"A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk."
And probably much of what is written by computer scientists in Yahoo Answers is bunk, too.
Scientists need to be vigilant and honest, that has always been the case and it always will be, and they need to check up on each other's work. For example, there was a well-known case of a couple of climate scientists, let's call them "Roy Spencer and John Christy", who were found to have made incorrect assumptions in their calculations calculations of satellite-derived temperature. After they were shown their mistakes (more than once) they changed the way the temperatures were calculated, and it fell more in line with ground-based thermometers, although there may still be more errors lurking that have not yet been discovered.
With climate models, errors are usually painfully obvious. There may be two ITCZs when there should only be one, there may be too much or too little rainfall in an area, etc. People work to improve the models by making modifications, or make their own models. The code is available for other people to check, and modify, and the models can be run by other groups.
If you're talking about something like the infrared spectrum of carbon dioxide, that's been measured and calculated thousands of times over man than a hundred years--don't expect that to change radically.
I actually believe the article was more about the life sciences and medicine than about the physical sciences. But that doesn't mean that the physical sciences are exempt from wrong results. In physics we would refer to experiment bias producing a desired result as a "Want 'em effect".
Several of the other answers are amusing and naive. Fred's comments sound like they come from someone that has never been closely involved in science, but admires it from afar. He classifies mathematics as a hard science, when it is not science at all, and just what would he consider a climate model to be, when it consists completely of mathematics, physics, and chemistry? Zippi62 is toeing the throw your hands up in the air, climate is too complicated to be understood line. Yes, it definitely is to those that don't try to understand it.
"Much research cannot be replicated"
Then whatever it is... it isn't science. Without reproducability... you're just hangin your privates out in the breeze. And as far as "hard sciences" go... it's not even close. Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry... those are the hard sciences.
LOL! Dude.. you just made a fool of yourself in front of the entire world. "Reproducibility" is an integral part of the scientific method. So for all your bellyaching you just told everyone you have no clue what the scientific method actually is. What was that you were saying again about a 7th grade understanding? I'm so pleased you have something to aspire too. LOL!
It's not even a science, bunch of witches examining chicken entrails could do better at forecasting both weather and future climate. Not one prediction has come right yet, boy they must think we are stupid to be swallowing this garbage still.
Science is supposed to be about seeking the truth of how things work in nature. That doesn't seem to be what most 'climate scientists' are trying to do. When a given field is more concerned with politics than the actual facts, then it's political and not science.
That is not to say there are no real scientists in climatology. But climatology isn't hard science because it just doesn't have a track record.
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- "Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying"
It reminds me of Reagan's quote, trust but verify.
I think Paul may have a point, that some things don't get published unless they tow the line, (paraphrasing his point of course).
In reading about McIntyre's review of Mann in The Hockey Stick Illusion by Montford, I was struck by how often Mann failed to perform good science.
Climate science has so many variables that interact with each other. It's like discovering the 'biggest secret in the universe'. Scientists have to rely on each other and work in concert to only understand the basic mechanisms. Anything beyond that is arrogance and we have seen that demonstrated here almost every day with the alarmism.
I was thinking highly of the article until it said that the most striking things have the best chance of getting published. Pretty much nothing (literally) could be so wrong. Anything that conflicts with conformity gets rejected. The situation is so perverted that journals actually say that overtly, not even aware how perverted they have become. As such, physics journals are a vast wasteland of people repeating other people's claim--often absurd claims like String Theory--with minor modifications. Journals no longer function to advance important new scientific ideas. They are merely homework assignments required for career building.
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Of course you did, because Deniers are so blinded by their political bias that they cannot see reality.
[Disclaimer: I doubt that you intended this as a compliment to climate science – although by using “has none” in the statement above, you are saying that climate science has none of the problems you cite from the article. If I am wrong then I apologize.]
The article was almost entirely about biomedical and related research – which is like picking the low-hanging fruit. Corruption in the pharmaceutical industry is endemic.
“Institutional Corruption and Pharmaceutical Policy”
http://www.ethics.harvard.edu/lab/featur...
The greatest problems arise when powerful corporations hire scientific whores and assassins to support marketing their products (for example, tobacco and the energy industries).
The comment most applicable to the AGW debate was the problem of “overfitting.” If there is one thing in the world that Deniers have demonstrated their ignorance in it is statistics. Deniers talk about statistical significance as if they knew what it meant – and they are guilty of implicit “overfitting” (even though they do not know what that is, either) every time they claim that methane or water vapor is more important than CO2.
In reality, the single greatest problem in science in the post-WW II era has been confusion by the public, government, and even scientists and engineers over what scientific research is – and in confounding the concept of scientific research with that of engineering problem solving- brought on by increasing systemic societal and public scientific illiteracy.
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Fred –
In a broad sense, mathematics can be called a science, although Galileo said, “Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe.” On the other hand, Deniers love to invoke Karl Popper’s concept of falsification (not having ever read a word of Popper or having a clue what he meant). By that measure, mathematics is not a science.
In any case, your statement, >>"Much research cannot be replicated" …Then whatever it is... it isn't science.<< suggests that your understanding of scientific experimentation stopped at about the 7th grade (which is about average for AGW Deniers).
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jim z --
>>In reading about McIntyre's review of Mann in The Hockey Stick Illusion by Montford, I was struck by how often Mann failed to perform good science. <<
Why weren't you struck by how many times MciIntyre lied?
You see everything scientific as a socialist conspiracy and every lie against science as proof of the divine goodness of radical political ideology.
By the way - they are not even clever lies. You should be embarrassed for being fooled so easily.
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Fred ---
Provide an example of research in climate sceince that cannot be replicated.
I think it's up there with Astrology and Fortune Telling.
it's more a science than political science. a lot of replication is not experimental- witness astronomy.
climate requires the fundamentals of physics, I would not expect the economist to understand how modern science works.
I just read a fairly depressing article in The Economist about the fall of science. As I read it, of course I was applying it to climate science. And from what I read around here and elsewhere, climate science has none of the following issues that most other science disciplines have:
- "Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying"
- "Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis"
- Much research cannot be replicated
- "The opportunity costs of stymied progress are hard to quantify, but they are likely to be vast. And they could be rising."
- "scientists have lost their taste for self-policing and quality control."
- "Careerism also encourages exaggeration and the cherry-picking of results."
- "one in three researchers knows of a colleague who has pepped up a paper by, say, excluding inconvenient data from results “based on a gut feeling”."
- "And as more research teams around the world work on a problem, the odds shorten that at least one will fall prey to an honest confusion between the sweet signal of a genuine discovery and a freak of the statistical noise."
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As I mentioned, if you ask an AGW proponent (who usually relys heavily on the "authority" of climate scientists) he/she would say that climate science is not affected by any of the above. They claim there are no examples of it; there are only the deniers who make stuff up liking taking Climategate emails out of context.
Does that make climate science the pinnacle of human scientific achievement?
(Source: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong )
