Alleging 'Malpractice' With Climate Skeptic Papers, Publisher Kills Journal 314
sciencehabit writes "A European publisher today terminated a journal edited by climate change skeptics. The journal, Pattern Recognition in Physics, was started less than a year ago. Problems cropped up soon afterward. In July, Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, noted 'serious concerns' with Pattern Recognition in Physics. As he wrote on his blog about open-access publishing, Beall found self-plagiarism in the first paper published by the journal. 'In addition,' says another critic, 'the editors selected the referees on a nepotistic basis, which we regard as malpractice in scientific publishing.'"
Wait- There's More! (Score:4, Informative)
http://scholarlyoa.com/2013/07/16/recognizing-a-pattern-of-problems-in-pattern-recognition-in-physics/ [scholarlyoa.com]
Then again, there is Retraction Watch in case deniers just want to claim that the scientists are sitting on their billion dollar yachts sipping their mojitos, and selectively killing only articles about global warming - hey, might as well add creationism while we are into denialism.
http://retractionwatch.com/2014/01/17/climate-skeptic-journal-shuttered-following-malpractice-in-nepotistic-reviewer-selections/ [retractionwatch.com]
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Since I think we know that few scientists are billionaires, and yet scientific fraud is documented to exist, you just might be distorting the picture. (I like the bit about, "might as well add creationism while we are into denialism." It really added to your argument. You should have suggested a more sophisticated cocktail for sipping on a "billion dollar yacht" though.) Thank goodness that everyone associated with climate science is clean [weather.com], eh?
False positives: fraud and misconduct are threatening scient [theguardian.com]
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And (while not pointing fingers at you) the popular belief here seems to be that AGW and GMO are sound, settled science, no matter who pays for the research. I have to just say that that's not a rational or scientific way to develop one's world view.
My thoughs on GMO are that there is more than one type. GMO that simply improves yield under normal conditions, or confers disease resistance is one thing. I have no problem. But GMO that allows us to drench the stuff in pesticide is quite another.
GMO like Roundup Ready is just silly and stupid. Yes, it will kill 99 percent of the "bad" plants for a few years, but then the 1 percent of the plants that weren't killed will then be 100 percent of the plants that would compete with the roundup ready corn. I
Re:Wait- There's More! (Score:5, Interesting)
And how long before all of the weeds just think of Roundup as a nice cool sip of water? Time for the next pesticide!
We're already seeing it. Several species of weeds in the midwest (including the already nearly indestructible pigweed and lamb's quarter) have developed not only resistance to Roundup, but a taste for it as a fertilizer. Glyphosate-loving superweeds are not science fiction or theory; they are already reality.
Talk of stronger herbicides is already happening, including the resurrection of Agent Orange:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2010/07/13/the-escalating-chemical-war-on-weeds/ [counterpunch.org]
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You really ought to do better investigation of your claims.
For example this article seems to have statements that something like 90% of GMO research is paid for by NON-industry sources.
http://www.euractiv.com/science-policymaking/chief-eu-scientist-backs-damning-news-530693 [euractiv.com]
âoeWe estimate that around 90% of the literature on which the conclusions of the report are based is on non-industry funded, peer-reviewed research,â said Sofie Vanthournout, head of the Brussels office of EASAC.
In other words t
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From your very article:
In other words... 90% of the research in this study was non-industry-funded, not 90% of all research on the subject. There's a big difference between the two.
Also from the very next paragraph in your linked article:
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Neither AGW nor GMO is a science. They are terms! AGW is a phenomenon and GMO is simply an abbreviation for gene manipulated organisms.
Re:Wait- There's More! (Score:4, Interesting)
Denialism? Oh, wait, you mean skepticism! You know, that thing where you don't believe something without sufficient scientific proof being presented.
Um, no. Denialism is not skepticism. Denialism is refusal to accept something that is pretty well established. Typical examples are denial of the likely age of the earth, the Holocaust, Evolution, The President's birth certificate The effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the shape of the earth, the cause of AIDS, There is a lot of evidence to support all of these, but the denier simply will not accept the evidence.
Skepticism on the other hand, especially scientific skepticism, is questioning beliefs based upon scientific understanding. I am a general skeptic, which is to say that if good solid evidence and studies that show that the accumulation of the so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere do not have heat retention capabilities in relation to their amount. I'm ready to drop AGW quickly. I can be convinced.
I can read the literature - and have - regarding the age of the earth. I can put together information across disciplines and come up with a pretty compelling case that the world was not created in 4004 b.c.e.
I can look af fossils, and see what levels they have come from. I can and have looked up the geological reference layers, and see the results of radio dating, which correlate so well with those layers, and then relate them to the world age science. More correlation.
I can look at the concept of Cold fusion, and inasmuch as it is an outlier to what we know about physics and atom level power, I can increase the level of my skepticism. And so far, that skepticism has proven correct. Because the science really isn't there.
The Scientific Skepticism can carry over to people too. Is there a chance that a person employed by an oil company would be sure that their work would only reflect highly on that company? Would the revers be true? Would a person who was employed by a wind turbine company or solar panel producer be more likely to represent a pro AGW perspective? The answer is quite possibly yes in both cases.
Back to the denialism, Is the creationist likely to suddenly support evolution? Donald Trump and the other Birth certificate deniers ever abandon their Quixotic quest to prove the current occupant is not qualified to be president? People who deny AGW fit into the same mold.
Whereas if I am shown very good evidence against AGW - I'll drop my support for the concept. And in my skepticism, there is one small niggle. In the back of my mind, I would like for AGW to be a bad concept. It would beso much easier, and humanity would be able to just do as it wants with the fuels that produce the so called greenhouse gases. That would be pretty cool (pun sort of intended)
But having been trained in science, I have to suppress what I think would be great, and look for what actually happens.
Oh my God... (Score:5, Informative)
There were three *entire* sentences that were self-plagiarized? They shouldn't just kill the journal, but the author himself!
The horror.
But seriously, it seems to me that the librarian-blogger is full of himself, and that the publisher may be hyper-sensitive to any form of criticism (or might have people making decisions whose virtually religious views on the topic of climate change align with the librarian, and this was used as an excuse to smack down the journal). Of course that is just supposition.
This instance of self-plagiarism doesn't exactly seem like it was malicious, I imagine it was an oversight that the journal and author(s) would have no problem correcting.
Re:Oh my God... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oh my God... (Score:5, Informative)
The data is published. The reason that you didn't find what you want is that you apparently didn't bother to look.
Here's a nice data source packaged up so that you can connect to it really easily: http://datamarket.azure.com/dataset/weathertrends/worldwidehistoricalweatherdata [azure.com]
And here's all the US' weather data: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/ [noaa.gov] .
The only person hiding data from you is, apparently, you.
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But evidence that REAL scientists did not all buy into the cultish AGM doomsday thinking could not be allowed to exist.
what is AGM?
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what is AGM?
Anthropogenic Global Marming. It's the effect kids all around the world feel when they see their school marms in the grocery store or drinking in a bar and realize they're actually human with a life outside of school.
Anonymous Coward (Score:3, Insightful)
Sea level temp. hash't raised much in recent years because we haven't had an el nino year (a year in which heat from the ocean moves into the atmosphere) in recent years, yet we have managed to get year equal or even slightly surpassing the last el nino year. Arguing global warming has ended because of no el nino years is like arguing global warming has ended because winter has not been any warmer the summer 6 months ago.
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Informative)
That's because there's a LOT of fucking sea water.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence [nasa.gov]
"The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969."
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Interesting)
Good point. To drive it home the top 3 meters (~10 feet) contains as much energy as the whole atmosphere so the top 700 meters contains over 233 atmospheres worth of energy. I don't know if this is a valid calculation but 233 * 0.302 = enough energy for 70 degrees F of atmospheric temperature rise. Even if it's not valid it's obvious the oceans are absorbing a lot more energy than the atmosphere.
Re:Ocean Heat (Score:5, Informative)
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"alleged pause"? I don't think that anybody is seriously questioning that there has been a "pause" in the rising global temperature observations. In fact it looks as though that is what will even appear in the IPCC report:
"Yet the leaked report makes the extraordinary concession that over the past 15 years, recorded world temperatures have increased at only a quarter of the rate of IPCC claimed when it published its last assessment in 2007.
Back then, it said observed warming over the 15 years from 1990-2005
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The first IPCC report from 1990 predicted a temperature rise of 0.15 to 0.3C/decade. Since then we have seen a temperature rise of 0.21C per decade: http://woodfortrees.org/data/gistemp-dts/from:1990/trend [woodfortrees.org]
Seems like they're doing ok so far.
Re:Killed because of the message (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly what they told Galileo.
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...and David Irving, and Peter Duesberg, and L. Ron Hubbard... Truly they will all be proven right!
Re:Killed because of the message (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Killed because of the message (Score:5, Insightful)
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when public opinion (or popularity) in science changes, it is due to evidence
You mean like string theory?
Re:Killed because of the message (Score:4, Insightful)
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Quite. String theory is currently one of the most elegant explanations for the otherwise arbitrary constants in Quantum Mechanics, and it gets a lot of support because of it. But so far it has made very few testable predictions, and the tests that have been performed have thus far been inconclusive*. As a result the majority of physicists (the only people whose opinion on the subject really matters) tend to regard it as nothing more an interesting but unproven hypothesis. If evidence in its favor is fou
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Re:Killed because of the message (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardly. Mathematics is a construct based on pure logic, the foundations are absolutely, unquestionably true *because we say so* - any similarities to the physical world are pure coincidence, or (more likely) the result of choosing a set of axioms that aligns with our understanding of the world. Mathematics makes no attempt to describe what we would normally consider "reality", rather it is concerned with exploring the logical implications of an arbitrary set of axioms. Importantly there is no possible way to experimentally test the validity of an axiom, the very idea is preposterous - an axiom is by definition valid, only it's applicability to "real world" problems can be called in to question, and that's not a question that can be answered within the context of Mathematics.
