‘Fraudulent research makes it past gatekeepers at even the most prestigious journals’
London 31 October: A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals the extent to which current policy-making is reliant on untrustworthy peer-reviewed research, much of which cannot be replicated and “may be simply untrue”.
click on the image above to watch a short video about the GWPF report
“Fraudulent research makes it past gatekeepers at even the most prestigious journals,” says Donna Laframboise, the study’s author and the investigative journalist behind the 2011 exposé of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) entitled: The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert.
The report, entitled Peer Review: Why Skepticism is Essential, describes the peer-review process as “haphazard and byzantine”, raising serious questions about the state of modern science and casting doubt on policies that claim to be ‘evidence-based’.
Laframboise explains:
“A policy cannot be considered evidence-based if the evidence on which it depends was never independently verified… News from the worlds of astrobiology, ecology, economics, chemistry, computer science, management studies, medicine, neuroscience, psychology, and physics all tell the same tale: ’peer-reviewed’ does not equal ’policy-ready’.”
This has striking implications for climate change policy, and particularly for the IPCC, which relies on the credibility of the peer-review process to provide support for its conclusions, and is quick to dismiss research that has not been peer-reviewed.
Laframboise describes how the now-disgraced former IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri was once asked if an Indian environment ministry report might alter the IPCC’s pessimistic view of Himalayan glaciers. The ‘IPCC studies only peer-review science’, Rajendra Pachauri replied dismissively. Until the report’s data appears in ‘a decent credible publication’, he said, ‘we can just throw it into the dust- bin’.”
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Have to ‘laugh’ in that what made me a confirmed ‘Atmospheric Anarchy’ sceptic was that, way back when, I couldn’t find anything, in even short/medium forecasts, that discussed ‘positive’ outcomes concerning increased CO2.
You are telling me that you couldn’t find just one?
So, increased CO2 might help plants? No, we don’t get ‘funding’ for suggesting that …
So warmer temperatures, especially beyond the Equator, might help feed more people? No … We don’t get funding for that kind of nonsense either.
In reality, we get funding for talking ‘Guardian’ about this being about increasing ‘pollutants’ but …
CO2+H2O+SUN–>LIFE on Earth. Take away one element and …
It’s all a complete mess designed to ‘Tax’ your part in the basic functioning of our World.
CO2+H2O+SUN–>LIFE on Earth
Can’t Tax Water, can’t Tax The Sun … CO2 though? (now there’s an idea) …
Climate change? I liked global warming. Climate is a regional phenomena that, when the globe warms,
with time should tend to change everywhere in the direction of warming. It always has in the past. So why
are we reporting on weather driven snowstorms when we know that these are mere temporary hiccups as
the globe warms.?
Mark4asp comments (above): “Some of these people have jobs at universities where they are mis-educating tomorrow’s policy makers.”
I’ll leave aside for now the thought that perhaps policy-makers are best *not* taught by scientific lecturers and that policy-makers shd primarily approach the subject from strong philosophical foundations. Instead, I ask:
What about the Secondary Schools at which our kids are — from what I can make out — brain-washed from the earliest, if not by already brainwashed, leftie, teachers, then by the Departments of Education (ex brainwashed, leftie teachers?) who set the curricula?
As a retired Engineer, I enlisted in a volunteer program to help Hi-School students. I was asked to apply for a specific posting which included certain subjects, while not specifically mentioning AGW,, clearly danced around this topic which appeared to be central to syllabus. In the to-and-fro of application, in which we talked-up a storm, I found it necessary — from deeply held personal beliefs — to state that I would expand on such matters in an even-handed manner, adducing all sides of the argument, so as to best position my charges TO MAKE THEIR OWN,DECISIONS ON A COMPLEX TOPIC. The exchange promptly stopped! Obviously, I was not one to toe the Party Line … perish the thought that kids shd be encouraged to think for themselves, perhaps!
I think this is a HUGE problem that the ed-authorities are getting away with.
Let’s hope at least the dust-bin was peer-reviewed?
