MaxedOutMama
Friday, June 10, 2005
Bad Science And Your Money
This Sfgate article discusses an survey of 8,000 scientific researchers who had received NIH (National Institutes of Health) funding. They responded anonymously and admitted to questionable practices such as:
All is not well in the world of science, just as all is not well in the realm of traditional journalism. Not surprisingly, the web has become a new avenue for critics of both disciplines. Climate Audit follows global-warming related stories; they are currently breaking down datasets and looking at how various popular temperature proxy datasets have been generated. This is an excellent, easily understood explanation of the failures of peer review that led to wide-spread acceptance of the hockey-stick thesis. I also strongly recommend this later article about both the specific errors in the Mann Hockey Stick and the implications of the fact that it took so long for a correction to be published. The abstract:
From M&M's page, the corrected proxy graph:
You can see why the early data series were "corrected". A longer time frame (over the last 10,000 years) would show several such fluctuations and a current temperature lower than it was for several thousand years. There is no question that the study of climate variation is incredibly important for the human race, but in order to help us it must be done on the basis of actual data. Whenever I can find any to work with that is current, it seems to show that temps are now shifting downwards in North America. I believe that is due to increased cloudiness and wind pattern changes such as that seen a few decades ago, so this observation certainly doesn't debunk global warming. However, it does explain to me why all of a sudden climate scientists are concentrating on sudden climate change. They must be seeing this too and need a new scarecrow to keep the money flowing.
-- "Changing the design, methodology or results of a study in response to pressure from a funding source," reported by 15.5 percent.Not surprisingly, the researchers had a hard time getting their paper published:
-- "Dropping observations or data points from analyses based on a gut feeling that they were inaccurate," admitted by 15.3 percent.
-- "Using inadequate or inappropriate research designs," acknowledged by 13.5 percent.
-- "Overlooking others' use of flawed data or questionable interpretation of data," reported by 12.5 percent.
Martinson, 41, had trouble getting the article published -- it was rejected by two prominent American journals, Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association, before Nature accepted it in the form of a "commentary." In Nature, a commentary is an article that contains a fair amount of personal opinion but must still go through peer review by outside experts before it is accepted for publication.You may remember that there has been strong criticism lately of global-warming science and peer review. There have been allegations that Science and Nature consistently refused to publish contradictory studies, and of course there is the dire saga of McIntyre and McKitrick's debunking of the famous hockey stick graph. For years they tried to get their results published, and their criticism was finally published in scientific journals only after they self-published on the web (for which they were duly criticized).
All is not well in the world of science, just as all is not well in the realm of traditional journalism. Not surprisingly, the web has become a new avenue for critics of both disciplines. Climate Audit follows global-warming related stories; they are currently breaking down datasets and looking at how various popular temperature proxy datasets have been generated. This is an excellent, easily understood explanation of the failures of peer review that led to wide-spread acceptance of the hockey-stick thesis. I also strongly recommend this later article about both the specific errors in the Mann Hockey Stick and the implications of the fact that it took so long for a correction to be published. The abstract:
The differences between the results of McIntyre and McKitrick [2003] and MannWilliam Kinmouth weighs in. The climate-change distortions are just one example of this trend in American science, which is dominated by government or corporate grants and which also tends to dominate world science. We appear to have constructed a system in which good scientists with strong ethics are disadvantaged. This has public policy implications that are monumental. The errors in the hockey stick graph were not subtle and they were not accidental. How is it possible that this error could go uncorrected for so long?
et al. [1998] can be reconciled by only two series: the Gaspé cedar ring width
series and the first principal component (PC1) from the North American tree ring
network. We show that in each case MBH98 methodology differed from what was
stated in print and the differences resulted in lower early 15th century index values.
In the case of the North American PC1, MBH98 modified the PC algorithm so
that the calculation was no longer centered, but claimed that the calculation was
“conventional”. The modification caused the PC1 to be dominated by a subset of
bristlecone pine ring width series which are widely doubted to be reliable
temperature proxies. In the case of the Gaspé cedars, MBH98 did not use archived
data, but made an extrapolation, unique within the corpus of over 350 series, and
misrepresented the start date of the series. The recent Corrigendum by Mann et al.
denied that these differences between the stated methods and actual methods have
any effect, a claim we show is false. We also refute the various arguments by Mann
et al. purporting to salvage their reconstruction, including their claims of
robustness and statistical skill. Finally, we comment on several policy issues
arising from this controversy: the lack of consistent requirements for disclosure of
data and methods in paleoclimate journals, and the need to recognize the
limitations of journal peer review as a quality control standard when scientific
studies are used for public policy.
From M&M's page, the corrected proxy graph:
You can see why the early data series were "corrected". A longer time frame (over the last 10,000 years) would show several such fluctuations and a current temperature lower than it was for several thousand years. There is no question that the study of climate variation is incredibly important for the human race, but in order to help us it must be done on the basis of actual data. Whenever I can find any to work with that is current, it seems to show that temps are now shifting downwards in North America. I believe that is due to increased cloudiness and wind pattern changes such as that seen a few decades ago, so this observation certainly doesn't debunk global warming. However, it does explain to me why all of a sudden climate scientists are concentrating on sudden climate change. They must be seeing this too and need a new scarecrow to keep the money flowing.