Physics and the other hard sciences *are* concerned with describing reality, that they generally do that within the language of mathematics is a credit to the value and clarity of applied mathematics (that field based on axioms that seem to reflect. Theoretical physics ventures much further afield, and often involves even more ornate mathematics than applied physics, but it continues to be bound by an attempt to describe a reality that can only be known experimentally. Applied mathematics is deployed as a tool to ensure the theories remain consistent with experimental evidence, and to generate predictions, but the foundation is experimental data, not axioms. The language may be similar, but that implies no more relationship than there is between poetry and legal documents.
If you're going to try to conflate the two you're going to have to step back and say that both are simply branches of philosophy and leave it at that.
Re:Killed because of the message (Score:5, Interesting)
Nope. While you, clearly not understanding science, may not believe it, scientists hold it a virtue to give up positions when they are disproven. So in science, if a popular idea is conclusively disproven, it becomes quite unpopular quite quickly. And this has happened many times in the past. Look, for example, at relativity, which was an "insane" idea when first proposed, but was widely validated by independent researchers, and adopted as the concensus by the scientific community.
When a scientist tries to use their personal agenda using their reputation, what always happens is someone smarter and more right comes along, and being right his research survives peer review and is validated by other researchers, and the guy who was wrong loses. It's happened for centuries. It's not that scientists are angels - the reason the scientific method works is that it assumes that everyone has biases and their own agenda, and the entire system is structured to use people's individual agendas and biases and force them to compete, with whoever's theories are provably correct winning. It's important to understand that, unlike politics, scientific theories can be objectively proven or disproven, by having competing teams try to repeat your research, with strong incentives to prove that you're wrong because they want to beat you. So if your research is right, and nobody can disprove it, your theory wins, and you win. That's happened over and over again for centuries, and it's resulted in constant change in science, as mankind's understanding of the world advances.
Sure, there's corruption. But the scientific method is designed to provide disincentives to corruption, because collectively scientists care about, and reward, truth. For example, if you do flawed research, meaning that your results can't be independently duplicated by others, instead those others come along and disprove your research, and they're rewarded for doing so. If a journal doesn't do proper peer review, then they lose credibility and go out of business. And if an industry (e.g. cigarettes, oil) tries to pay researchers to do corrupt research, they'll find some willing to take the money, but journals have a strong incentive not to publish research that's flawed, because if they publish flawed research they'll lose credibility (which they care quite a bit about), and thus sales. And peer reviewers have a strong incentive not to let flawed research make it past them, because individually they'll lose credibility, and not get paid to do peer reviews in the future. And other scientists have strong incentives to disprove any flawed research that's published, because disproving someone else's research is very impressive. So while the corrupted research may be useful politically (e.g. cigarette companies published lots of quotes from "research" that "proves" that cigarettes didn't cause cancer, letting them sell more cigarettes and give more people cancer for a few more decades), ultimately their research was flawed, often with falsified data, and the authors and journals involved were discredited, while the accurate research survived peer review and other teams' challenges and was proved correct. So the scientific method worked despite all of the money and other incentives that were applied to try to corrupt it.
So no, the scientific method works, and has worked for centuries, and will continue to work as long as scientists are rewarded based on the scientific method.
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Worth mentioning as well - one of the faster ways a scientist can earn professional renown is to disprove a popular theory advanced by some major player. Of course they'd better be sure of their evidence and get some strong supporters on their side before addressing the larger population or they risk torpedoing their own career*, but in a field where hard evidence is the final authority even the most powerful personalities can be undermined quite effectively. Certainly far more easily than in any other fi
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"hiding" the decline.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence [nasa.gov]
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/records/ [noaa.gov]
Yet, we keep getting more low temps and even more high temps - more weather extremes - just as predicted.
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Well... I'd be cautious in using that argument regarding extremes, not because I imagine it to be untrue, but because new extremes are a statistical inevitability. Getting an unexpectedly large number of them over and over, that tells you something, but the mere presence do not.
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That's exactly what they told Galileo.
Funny how kooks always think the are Galileo, and not one of thousands of crackpots who were also laughed at. Especially when their ideas aren't brand new and revolutionary, but old and stale.