I myself believe that Mankind’s burning up of the Earth’s very finite supply of fossil fuels is not such a good idea. I would like to use AGW as another reason to conserve on the use of fossil fuels but the AGW conjecture is just too full of holes to defend. There is no real evidence that CO2 affects climate and plenty of scientific rationale to support the idea that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is really some very small number close to zero.
The IPCC, in part to provide evidence that AGW is real, sponsored the development of a plethora of climate models. The fact that so many different models were generated is evidence that a lot of guess work was involved. The plethora of models generated a wide range of predictions for today’s global temperatures but they all seem to have one thing in common. They have all been wrong. They have all predicted global warming that has not happened. If the models are evidence of anything it is that there is something very wrong with the AGW conjecture but the IPCC refuses to acknowledge this for fear of losing their funding. In their first report the IPCC published a wide range of possible values for the climate sensitivity of CO2. Only one value can be the correct one. In their last report the IPCC published the exact same values. So after more than two decades of effort the IPCC has learned nothing new that would allow them to narrow their range of guestamates one iota. Others have generated models that much better predict today’s global temperatures without any dependence on CO2 based global warming. Others have also estimated CO2 climate sensitivity values for CO2 that are much lower than the IPCC’s range of values but the IPCC refuses to acknowledge these efforts for fear of losing their funding. The IPCC is hence a political and not a scientific organization.
One of the fundamentals upon which the AGW conjecture is based is that the earth’s surface is 33 degrees C warmer then it would otherwise be because of the effects of so called greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere. A real greenhouse does not stay warm because of the action of heat trapping greenhouse gases. A real greenhouse stays warm because the glass decreases cooling by convection. It is a convective greenhouse effect. There is no radiative greenhouse effect keeping a real greenhouse warm. So too on Earth. The Earth’s surface is 33 degrees C warmer than it would be otherwise because gravity and the heat capacity of the atmosphere limits cooling by convection. It is a convective greenhouse effect, as derived from first principals, that keeps the surface of the earth 33 degrees warmer because of the atmosphere. There is no evidence of an additional radiant greenhouse effect on Earth nor anywhere in the solar system for that matter. Without the radiant greenhouse effect, the AGW conjecture is nothing.
Another very important part of the AGW conjecture is that H2O provides positive feedbacks to CO2 caused climate change effects because H2O is also a so called greenhouse gas with LWIR absorption bands. But the AGW conjecture ignores the fact that H2O is a major coolant in the Earth’s atmosphere moving heat energy from the Earth’s surface which is mostly some form of H2O to where clouds form via the heat of vaporization. According to some energy balance models, more heat energy is moved by H2O via the heat of vaporization then by both LWIR absorption band radiation and convection combined. The cooling properties of H2O are also evidenced by the fact that the wet lapse rate is significantly lower than the dry lapse rate. Because of the cooling effects of H2O in our atmosphere the H2O feedback must be negative and must have been negative for the Earth’s climate to have been stable enough over more than the past 500 million years for life to evolve We are here.
I read an article recently where the author pointed out that the original calculations of the climate sensitivity of CO2 were too great by a factor of more than 20 because the original calculations ignore the fact that doubling the amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere would cause a slight decrease in the dry lapse rate in the troposphere. This factor of 20 error renders the climate effects of CO2 as totally insignificant.
There is no evidence in the paleoclimate record that CO2 has any effect on climate. There is evidence that warmer temperatures have resulted in for CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. It is well known that warmer water cannot hold as much CO2 as cooler water. There is no real evidence that the additional CO2 caused any additional warming.
Then there is this idea of consensus. They want us to believe in the AGW conjecture because they deem it as a consensus opinion. But science is not a democracy. The Laws of science are not some form of legislation. Scientific theories are not proven true through a voting process. If consensus made things true the we would all be having to abide by the Ptolemaic model of the universe which at one time was the consensus opinion. The idea of consensus is politics and not science.
Willhaas strikes a chord: in the long-run, fossil-fuel resources at current consumption levels, really are finite. (Unless, of course, current production thereof — harvestable in aeons — can sustain it in the long-run. No-one to my knowledge has claimed that our current rate of exploitation is remotely matched in the near-term by the lay-down of replacement resources.
