The Great Climate Change Debate- Continued

[The PIT]

Just google "scientific fraud" for a plethora of information on fabricated data that has got into the literature, some deliberate and others possibly unconscious that permeates research.

Deliberate, e.g. "Piltdown Man", unconscious, probably, Gregor Mendel's seminal research on plant hybridization.

Many years ago I was a research technician in a prestigious University of London College. My professor got extremely annoyed when I could not get the results he wanted, because he had already got the paper accepted with his anticipated outcome of the experiments. He wasn't fraudulent as such, just full of an enthusiastic prejudice, which in this case was wrong.

What happened in the end did he give up or was he a naughty boy????

[Roo]

Just google "scientific fraud" for a plethora of information on fabricated data that has got into the literature, some deliberate and others possibly unconscious that permeates research.

Deliberate, e.g. "Piltdown Man", unconscious, probably, Gregor Mendel's seminal research on plant hybridization.

Many years ago I was a research technician in a prestigious University of London College. My professor got extremely annoyed when I could not get the results he wanted, because he had already got the paper accepted with his anticipated outcome of the experiments. He wasn't fraudulent as such, just full of an enthusiastic prejudice, which in this case was wrong.

Sorry Chris, I should have been clearer: I meant to say Climate Research, not research in general.

[And if all you can come up with as the sum of scientific error is a Victorian missing-link fraud, then I'm still not convinced! ]

As for your professor: did he actually falsify his results for the paper? If not, then surely it proves the case that no matter how 'enthusiastically' he might have wanted something, without the EVIDENCE he did not have a case and did not produce the paper.

Your example actually proves how good the scientific system is in regulating itself against personal prejudice.....

[The PIT]

Sorry Chris, I should have been clearer: I meant to say Climate Research, not research in general.

[And if all you can come up with as the sum of scientific error is a Victorian missing-link fraud, then I'm still not convinced! ]

As for your professor: did he actually falsify his results for the paper? If not, then surely it proves the case that no matter how 'enthusiastically' he might have wanted something, without the EVIDENCE he did not have a case and did not produce the paper.

Your example actually proves how good the scientific system is in regulating itself against personal prejudice.....

Err what's the difference if it goes of in one field it'll go off in another. Scientists are human after all not Borgs.

[osmposm]

Os,I apologise fully and without reservation. Regards,LG.

LG, I cannot tell you how appreciated that is.

I, for my part, wholeheartedly apologise for occasions when I may have been guilty of excessive 'needle' - and particularly for whatever silly things I said about motorbikes...I'm really only jealous, you know (though I could happily dismember the guys who, as they finally clear the traffic of the one-way system, open their throttles wide going up the hill about 200 yds from my house!)

Ossie

Edited September 4, 2008 by osmposm

[Roo]

Err what's the difference if it goes of in one field it'll go off in another. Scientists are human after all not Borgs.

No difference, but we're talking about the falsification of climate research data, so that's what I, for one, would like to see evidence for.....

As for scientists being humans, not borgs: Exactly!

And that is why we have peer review and learned journals and all the rest of the checks and balances: that makes sure that when scientists do behave exactly like humans, there is a means of spotting it and weeding it out.

That is not possible with someone who, e.g. writes a non-refereed piece in an unrecognised source: we have no way of knowing exactly whether they have made an intentional (or unintentional) human error.......

[Mondy]

btw, where is the Global Warming?

[Mondy]

No difference, but we're talking about the falsification of climate research data, so that's what I, for one, would like to see evidence for.....

As for scientists being humans, not borgs: Exactly!

And that is why we have peer review and learned journals and all the rest of the checks and balances: that makes sure that when scientists do behave exactly like humans, there is a means of spotting it and weeding it out.

That is not possible with someone who, e.g. writes a non-refereed piece in an unrecognised source: we have no way of knowing exactly whether they have made an intentional (or unintentional) human error.......

Therefore, can you explain why head of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge that earth had cooled? Get this - he said that nature had overwhelmed "mankind's warming" and it may be 10 years before warming occurs again. So all this mad panic about Global Warming, and the beaurocratic IPCC take a 10 year break? LOL.

The bottom line is this: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in co2 in the atmosphere from the use of fossils fuels. They don't have another issue. CO2 - that's it.

Nothing would be green without CO2. There has to be a joke there somewhere!

[Paul]

If the earth has been warming for 100 years and cools for 10, does that mean it's been warming or cooling?

[Mondy]

If the earth has been warming for 100 years and cools for 10, does that mean it's been warming or cooling?

Luke warm

[Roo]

Therefore, can you explain why head of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had to acknowledge that earth had cooled? Get this - he said that nature had overwhelmed "mankind's warming" and it may be 10 years before warming occurs again. So all this mad panic about Global Warming, and the beaurocratic IPCC take a 10 year break? LOL.