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Galileo lived in the Papal states, where the Canon law was the effective civil law and the Pope was the temporal king. Kepler lived in the Holy Roman Empire the Duchy of Wurttemberg, where Roman authority was depised. This fact has the most bearin
Re:Killed because of the message (Score:5, Informative)
...where the pope was the temporal king, and gave the equivalent of a court order during trial (ordering Galileo to make his arguments in learned Latin and not in common Italian until the court/church ruled on the case). G. did precisely the equivalent of defying many a modern judge's orders not to talk about the trial publicly while it was still going on, and not to try and inflame public sentiment while the trial was still going on. Then he insulted the judge as part of it (which would be most analogous to modern day contempt of court). The sentence Galileo got was less severe than in many modern cases. (Look at his house arrest vrs. modern open ended contempt citations).
The church was also going through the counter-reformation, which was historically an atypically bad part of church history. Galileo would have gotten away with more just 10-20 years before or (probably) 30 years later. This is why using the Galilean trial to prove anything about the relations of science and religion is roughly meaningless, it's like pointing to the story in To Kill a Mockingbird to prove Jury Trials in general are somehow a bad thing.
Kepler's own residence was certainly a factor, but this different treatment also happened because of his mother. Kepler's semi-SF writing, Somnium seu de astronomia lunari (roughly "Dream Voyage to the Moon"), is allegedly based on tales his mother told him. Kepler's mother was accused of witchcraft at one point, but Kepler was able to successfully defend her. An early move by the family was in all probability to find a political climate more congenial to protestant thinking and general freedom of belief, and when his mother was later accused of witchcraft, this probably paid off. Kepler didn't just live in the Holy Roman Empire, he sought to live in a part of it that was particularly enlightened and tolerant, and that helped immensely during a period when Europe in general, and not just the Papal states, was temporarily regressing towards the middle ages.
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Not me: I looked it up just now and Kepler actually did his work in Denmark with Tycho Brahe and in Graz, but he was the official astronomer to the Holy Roman Empire, so tomato/tomahto.
Mod above up (Score:2)
Another interesting thing is the Pope was Galileo's former classmate and they had a bit of a history of not getting on.
Nearly half the Cardinals voted for Galileo. It wasn't the Pope's call alone.
So in other words, ordinary grubby politics and not really anything to do with Science or Religion.
At the time and since there have been portions of the Catholic church very much in favour of Science.
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How about Giordano Bruno? What'd he do, give the Pope a wedgie in the locker room after basketball practice?
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Putin seems to resemble some of those earlier Popes more than anyone else at the moment.
Re:Killed because of the message (Score:4, Insightful)
there can be no dissenting opinion because the science is SETTLED!
Then it isn't real science. Theories are always up for review and revision in the face of new evidence and research.
Yes, there are some people who attempt to re-submit old, refuted work in an attempt to get it into the public record. But others have legitimate complaints in that their original research doesn't get much more that a response of, "Shut up! This has been settled."
Sadly, sometimes one does have to repeat themselves, more slowly and with simpler words to get everyone to understand them.
P.S. I think you forgot your <sarcasm> tags.
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Which particular paper of this journal are you referring to? I have my doubts that you've read any of them.
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Theories are always up for review and revision in the face of new evidence and research.
I don't know, Newton's three laws look settled. Sure there are error bars, but within the error bars, I don't see any dispute.
The problem is, like all relativist arguments, you are taking a small wedge to characterize the totality of what is going on. Sure theories are always being reviewed and revised. Sure there is always uncertainty. But the people who bring this up a pushing a line on global warming that is almost certainly wrong, and we know that very well. If you want to the science is uncertain,
Re:Killed because of the message (Score:4, Interesting)
Global Climate Change has become the consensus position of Climatologists the same way that Evolution has become the consensus position of Biologists and the same way that General Relativity has become the consensus position of Physicists.
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This first graph seems to point pretty clearly to a cause.
http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence [nasa.gov]
Let's Build An Atmospheric Model (Score:5, Informative)
Let's build a model of the Earth's atmosphere.
First let's model the Earth as a point particle with perfect blackbody characteristics. Taking into account the received radiation from the sun, that should get us a global temperature of ~6 degrees C.
But wait, we know the Earth isn't a perfect blackbody, so we'll factor in an albedo of ~ .3 and get a global temperature of -18 degrees C.
This isn't a very good model so far, is it? Well, let's model the atmosphere as a layered column of gases, then. Oh hey, funny thing. It looks like if you increase the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, it heats up, and then the atmosphere can hold more CO2, leading to arbitrarily large temperatures. That can't be right. Let's revise the model...
That brings us to the beginnings of the 20th Century in terms of atmospheric modeling. You can read more about subsequent steps in this textbook [aip.org], or perhaps this one. [harvard.edu] I can particularly recommend the former as it is brief and a good introduction to the problems associated with e.g. where in the atmosphere CO2 is concentrated, and its peculiar vibrational modes.