The anti-AGW Alarmists’ mantra is: ‘Don’t worry, be happy, today”, but what about: “Don’t happy, be worried tomorrow / next generation(s). One of the (few!) pluses of the AGW/Alarmist arguments is that of — yes, you guessed it! — sustainabilty in the long-run, for which we shd all give them some credit, even if they’re hunting the wrong culprit — CO2.
Methinks the paradigm shd be analogous to the debate over ‘Base-Load Electricity Supply’ … and I have much more to say –manana!
There are alternate sources of hydrocarbons for every other purpose that oil is used for.
Keeping it locked in the ground on the off chance that it might have other uses in the far future is not a wise use of a valuable energy resource.
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
The “science” behind AGW is so dodgy, because the science didn’t come first. What came first was the notion that mankind was a problem and was doing harm to the planet. The “science” was then simply tortured until it fitted in with this notion.
If it was up to Stokes, Griff et al. Guy Paul Morin would be serving a life sentence
http://injusticebusters.org/index.htm/morin06.html
http://injusticebusters.org/index.htm/morin01.html
This issue needs to be discussed more!!!!! ty!
This I said more than a decade back and wrote and presented in several forums including in this forum. You scratch my back and I scratch your back, thy name of peer-review.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
All frauds are exposed by time. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Patience.
They can still do a lot of damage before they are exposed.
How many of the people that Bernie Maddox cheated got much of their money back?
Madoff.
Recently the BBC showed an extraordinary film in three parts: Fatal Experiments: The Downfall of a Supersurgeon. If it’s repeated, watch it, although it is extremely upsetting to see the patients die one by one.
The parallels with the corruption of climate science are remarkable.
Here’s a good summary of what happened:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-37311038
.
Four doctors at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm started to suspect that there was something seriously wrong with Paolo Macchiarini’s scientific work. After looking at his published work they found serious problems that even suggested scientific fraud. When they reported their findings the Karolinska managers actually threatened the doctors. But finally the Karolinska Institute commissioned a report by an independent and respected scientist. His report was damning and confirmed the suspicions of the doctors of scientific fraud.
.
The Karolinska Institute simply ignored the report. They then claimed new evidence – which naturally they kept secret – had exonerated Macchiarini.
.
Incredibly, it seemed there had been no animal trials to test the procedure. And yet Macchiarini had reassured the patients before the operations that there had been animal tests. The patients were literally experimental subjects. Macchiarini’s scientific articles claimed that his patients were doing very well. In fact this was an appalling lie: all his patients were slowly dying.
.
But now the fraud has been publicly acknowledged and there are police investigations. Hopefully Macchiarini will end up in jail. The Vice Chancellor of Karolinska Institute, who had endlessly defended Macchiarini, has now resigned.
.
There are remarkable parallels with climate science: classic group think, scenario fulfillment delusions so that even evidence that contradicted their theory if anything strengthened their belief. And of course, when their star surgeon had been accused of scientific and ethical misconduct the Karolinska’s response was to circle the wagons and do all they could to maintain their reputation. As often happens, the priority of the organisation was the wellbeing of the organisation, not of the people they serve.
.
The good news is that the fraud has been blown wide open and now hopefully justice will be served for his victims, most of whom suffered terrible and long drawn-out deaths.
If you have the chance to watch the films, do so. They will remain with you for the rest of your life.
Chris
Two kinds of science occupy center stage today. Global Warming is of the Post Modern Science school, where skepticism is not practiced. Instead, scientific propositions must pass Popper’s three intersubjectivity criteria, peer review, publication, and consensus, all within the certified community, plus pretend to have a falsification criterion and be politically correct. PMS is king in academia, except most notably for engineering.
Some industries pay lip service to PMS, as in pharmaceuticals, but in the last analysis industry practices Modern Science, where validity of models rests solely on their predictive power (Bacon), where all subjectivity is automatically rejected, and where skepticism is a virtue.
Popper deconstructed Bacon. The two versions of science are mutually exclusive.
P.S. As PMS and MS are mutually exclusive, each is a fraud judged by the standards of the other. In the public arena, however, a regularly reinforced instinct exists for scientific models that actually work. That would put the public squarely in the MS arena but for the intense politics of PMS.
