impress me much one way or the other. The merit is in the fact that without my input and quite a few years later, my study was repeated (not replicated because equipment improvements were made that produced a cleaner stimulus used in early latency auditory evoked potentials and with more subjects). The salient results I obtained were again seen in the repeated study.
With that background, research replication is an exact copy. In many fields that may not be the best design, especially if better techniques or better equipment is available. Repeating a study with new and improved techniques and/or equipment that results in the same finding gives robustness to the proposed hypothesis. As it did mine. And that’s not too bad at all.
The guest Blogger is being too generous to the ‘halls of science’. His comment: “the crisis might have severe side-effects — such as a loss in public confidence. America has long had a rocky relationship with science”, is well taken but too lenient as many straight thinking every day type Americans have already thrown the bath water out and have a grave mistrust of scientific conclusions. Can you blame them?
The main problem, in addition to replicability of many current scientific beliefs/findings, is the fact that climate science is not, and has not ever been a science. It is a study involving the input of many scientific fields and statistics. It has been hijacked by those who were intent on making beaucoup dollars from fraudulent enterprises — and — even more importantly — developing a global governance structure run only by elites. Enough of the term “climate science”.
What is really scary is the amount of analysis on CO2 and Carbon compounds compared to the amount of analysis on H2O in the UN IPCC WG1 report. If you have a PDF of the report. do a word search for the terms. Most references on water I found are in terms of water causing increases in CO2. Those that are there are fuzzy “Not to Worry” comments. Supports “blame it on CO2,do NOT look for any other cause.
From the National Cancer Institute.
“Cyclamate, Because the findings in rats suggested that cyclamate might increase the risk of bladder cancer in humans, the FDA banned the use of cyclamate in 1969. After reexamination of cyclamate’s carcinogenicity and the evaluation of additional data, scientists concluded that cyclamate was not a carcinogen or a co-carcinogen (a substance that enhances the effect of a cancer-causing substance). A food additive petition was filed with the FDA for the reapproval of cyclamate, but this petition is currently being held in abeyance (not actively being considered). The FDA’s concerns about cyclamate are not cancer related.”
I actually liked drinking soda that was sweetened with Cyclamates. It was difficult for me to tell the difference between Cyclamate sweetened and Sugar sweetened drinks. Have never been able to drink any of the new sweeteners.
I personally prefer Sucralose, which has 3 hydroxyl groups replaced with chlorine atoms making it, well, a chlorinated hydrocarbon (sucrose = C12H22O11, sucralose = C12H19Cl3O8) and therefore mostly calorie free. A safe(?) Chlorinated hydrocarbon, who would have thought.
https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pi090
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucralose
“The defenders of the status quo rarely actively defend anything. They aren’t about to publish articles explaining why NHST tells you everything you need to know, or arguing that effect sizes of r = .80 in studies with an N of 20 represent important and reliable breakthroughs, or least of all reporting data to show that major counter-intuitive findings are robustly replicable.”
Not only is the n=20 issue a problem, but the question of what exact universe has been sampled compared to the universe upon which one is attempting to lay predictions. Many times, even with large sample sizes they are completely different universes negating any predictability from the sample to the universe upon which one wishes to project effects. In addition, there are so many other sources of potential error other than sample size, many of which are not quantified or may not be quantifiable in any event. Statistically, in the real world, the science can never be “settled” completely. Statements of “fact” need to always be subject to qualifiers regarding per the best data we presently have as many items stated as fact are much closer to conjecture than fact due to poor research methods and or poor statistical analysis. The most often violated is correlation mistaken for causality.
Larry Kummer;
I repeat my comment from upthread as you have failed to respond to it. In your reply to Steven Mosher you said:
can you provide a published source to support it?
To which I replied:
The appeal to authority card in all its glory.
Can you cite a single example of a climate science “experiment” which can be replicated?
Per Einstein, all you need is one.
I repeat my request.
Nice job Larry! Much appreciated write up.
How do we replicate something like this?
http://realclimatescience.com/2016/04/nsidc-busted/
The probity of this comments-thread has inspired me to share my quotations file, which contains many quotations directly relevant to this thread, as well as many that are an important part of this thread’s larger context — the general politicization of “science” as part of a cultural and social engineering project masterfully administered by the minions of the global oligarchy. However fractious relations between the various factions of the oligarchy, they are united in their manipulation of their bred-to-obey, credulous chattels. Wheels within wheels…
https://www.dropbox.com/s/knkzbgqle31ox6h/QUOTATIONSApr2016.doc.zip?dl=0
Please enjoy…
I’ve got a few bookmarked myself. You have linked to many that I have bookmarked in your essay. If you are keeping a file, here are a few I didn’t see linked in your piece that may interest you:
“Stanford researchers uncover patterns in how scientists lie about their data”
https://news.stanford.edu/2015/11/16/fraud-science-papers-111615/
“Many scientific “truths” are, in fact, false” [lots of embedded links in this one]
http://qz.com/638059/many-scientific-truths-are-in-fact-false/
“On the origins of the linear no-threshold (LNT) dogma by means of untruths, artful dodges and blind faith”
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935115300311
How does one replicate altered data and rank opinion? The process has been impossible to replicate and climate scientists are careful to not share raw data. But the conclusions are easy to formulate: CAGW = $.
There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience.
A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel.
– Vladimir Lenin
Vlad understood how to staff a climate science department.
Such alarmism:
One would think that before putting such alarmism on paper, you’d research the public trust in scientific institutions (and scientists), think about whether there have been changes over time, and consider what some of influences might be for any changes you might find, other than those that you’re speculating about.
Surely, you’ve done that. Then why didn’t you report what you found? Because I’ve seen a fair amount of evidence that you’re alarmism is not substantiated.
I read this a few years ago. Seems to me this has been brewing for a few years at the very least:
“Not even trying: the corruption of real science” by Bruce G Charlton.
http://corruption-of-science.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/not-even-trying-corruption-of-real.html?m=1
My most recent copy of “Mechanical Engineering” magazine included an article by several young engineers recommending books that other young engineers might find helpful in beginning their careers. I thought of the unwritten book that would be helpful.
You get paid to say what the boss wants said.
You get paid to do what the boss want done.
These are the two most basic, though unwritten, expectations.
If you expect to get paid, check your ethics and conscience at the door. Nobody really cares what you think about it. All those high minded corporate values are just window dressing. When those values roll up against big egos or big money, they lose.
I have a growing list of papers and articles on troubled state of what passes for “science” these days, on my web site, here:
sealevel.info/papers.html#whitherscience
Thank you, Larry Kummer, for providing me with more material to add to my list.
Larry: 3rd Request!
davidmhoffer April 23, 2016 at 10:48 am
Larry Kummer;
I repeat my comment from upthread as you have failed to respond to it. In your reply to Steven Mosher you said:
can you provide a published source to support it?
To which I replied:
The appeal to authority card in all its glory.
Can you cite a single example of a climate science “experiment” which can be replicated?
Per Einstein, all you need is one.
I repeat my request.
Larry: You’ve made an assertion which you haven’t seen fit to support with a single example. You can support your assertion, you can admit that you are wrong, or you can quietly ignore this simple request which would make you guilty of the exact crisis in science you accuse others of.
There are no Nobel’s for replication…….sadly all the Kudos goes to the first publisher.
Perhaps they and other awards should be withheld until such studies ere replicated.