All of Science is to some degree wrong. Congratulations on your discovery of this fact. The question is, how wrong? And with these models we try to estimate that. We would all dearly like for there not to be such thing as the greenhouse effect right about now, believe you me. However, since it is trivial to show that an atmosphere with a greater proportion of CO2 will retain more solar radiation, and this has been known since the early 19th Century, we're not holding out much hope for that hypothesis. Wrong we may be, but that wrong we are surely not. I don't know where in your fathomless depths of ignorance and hubris you find the means to dispute apparent fact, but keep in mind that when many others' opinions differ from yours, it's unlikely to be a conspiracy.
This post brought to you by the Anthropogenic Global Warming Conspiracy. [slashdot.org] Get your membership card today!
Re:Killed because of the message (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not how science works. There are "revolutions" in science, disproving consensus, regularly. Because in science, popularity isn't relevant, being provably right is what matters. And, if anything, the incentives are strongly towards disproving what everyone believes, because they guy that pulls that off just proved that he's smarter and more right than everyone else, which gets him published, winning awards, etc. Scientists all need to do original research, since they don't publish the other kind, and disproving what everyone believes is HIGHLY original, while agreeing with what everyone believes is true is only marginally valuable, but isn't going to make anyone famous or rich. So you get some really weird theories (relativity, for example, etc.) that overturn the consensus because they're provably right, and amazingly enough, it's a virtue in a scientist that they change their mind when confronted with evidence that disproves their previous beliefs, and a career-ending failure to not to so. So all of the incentives are to disprove consensus, and then when that's successful for other scientists to take up the newly proven position.
Add to that the oil companies paying researchers tons of money to write anything that "disproves" global warming, and the complete lack of peer-reviewed research that disproves global warming probably means that there's not enough support for that position to stand up to any peer review at all.
Heck a publisher TRIED to run a journal dedicated to anti-global-warning research. The fact that they could only find an oil industry hack, and a bunch of "scientists" who used it as an opportunity to hire their buddies, and writers who tried to pass off old work as "original research" doesn't speak well to to the credibility of the people or the research supporting the anti-global-warming position.
Re:Killed because of the message (Score:5, Insightful)
And, if anything, the incentives are strongly towards disproving what everyone believes, because they guy that pulls that off just proved that he's smarter and more right than everyone else, which gets him published, winning awards, etc.
I agree - an here's a contemporary example that I think everybody already knows about: the conflict between General Relativity (GR) and Quantum Mechanics (QM) - those two theories being fundamentally incompatible. For a long time, now, those in favour of QM have tried in every way to disprove GR, even to the extent that you can find numerous articles along the lines of "this is another symptom of GR being wrong". Now, personally, I favour GR as being the more fundamentally sound theory, but I have to admit that the "QM side" is scientifically sound in their attacks. In my view this conflict is a good illustration of how real science works, and it is also a very prominent example of how even the most popular, scientific theories are not safe from good, honest criticism. It also demonstrates why climate deniers, creationists and the like are not taken serious: the just don't have what it takes, scientifically. They can make noise and bluster, and that can fool the popular view for a while, but they don't have any true evidence.
Re:Killed because of the message (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently, the journal publishes more than just climate articles [pattern-recogn-phys.net].
I was going to point out that I didn't think much of your conclusion that a geophysicist working for a school that specializes in teaching how to drill for oil should necessarily be viewed as acting in strictly political interests. I also thought that you were being disingenuous in not pointing out that there are two geophysicists, the other from Stockholm, who are co-editors.
That was until I realized that I recognized the name of the editor you don't mention: Nils-Axel Morner [wikipedia.org]. Apparently, among his other talents, he douses water [randi.org]. Instead, I'm going to pull an "ad hominem" out of my hat and suggest that we should be skeptical of a journal edited in part by a water-douser.
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Apparently, among his other talents, he douses water [randi.org]. Instead, I'm going to pull an "ad hominem" out of my hat and suggest that we should be skeptical of a journal edited in part by a water-douser.
I didn't mention that - true enough. There are so many red flags on this stuff that it becomes difficult to defend it with a straight face.
If the deniers are going to make any real headway, they are going to have to stop relying on oil company employees and people who might otherwise end up on reality shows right after people who make duck calls or people who cut down trees in swamps. Or have a stock answer of "Ancient Aliens".
As someone who might be sort of in the middle, I would love for the AGW ide
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. . .really, really skeptical about people whose science can be bought
My general position is so close to that which you've expressed in this posting that it sounds like words I may have said. This last bit, though, deserves a slightly cautionary warning. As my username makes clear, I'm not a scientist, but an engineer. For more than a decade, I worked as a consulting engineer preparing traffic, parking and other transportation studies, generally for private enterprise. Over the last 2 1/2 years, I've worked in the public sector designing highway safety improvements, as we
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If they are obviously jumping well outside of their field into something where they only have a layman's perspective, and they try to use their reputation to push it through, then I'd say most definitely.
It's comparable to asking a cardiologist to design a helicopter. It doesn't m
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If they are obviously jumping well outside of their field. . .