Another interesting exception is that the practice of peer review is a fraud judged by its own parent, PMS. At the risk of looking like a crank on the subject, here, once again because it is highly relevant to a cranky thread, is a capsule summary of the state of peer review:
Peer review as a reliable technique for assessing the validity of scientific data is surely discredited. ¶ The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed [jiggered, not repaired], often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong. Horton, R.C., Genetically modified food: consternation, confusion, and crack-up, Med.J.Aust. 172(4), 2/21/2000, 148-9.
That from the Editor of The Lancet, a peer-reviewed journal.
GCMs only have to work in the sense of passing self-examination, i.e., the criteria of peer review, publication, and consensus. They do predict climate, but a century hence so that it cannot be validated before Policymakers are supposed to use the AGW model, i.e., send money, squeeze democracies. What GCMs do predict that is testable is Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity, and testing shows that the GCMs are indeed correct about ECS with about 3% confidence.
Jeff Glassman:
Using IPCC-sanctioned terminology, GCMs do not “predict” but rather “project.” As they do not “predict” they cannot be “validated.” However, they can be “evaluated.” Those plots of computed global temperatures vs time with a global temperature time series superimposed are “evaluations.” Validation is impossible because for validation aka cross validation it is necessary to count sampling units but no statistical population underlies a GCM.
If we bloggers were to get on the same page terminology-wise we would have more impact.
Terry Oldberg, 11/2/16 @ur momisugly 7:28 pm said,
Using IPCC-sanctioned terminology, GCMs do not “predict” but rather “project.” As they do not “predict” they cannot be “validated.” However, they can be “evaluated.” Those plots of computed global temperatures vs time with a global temperature time series superimposed are “evaluations.” Validation is impossible because for validation aka cross validation it is necessary to count sampling units but no statistical population underlies a GCM.
If we bloggers were to get on the same page terminology-wise we would have more impact.
Re sanctioned: What a most interesting word! In everyday use, it has exactly opposite meanings — approval and disapproval. IPCC approved project to disapprove use of predict. That is a curious thing because IPCC exploits Post Modern Science where models don’t have to work at all. They only have to have three forms of certified (i.e., closed) community approval. Somehow, IPCC’s sanctioning reveals a sensitivity either to public instinct that models are supposed to work, or to Modern Science, where models are judged solely on their predictive power. By definition, IPCC left itself with just one prediction: catastrophe many generations hence from US-led free world use of fossil fuels today, where nuclear power is, of course, politically incorrect.
Re statistical population underlies: You point to a classical problem with statistical analysis. K. Pearson (1900) and Fisher (1922) explored the general statistical problem of finding a goodness of fit of regression curves to an underlying statistical population. They failed, in large part because underlying populations are supposed to be infinite and stationary. Such populations do not exist in the real world. They are statistical figments. The solution to this problem is found in MS through Information Theory and maximum entropy.
Re scare quotes: When you put scare quotes, meaning “so-called”, around predict and validated, you project a sympathy to PMS. These are unconditional, unqualified power words in MS.
Re get on the same page: One of the features of the blogosphere is that discussions almost never converge. Convergence requires liberal posting rules coupled with strong moderation. If this discussion could converge, we could settle the matter by agreeing to discuss it in the context of each kind of science separately.
File Oldberg’s post under He who controls the vocabulary wins the argument.
Jeff Glassman
Thank you for taking the time to reply. As you point out, convergence is difficult. A requirement for convergence is for all of the parties to the debate to agree on the meanings of words in the language in which the debate is conducted. Most parties to the debate over global warming have agreed to assign one meaning to “prediction” and another meaning to “projection” but there are holdouts. I note that you are among the holdouts and wish you would change your mind.
As you may know, modern information theory works around logical deficiencies in the notion of a “statistical population.” For example a statistical population can be formed by associating the concrete Earth on which we live with a partition of the time line between the year 1850 and the present such that the pairing of the concrete Earth with an element of this partition creates an element of a statistical population. It is a population of this type that is currently missing from global warming climatology. Absent this population “prediction” is a misnomer as it does not refer to the concrete object that is the target of the alleged prediction. “Projection” is the right term as it is understood to stand in contradistinction to “prediction.”