The bottom line is this: the entire global warming scientific case is based on the increase in co2 in the atmosphere from the use of fossils fuels. They don't have another issue. CO2 - that's it.

Nothing would be green without CO2. There has to be a joke there somewhere!

1) I refer you to Paul's question above

2) 'Nothing would be green without CO2'.....are you seriously saying that the AMOUNT of anything is completely irrelevant? CO2 is good for trees, end of? If so, I would suggest that you take 1 paracetamol today, and then a whole bottle tomorrow and see if you see any difference [kids, please don't try this at home....]

Edited September 4, 2008 by Roo

[The PIT]

If the earth has been warming for 100 years and cools for 10, does that mean it's been warming or cooling?

It means nothing too short a time span.

[Chris Knight]

What happened in the end did he give up or was he a naughty boy????

Now be fair, I have given you the anecdote without names or places for obvious reasons. Whether he retracted or not was his business. I took a new job shortly afterwards, with a rather jaundiced view of the practices actually taking place in science.

Roo, The Pit is right, it happens in all sciences. I thought I'd give an example close to your own field, which fooled palaeontologists, archaeologists and anthropologists alike for about 40 years. Piltdown man found his way into all the text books, was taught in all the universities during that time. An insidious meme, in the end exposed as a forgery. Peer review was no help here.

Egos and bleeding edge research get in the way of proper practice. Even experimental sciences produce reams of data, of which the inconclusive is usually discarded in favour of that which strengthens the target hypothesis. Unless of course, you are trying to falsify another hypothesis which does not fit yours, in which case the inconclusive results are happily put forward for publication.

If the earth has been warming for 100 years and cools for 10, does that mean it's been warming or cooling?

If I climb a hill to the summit, and then go down the other side, am I descending or ascending?

[SP1986]

If I climb a hill to the summit, and then go down the other side, am I descending or ascending?

Alternatively: If someone sends me up a hill then puts a blindfold on half way up the hill, and then you start to descend, how do you know there isn't a another ridge immediately in front of you?, I mean especially if you were walking in a particularly hilly area where the topography should be rising.

[laserguy]

If the earth has been warming for 100 years and cools for 10, does that mean it's been warming or cooling?

It means it's been warming for 100 years,but is now cooling and has been for the last ten . Only a flying visit (some will be glad to hear!),lots to do and only came on to see if Ossie had accepted my apology which too waste posted in haste before work. It means a lot to me too that you have - really sincerely sorry for my unacceptable comments -no excuses. Don't know about 'converting' you on AGW but if I lived nearby I'd offer you a spin on the motorbike and show you the light! Hey it's alright this getting on together lark,after all. Ok,put the violins away,catch y'all later.

[Roo]

Roo, The Pit is right, it happens in all sciences. I thought I'd give an example close to your own field, which fooled palaeontologists, archaeologists and anthropologists alike for about 40 years. Piltdown man found his way into all the text books, was taught in all the universities during that time. An insidious meme, in the end exposed as a forgery. Peer review was no help here.

But, Piltdown Man happened BEFORE such things as regulated peer review and refereeing. It was actually exposed by developing scientific techniques and as such, good science put a stop to it! .....so, again, your example actually proves what I have been saying.

As I say, if a 100 year old hoax is all you can find to damn the ENTIRE body of scientific research, then I am still not convinced....

Edited September 4, 2008 by Roo

[Paul]

I think to be honest though Roo, although it's certainly fair to say peer review is the standard way forward and it does provide checks and measures to sort the weed from the chaff (so to speak), as with anything it's not 100%. I'm sure there are plenty of examples of flawed work which has made it through peer review, as there are examples of brilliant work which hasn't been taken down that route. So I don't think an argument or hypothesis should be totally dismissed if it's not peer reviewed, or on the flipside of that, read as gospel if it is.

[The PIT]

But, Piltdown Man happened BEFORE such things as regulated peer review and refereeing. It was actually exposed by developing scientific techniques and as such, good science put a stop to it! .....so, again, your example actually proves what I have been saying.

As I say, if a 100 year old hoax is all you can find to damn the ENTIRE body of scientific research, then I am still not convinced....

Oh dear a very naive view that it doesn't happen any more. Of course it does and hopefully the people will get found out. There also some very good scientists out there as well who are as honest as the day is long.

[Mondy]

But, Piltdown Man happened BEFORE such things as regulated peer review and refereeing. It was actually exposed by developing scientific techniques and as such, good science put a stop to it! .....so, again, your example actually proves what I have been saying.

As I say, if a 100 year old hoax is all you can find to damn the ENTIRE body of scientific research, then I am still not convinced....

Well I took one of those of paracetemol you so kindly suggested.

By the "ENTIRE" body of scientific research, do you mean all those scientists who work for the IPCC?

PS, nobody has answered the earlier question yet of " Where is this warming?"

Edited September 4, 2008 by Delta X-Ray

[Roo]

I think to be honest though Roo, although it's certainly fair to say peer review is the standard way forward and it does provide checks and measures to sort the weed from the chaff (so to speak), as with anything it's not 100%. I'm sure there are plenty of examples of flawed work which has made it through peer review, as there are examples of brilliant work which hasn't been taken down that route. So I don't think an argument or hypothesis should be totally dismissed if it's not peer reviewed, or on the flipside of that, read as gospel if it is.

I absolutely agree with you Paul: there is no such thing as 100% safe: but there is more safe than the alternative.

But, I do have to say, that you don't actually hear about academics under peer review who make big mistakes and, if we are talking about GW, then to disprove it we would have to be doing that (in fact, big mistakes/frauds from multiple scientists in multiple organisations).

Flawed might make it through sometimes, but I don't accept that fraudulent will without being pretty soon discovered.

I would never dismiss anything just because it wasn't peer-reviewed, but equally I would accept peer reviewed material more readily than anything else (as I do not have the training to be able to evaluate the evidence without the recommendation of those who know more than I do! Kind of like a star rating for research, if you like).

In addition, peer review is not just about weeding out rubbish: even a renowned specialist in a field needs others to point out the weaknesses in their research, their not-seeing-the-wood-for-the-trees-ness, their inherent subjectivity, bias, etc, etc: peer review enables any academic to make the best argument they can because it has been sifted by other minds who can help to strengthen their case. It is not an old's boys club, but actually a critical tool to make you produce the best piece of research you can.

My basic point is that the academic peer review process is very wide ranging and is difficult to get around.

And this is why:

To get funding you must apply to a research body and your application will then be decided by a panel of 20ish very senior academics from different universities and research groups, a lot of whom will not be from precisely your field.

Each year you have that money you will have to submit, at minimum, annual reports to that same body (who will by now have all new members as panel members can only sit for a certain term and will be replaced) showing that you have exactly spent the money how you said you would.

When you publish you will have your paper sent to an editorial board of up to of 20 people (in addition to your grant body) to decide whether it has academic validity.

Should it pass this procedure, you will then be in print and then the fun really starts as every other research group in your field (usually there are upwards of 10 other groups of a minimum of ten individuals each) will start picking apart your data to see if they can find any areas that you have not thought of (there is a healthy trade in trying tp nitpick other people's research....). Then you also have conferences, where c.200 people will gather to discuss who's done what, when and how.....

And that's without even looking at the fact that people within a particular niche field are constantly in email contact with each other and are always sharing info, data, results, advice....

To get a piece of fraudulent research through and for it to be maintained would, I think, be near impossible without the collusion of upwards of 500 people. Minor errors will creep in, yes, but big intentional errors/lies, which change the face of science are just not likely.

In the case of AGW, you have hundreds and thousands of papers from varying fields and subjects undergoing peer review in a variety of disciplines and from a variety of accredited journals and sources, and yet still saying basically the same thing, going up against a handful of non-peer reviewed ones which say something different.

That is why I believe that broadly the theory of AGW is right.

[Edited for clarity!]

Edited September 4, 2008 by Roo

[Roo]

Well I took one of those of paracetemol you so kindly suggested.

By the "ENTIRE" body of scientific research, do you mean all those scientists who work for the IPCC?

PS, nobody has answered the earlier question yet of " Where is this warming?"

Can I have one? I'm getting a headache....

As for damning, I was asking someone to come up with something from climate research which had been proved to be fraudulent (no-one has yet managed to give me an example....just a very old plastic ape skull.....)

As for warming: I thought you admitted to 'luke warm': that's warm isn't it?

Edited September 4, 2008 by Roo

[Guest Shetland Coastie]

I absolutely agree with you Paul: there is no such thing as 100% safe: but there is more safe than the alternative.

But, I do have to say, that you don't actually hear about academics under peer review who make big mistakes and, if we are talking about GW, then to disprove it we would have to be doing that (in fact, big mistakes/frauds from multiple scientists in multiple organisations).

Im going to disagree on this one Roo. There are numerous instances of failure in the peer review process involving plagiarism and indeed systematic fraud.

In a poll of scientists conducted by the US National Institutes of Health, for example, 1.4% admitted plagiarism, 4.7% admitted autoplagiarism (republishing the same material or data without citing their earlier work) and 0.3% admitted fabricating data.

Also, the US Office of Research Integrity has had to sanction a number of reviewers for having used information gained through the peer review process for personal gain.

A prime of example of the peer review rpocess having succumbed to systematic fraud would be the case of Jan-Hendrik Schon who had fifteeen papers accepted for publication in the magazines Nature and Science, all of which were peer reviewed and all of which were utterly fraudulent. The fraud itself was not detected by peer review but only after the results were published when others tried to reproduce his results and failed to do so.