Are they? [wikipedia.org] I'm not qualified to say that both of the editors are engaged outside their field. It certainly looks to me, though, like geophysics is closely related to studies of climate change. (The geophysical institute at the university I finished with some years ago has produced a number of researchers on both sides of this particular debate.)
. . .silly vanity press rag.
I don't think that you've looked or studied far enough to reach this conclusion: This paper [pattern-recogn-phys.net], and lots more [pattern-recogn-phys.net] like it seem relevant to geophysics. I read the abstr
Epic fail due to being well outside your field (Score:3)
Sorry, but no. One guess as who I work with these days now that I've moved out of engineering in power generation and into computer wrangling of clusters. The resource exploration industry uses a lot of computer power so there will be a few readers like me that work surrounded by geophysicists. Climate is on a bit of a different time scale to what they deal with - as should be obvious.
So sorry, your silly bluff has failed. Why did you even t
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Just like if someone published to continue their career because they just had a kid. They need to publish something and results that go against the status quo or are "negative results" are not "interesting" so they look at stuff enough ways to find something to publish even if they don't believe it. Everyone is biased and has external agendas.
But that doesn't address the other issues. Your world would have the child as part of the peer review group for their parent's papers.
Re:Killed because of the message (Score:4, Insightful)
What an odd claim. In the real world, disproving a widely believed theory is a huge success that will make the scientist famous, sell lots of copies of magazines, etc., while doing research that supports what everyone knows doesn't get you much at all. In science, the incentive is _always_ to challenge the status quo. Add in that the oil companies are paying scientists extremely well if they can produce research to disprove global warming, and you'd think that if there was anything to the anti-global-warming theories there would be plenty of proof getting published because people like getting famous and paid well. If, despite all the incentives, there's no credible anti-global-warming research getting published in any scientific journals, that probably means that there's no credible way to support their arguments.
Yes, everyone has biases. That's why the scientific method is designed assuming that everyone has biases, so the truth must be based on facts and on multiple, independent scientists ability to reproduce experiments to validate them. The science doesn't care what your motivations or biases are. And no matter what your biases are, other teams' motivation and bias is to prove that you are wrong. And peer review panels' motivation is to not let any flawed research get published. So everyone's competing agendas end up countering each other, and the truth emerges from that competition, validated as the truth not due to popularity, but due to being able to withstand scrutiny and be validated. In science, popularity doesn't matter, being right matters, and right can be objectively measured.
Pretty much the opposite of politics. Which is probably why politicians can behave in ways that seem so absurd to a scientist, such as by promoting as "truth" something that's clearly not true, but which furthers a personal agenda. Which is effective for politicians, because the truth can't be objectively determined most of the time. But if scientists promote as "truth" something that's clearly not true, but which furthers a personal agenda, someone else comes along, proves that they're right and the first guy is wrong, and the first guy loses and the truth wins. And while individuals are imperfect, the system as a whole works remarkably well, getting us advancing at a remarkable rate scientifically for hundreds of years.
If only someone could work out a system for politics that worked as well...
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I'm sure there's plenty of climatology research to do without considering greenhouse gases at all.
And funding for that research would probably be one to two orders of magnitude smaller than it currently is.
It's as if you're claiming that astronomy would fall apart if we developed an asteroid shield, or that geology would fall apart if we could stop earthquakes, or that meteorology would fall apart if we could prevent hurricanes.
Or that these fields would receive far less funding if the compelling interests such as asteroid strikes or space development, large earthquakes, or cyclones didn't exist. Many fields are driven by perceived threat or benefit and if that goes away, then so does most of the impetus for doing the research.
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A lot of programming places a much lower priority on memory usage efficiency than it used to. Memory for most applications is
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Many fields of research are researched because they are worth researching ...
In most countries research funding does not work as weird as it seems to be in the USA.
How much can climate research cost anyway? Except for a few satellites that got launched in the last 20 years there is not much that comes to mind that costs 'real money'. A supercomputer perhaps, and thats it.
Perhaps someone finds a nice statistic, but I would bet that every mojour company that does research (like a pharma company) spends more
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How much can climate research cost anyway? Except for a few satellites that got launched in the last 20 years there is not much that comes to mind that costs 'real money'. A supercomputer perhaps, and thats it.
Yes, because you're a super-genius who knows everything about every branch of science as whatever you immediately assume must be 100% accurate and true.
In most countries research funding does not work as weird as it seems to be in the USA.
Wow, you've even got an extensive knowledge of "research funding" practices across the world. Surely, your time is wasted doing low-level IT work and practicing at your dojo.
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Around 1900 the CO2 concentration was 0,028% ...
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Lets try flipping that and see how it works.
Remember, many scientists get their funding from politicians. They'd never stretch the truth, nor pervert science according to ideology. Nor would they pursue research out of a monetary interest or exaggerate its importance to keep the money flowing. And if disproving the claim that resulted in receiving most of their funding meant that the funding would then be lost, well then ....
Yes. And as humans, scientists are subject to the same shortfalls as the rest of us. It is not common for a scientist to be caught fudging the data, or sometimes total fabrication. Yes, it happens.
But part of the scientific system is to root out any fraud that exists. Professional Librarians take their jobs seriously - it was a librarian who noted the discrepancies involved in this Journal. And self plagiarism and narrow selection of reviewers, as well as heavily vested interests are big red flags.
So t
Re:"Self-Plagarism"? Care to define that? (Score:4, Insightful)
Curious minds want to know what sort of "self-plagarism" in a journal's content rates shutting the journal down.
Apparently not curious enough to read the fine article.
The editors of the journal copy-pasted from an earlier work without crediting their earlier coworkers. So "Ouadfeul, Aliouane, Hamoudi, Boudella, and Eladj" became just "Ouadfeul and Aliouane".
Re:"Self-Plagarism"? Care to define that? (Score:5, Informative)
Even if it was a single author, just copying from an earlier work is enough to be considered self-plagiarism. You must publish original research.
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Btw, Stanford has a MOOC titled "Writing in the Sciences", that covers plagiarism and other stuff you should avoid. I highly recommend that course.
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Even if it was a single author, just copying from an earlier work is enough to be considered self-plagiarism. You must publish original research.
Not at all. There's a fair amount of boilerplate that goes into a paper. If it hasn't changed since the last research paper by the authors, then it doesn't require a rewrite. It's not original research.
I'm pretty sure I could come up with high profile examples from mathematical physics, for example where an author copy/pasted from one of their previous papers, summaries of other peoples' research.
As was noted elsewhere [slashdot.org] by artor3, the real problem was not crediting additional authors of the previous wo
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The only reason to have large amounts of summaries of other people's research beyond a couple intro paragraphs is to either respond to someone else's specific work (and you're doing it wrong if the summaries/repeat descriptions of their work take up any where near the majority of your paper), or a review paper which is explicitly labeled as such usually.
The copy/paste was supposedly a few sentences which would easily fit into any of the more or less legit situations you mention. At a brief glance, the copied section didn't appear to me to be discussing original research, but I didn't look at it in context.
But in addition to not attributing the additional authors of the previous paper, they apparently didn't cite the paper either.
The article also cites the biggest problem of all which can be inferred from the odd name of the journal. Apparently, the s
Re:"Self-Plagarism"? Care to define that? (Score:4, Funny)
what has been original in the last 10 yrs?
Round corners on handheld devices, according to Apple.
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If it's not original, it's not research. It might be nice writing, but if you're not moving the state of the art forward, you might as well be in Marketing. :-)
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But you aren't presenting that reused code as new research advancing the state of the art of the field, right?
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Wow! That means as a software developer, I must self-plagiarize all the time!
And if you reuse code you wrote as a contractor, you may actually be in trouble.
Re:"Self-Plagarism"? Care to define that? (Score:4, Informative)
Where it gets interesting is that large chunks of papers are literally re-telling the same stuff over and over again. ... Obviously trying to re-write this over and over is a completely pointless waste of time, so many academics just copy/paste the same old crap and then get on with the rest of the paper. Is that sort of self-plagiarism bad, and if so why?
In the "keystone" course I took, (i.e. basic library use and academic writing) which included avoiding both self- and ordinary plagiarism, the main issue was clearly distinguishing among your new work, your new interpretation of others work, and the previous work of others and/or yourself.
The college uses an automated plagiarism-detection-and-measurement service, which compares newly submitted work against a database of previously submitted work, published work, and crawls of the web. We were warned, not just against using copy-and-paste boilerplate in multiple papers (or papers for multiple classes) but that the tool also tended to false-positive for self-plagiarism due to a person's writing style and word choices resulting in a tendency to put identical multi-word strings of significant length in more than one paper.
(I made a point of having a discussion with each prof, giving a heads up that I make extensive web posts under handles, consider it fair to use the same research and phrasing both in a discussion here and in a paper, and would be more than a little annoyed if the tool claimed I'd lifted a paper from my own contribution to a forum thread on some hot topic. So far I've had no problems.)
Re:Trying to censor decenting opinions is bad scie (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue isn't dissent. The issue is malpractice. The authors rehashed their old papers without crediting the old papers' co-authors, and the peer reviewers tampered with the review process to favor their own or colleagues' papers.
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When you google "peer review problems" the first hits are:
http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/10/04/open-access-is-not-the-problem/ [berkeley.edu]
and this
http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/oct/04/science-hoax-peer-review-open-access [theguardian.com]
and this
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong [economist.com]
and
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/ [nih.gov]
So, should all the journals discussed there be closed down? Peer reviewing e
Re:Trying to censor decenting opinions is bad scie (Score:4, Insightful)
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Apparently you are no scientist or you would know that the point of peer-reviewed journals (not sure what previewed papers are) is to
Re:Trying to censor decenting opinions is bad scie (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue here is that the ideas have been picked apart long ago by the scientific community. But these journals are not meant to address the scientific community. They exist to provide industrial boilerplate as quote fodder for politicians and pundits. The real target is people who don't know any better. Even when the journal has been discredited, they will still quote it, because few people will know that it has been discredited.