The phrase stating that “He who controls the vocabulary wins the argument” is inappropriate. My desire is not to control this vocabulary but rather to disambiguate it. Disambiguation has the merit of halting applications of the equivocation fallacy that plague global warming climatology. It thrives, for example, when bloggers insist upon using “prediction” and “projection” as synonyms.
Terry Oldberg 11/3/2016 @ur momisugly 11:49 am
By global warm climatology I presume you mean the capitalized Climatology promoting the (capitalized) Anthropogenic Global Warming conjecture, where capitalization indicates defined by stipulation, as for example by the authorities behind the IPCC narrative. At the risk of pedantry, a statistical prediction of Global Average Surface Temperature anomaly over the past half-million years, far more than your period since 1850, is duck soup. To a first order, that temperature has varied between about -11C to +3C, correlated usefully over several centuries. That comes from considerations of vanilla climatology, a modern science, not the current Climatology of IPCC and its obeisant academics.
When I suggested that He who controls the vocabulary wins the argument, I was thinking not of you but of IPCC.
At 7:28 pm you wrote, GCMs do not “predict” but rather “project”. However, IPCC says,
Current GCMs do not have sufficiently rigorous microphysics or sub-grid scale processes to accurately predict cirrus clouds or super-cooled clouds explicitly. AR4, ¶2.4.5.5, p. 180.
So by implication GCMs do indeed predict. They predict cirrus clouds and super-cooled clouds, just not accurately (enough for something) and explicitly (enough). Most significantly, they also predict the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity:
The equilibrium climate sensitivity is a measure of the climate system response to sustained radiative forcing. It is not a projection but is defined as the global average surface warming following a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations. It is likely [P > 66%] to be in the range 2ºC to 4.5ºC with a best estimate of about 3ºC, and is very unlikely [P < 10%] to be less than 1.5ºC. Values substantially higher than 4.5ºC cannot be excluded, but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values. Water vapour changes represent the largest feedback affecting climate sensitivity and are now better understood than in the TAR. Cloud feedbacks remain the largest source of uncertainty. Bold added, AR4, SPM, p. 12.
Because we only have two categories so far, ECS, being a response, that is, in the future, must be a prediction, too. Or do we have to add another undefined category, say, foretell? We need more than word definitions; we need consistency.
While I’m amenable to changing my mind, I’m reluctant to change the facts.
Jeff Glassman:
Thanks for sharing. One should not get hung up on the identities of the words that are used in making an argument as they are only place holders for meanings. It is the meanings that determine the logicality of the argument. Its logicality is the trait of an argument that most interests me.
It is when a word changes meaning in the midst of an argument that this causes trouble. By the definition of terms, this argument is an example of an “equivocation.” While an equivocation looks like a syllogism it isn’t one. In particular, while the conclusion of a syllogism is true the conclusion of an equivocation is false or unproved. Thus, to draw a conclusion from an equivocation is logically illegitimate. To draw such a conclusion is the “equivocation fallacy.”
An argument that is made by people on both sides of the controversy over “anthropogenic global warming” makes no distinction between a model with an underlying statistical population and a model with no underlying statistical population. In the arguments of these people, “model” has two meanings. “Model” changes meaning in the midst of their argument making of this argument an example of an equivocation. Under this argument, a conclusion is drawn from this equivocation. In this way, an application of the equivocation fallacy is made by this argument.
Let us disambiguate the word “model” such that a “model-a” has an underlying statistical population and a “model-b” has no underlying statistical population. It can be shown, using information theory, that the mutual information of a model-b is nil. On the other hand, the mutual information of a model-a has a chance of being non-nil.
The mutual information of a model is all of the information that is available to the government for the purpose of regulating the climate system. A point of interest to me is that every one of the models currently being used by my government in its attempts at controlling the climate system is a model-b. Global warming climatologists don’t build model-a’s and never have Thus, at great expense my government has built a technology that is incapable of being used for its advertised purpose.
I wish that my government would cease wasting my tax money by building umpteen model-b’s and spend a much lower sum of money in an attempt at building one model-a that is suitable for regulating Earth’s climate. Rampant applications of the equivocation fallacy, many of them by well meaning bloggers, make this currently impossible.