Or the famous case of the South Korean biomedical scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, who had two papers published in Science in which he claimed to have created human embryonic stem cells by cloning. Again it was only after they were published that the papers were found to contain a large amount of fabricated data.

If I may quote Richard Horton, currently editor-in-chief of The Lancet:

"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, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong."

(The boldening of the text is my own)

Edited September 4, 2008 by Shetland Coastie

[SP1986]

The original question posed is: Are there any examples of evidence of research on climate change that could be seen as fraudulent?

I wouldn't know where to begin looking for this one, I do know that if fraudulence is committed within the research world, then it is treated with the harshest of punishments especially peer reviewed work. There is far far too much for the researchers to lose by doing this. I have to say myself that there have probably been frauds in the past regarding research papers, however I genuinely believe it's not in anyones best interest to partake in this activity. This should not have to be explained to anyone though, especially those who have been through the academic trail...

[SnowBear]

A recent flawed theory which has a thirty year history is Hawkins theory of Black Holes. His original theory said Black Holes do not leak, they suck in all that goes over the event horizon, nothing escapes. His theory was peer reviewed and accepted as the standard. Later he then had to bow down to the pressure of a fellow scientist (John Preskill) who questioned this "non leakiness". He had to concede that they do indeed leak radiation over time thus altering the whole view of how the universe works and backing up string field theory. The bet he made at the time was a complete Encyclopaedia Britannica which he duly gave to the other scientist in question. So yes, recent peer reviewed theories have been wrong in very fundamental ways.

I think the current mainstream climate change theory is similarly flawed, and at some point possibly soon, certain parts of it will have to be reworked as new data and mechanisms are found and those new mechanisms are found to influence a larger degree than first thought. CO2 will be a factor, but not as first thought.

The whole climate change theory is an experiment in progress, the results will not be in for decades so again I say how can mainstream science, media etc keep saying its all done and dusted and that warming is now a given and no variation from it will occur? This in my view is being closed minded, not open to new theories coming along, as once said to a theoretical scientist regarding string theory, "The theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?". Therefore with a subject as diverse and complex as the climate of our planet, the theory to cover all parts must equally be "crazy" and not just focused on one single part (CO2).

[Roo]

1) 03.% of scientists is not ideal but is by no means anywhere near a significant amount...and, anyway, of those how many were caught out?

2) All the papers you cite were proved to be fraudulent (by scientists) very quickly after they were published and all were very publicly (and immediately) withdrawn. The system worked.

3) As for Horton: he published (against the advice of some of his reviews board) the paper written by Wakefield on MMR which has now been absolutely discredited by the rest of those working in the field: his peers, you might say.....

The bet he made at the time was a complete Encyclopaedia Britannica which he duly gave to the other scientist in question. So yes, recent peer reviewed theories have been wrong in very fundamental ways.

But that is not fraud, and that is what is constantly alleged by some people: that AGW is the result of a conspiracy of badly achieved and fraudulent science.

Of course theories adapt, change and are proven to be correct or incorrect...that is the nature of academia. But cheating isn't.

[Devonian]

A recent flawed theory which has a thirty year history is Hawkins theory of Black Holes. His original theory said Black Holes do not leak, they suck in all that goes over the event horizon, nothing escapes. His theory was peer reviewed and accepted as the standard. Later he then had to bow down to the pressure of a fellow scientist (John Preskill) who questioned this "non leakiness". He had to concede that they do indeed leak radiation over time thus altering the whole view of how the universe works and backing up string field theory. The bet he made at the time was a complete Encyclopaedia Britannica which he duly gave to the other scientist in question. So yes, recent peer reviewed theories have been wrong in very fundamental ways.

I think the current mainstream climate change theory is similarly flawed, and at some point possibly soon, certain parts of it will have to be reworked as new data and mechanisms are found and those new mechanisms are found to influence a larger degree than first thought. CO2 will be a factor, but not as first thought.

The whole climate change theory is an experiment in progress, the results will not be in for decades so again I say how can mainstream science, media etc keep saying its all done and dusted and that warming is now a given and no variation from it will occur? This in my view is being closed minded, not open to new theories coming along, as once said to a theoretical scientist regarding string theory, "The theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?". Therefore with a subject as diverse and complex as the climate of our planet, the theory to cover all parts must equally be "crazy" and not just focused on one single part (CO2).

I though Stephen Hawking discovered Hawking radiation which does indeed make black hole evaporate? I could be wrong though.

Anyway, yes, I doubt AGW is a perfect theory. But, if it's wrong why must it be wrong one way - toward less warming? Surely that to pre judge any errors in it? Why are people who are SO sure AGW is wrong SO sure it is wrong in that it's predicts too much warming? Like I say, I can accept it might be wrong, but not that it must be a certain sort of wrong.