A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has its boots on. That is the whole point of efforts like these.
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It's pushback. After a few decades of trying to let the lies slide off it became time to point out the liars.
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The bad articles don't lead to self embarrassment by the authors ... takes much to much effort to debunk every of such articles. It is the job of the editorial office to prevent obvious faulty articles to be published. ;)
So that 'skeptics' like you can not quote them wrongly
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One can easily say the same thing about liberals an GMO's.
Yep, that's true. But allowing global warming to continue unchecked is far, FAR more harmful than forcing companies to label their GMO products. The two types of anti-science behavior are alike in kind, but not in scale. Only one is threatening human civilization.
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There's no science to support the idea that GMO foods need special warning labels. All the hippy nonsense about "toxins" is born of ignorance.
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Yeah, probably. Like those damn hippies of a century ago who brought pasteurization to "kill the toxins". Bullshit, all of it, no doubt.
Or that damn hippy Semmelweis who started that ridiculous hand-washing nonsense.
Let's look at your words again:
Do you wash your hands before you eat? Do you wash vegetables after you get them home from the store? Do you eat food after you've dropped it on the floor? Do you leave raw poultry out in a warm kitche
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You forget in most countries GMO food is illegal or needs to be labeled. So the amount of people who might have ate GMO food the last 30 years is not as huge as you might believe. Looking at the general health of american people e.g. I have the impression the whole food issue is handled pretty badly, regardless of GMOs.
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It is pretty ignorant to claim there is no science that supports the idea that GMO foods might be dangerous ... ;)
Seems you somehow got your sentence turned around
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I'm pretty liberal, but I have no problem with GMO per se -- at least as far whether they're safe to eat. I think there were some concerns raised twenty years ago that were worth looking into.
I *do* have a problem with enforcement of IP against farmers whose crops were contaminated by GMO cross-pollination, and forbidding poor farmers from saving seed.
I also have concerns about plants bred to produce insecticidal molecules, not because things like BTI are toxic (they aren't to humans), but because the wide
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Re:Again, hard to take conservatives seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, Global warming has had significant scrutiny, and it still stands with around 100% support with the experts in that field, the climatologists.
After all, if you are asking questions about rocks you consult a geologist, not a dentist. So why are so many people listening to the dentist that disagrees with the worlds climatologists.
I've heard some people say there's a conspiracy. Maybe, but it's not among the scientists. Don't forget that the scientists get nothing from it whether it exists or not, they are dedicated to the scientific principle where the theories must be supported by the evidence, and they often quibble about details and would dearly love to find something to prove everyone else wrong and themselves the founder of a new discovery.
Don't forget that Scientific Journals have to meet certain criteria to be accepted. That criteria is not based on whether or not it makes other scientists happy or sad, but rather that it is properly attributed and backed by evidence. In this case, it also looks like one of the reasons that one got canned was because it was consistently off topic, and with troll articles not backed by evidence. Then there's that whole self-plagiarizing thing. I'm not sure to consider that repeating the same dross while trying to flog it off as new, or doing a bit of circular logic by using yourself as reference for your self is the worst part of this mess, but no matter how you look at it, both are bad and definitely violations of Scientific Journals.
So hey, if you can't follow the rules and meet the requirements, you're going to get bounced. Don't like it? Well maybe you shouldn't have tried to scam the system.
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It's worse than that - it's PR and marketing!
The "Heartland Institute" and similar are a blight on the landscape.
Re:Again, hard to take conservatives seriously (Score:4, Informative)
There is no evidence the solar system is warming. There is plenty of evidence the Earth is warming. There is no evidence that GMO foods *in general* are deleterious to human health, although there may well be specific exceptions. It seems reasonable to assume that the safety of any particular GMO depends on the organism itself and the nature of the modifications made.
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Something other than an expert on climate, just like nearly everyone reading this article.
The problem only arises when people put themselves up as knowing more than experts in a field when they know nothing about it or next to nothing. Don't worry, it's been pushed so hard and spreading so much that some economist or marketer is going to say they know more about your field than you do at some point. You'll see how stupid this luddite bullshit is first hand someday.
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Just keep in mind the typical liberal MO...
The use of the phrase "the typical liberal" makes me thing you are a "typical right wing not job", the sort of gun toting, gas guzzler driving red-stater who would declare such things as "I don't believe no man came from no monkey".
Of course drawing such broad generalizations would be indicitave of a very weak mind, but you make that a dangerously tempting hole to fall into.