Peer Review has been a sixty year experiment with no control group
It’s touted as the “gold standard” of science, yet the evidence shows Peer Review is an abject failure.
There are 30,000 scientific journals that publish nearly 5 million articles a year, and the only thing we know for sure is that two-thirds of papers with major flaws will still get published, fraud is almost never discovered, and peer review has effectively crushed groundbreaking new discoveries.
By Adam Mastroianni, Experimental History
The rise and fall of Peer Review
Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing
For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, instead it was just rubber stamp to keep the bureaucrats safe. As government funded research took over the world of science after World War II, clueless public servants wanted expert reviewers to make sure they weren’t wasting money on something embarrassingly stupid, or fraudulent. They weren’t search for the truth, just protecting their own necks.
Scientifically, there’s no evidence supporting peer review:
Here’s a simple question: does peer review actually do the thing it’s supposed to do? Does it catch bad research and prevent it from being published?
It doesn’t. Scientists have run studies where they deliberately add errors to papers, send them out to reviewers, and simply count how many errors the reviewers catch. Reviewers are pretty awful at this. In this study reviewers caught 30% of the major flaws, in this study they caught 25%, and in this study they caught 29%. These were critical issues, like “the paper claims to be a randomized controlled trial but it isn’t” and “when you look at the graphs, it’s pretty clear there’s no effect” and “the authors draw conclusions that are totally unsupported by the data.” Reviewers mostly didn’t notice.
In fact, we’ve got knock-down, real-world data that peer review doesn’t work: fraudulent papers get published all the time. If reviewers were doing their job, we’d hear lots of stories like “Professor Cornelius von Fraud was fired today after trying to submit a fake paper to a scientific journal.” But we never hear stories like that. Instead, pretty much every story about fraud begins with the paper passing review and being published. Only later does some good Samaritan—often someone in the author’s own lab!—notice something weird and decide to investigate. That’s what happened with this this paper about dishonesty that clearly has fake data (ironic), these guys who have published dozens or even hundreds of fraudulent papers, and this debacle:
Gotta love this graph!
Wait a second, these are not real error bars … the author literally just put the letter “T” above the bar graphs 😭 pic.twitter.com/KKtTGRHFaw
— Josemari Feliciano (@SeriFeliciano) November 28, 2022
That graph was published, in Advances in Materials Science and Engineering. After peer review failed, but “Twitter Review” succeeded in discovering the error bars were deliberate typos, so-to-speak, it has been retracted. But how much other junk got set in print in 4.7 million articles a year?
Why don’t reviewers catch basic errors and blatant fraud? One reason is that they almost never look at the data behind the papers they review, which is exactly where the errors and fraud are most likely to be. In fact, most journals don’t require you to make your data public at all. You’re supposed to provide them “on request,” but most people don’t. That’s how we’ve ended up in sitcom-esque situations like ~20% of genetics papers having totally useless data because Excel autocorrected the names of genes into months and years.
Mastroianni makes the case that the whole point of peer-review was to deal with the explosion of new government funded papers. Once the bureaucrats took command of science the main aim was not “brilliant discoveries” but just not to fail embarrassingly. Thus peer review was merely a bureaucratic safety value that cost no dollars but gave a rubber stamp to “government science”. It became the committee cover that “protected” jobs — but in a sense all of science became a bureaucratic protectorate:
Why did peer review seem so reasonable in the first place?
I think we had the wrong model of how science works. We treated science like it’s a weak-link problem where progress depends on the quality of our worst work. If you believe in weak-link science, you think it’s very important to stamp out untrue ideas—ideally, prevent them from being published in the first place. You don’t mind if you whack a few good ideas in the process, because it’s so important to bury the bad stuff.
But science is a strong-link problem: progress depends on the quality of our best work. Better ideas don’t always triumph immediately, but they do triumph eventually, because they’re more useful. You can’t land on the moon using Aristotle’s physics, you can’t turn mud into frogs using spontaneous generation, and you can’t build bombs out of phlogiston. Newton’s laws of physics stuck around; his recipe for the Philosopher’s Stone didn’t. We didn’t need a scientific establishment to smother the wrong ideas. We needed it to let new ideas challenge old ones, and time did the rest.
Weak-link thinking makes scientific censorship seem reasonable, but all censorship does is make old ideas harder to defeat.
Mastroianni argues that having a meaningless rubber stamp is worse than no rubber stamp at all — as if the FDA inspected meat just with a sniff, and then put on sticker saying “Inspected by the FDA”. It’s dangerous…
If you want to sell a bottle of vitamin C pills in America, you have to include a disclaimer that says none of the claims on the bottle have been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Maybe journals should stamp a similar statement on every paper: “NOBODY HAS REALLY CHECKED WHETHER THIS PAPER IS TRUE OR NOT. IT MIGHT BE MADE UP, FOR ALL WE KNOW.” That would at least give people the appropriate level of confidence.
“Hooray We Failed” he says. No one was in charge of this experiment, so no has the job of saying it’s over. Mastroinni appoints himself, and declares it “done”.
What should we do now? Well, last month I published a paper, by which I mean I uploaded a PDF to the internet. I wrote it in normal language so anyone could understand it.
Then thousands of people read it, retweeted it and he got more reviews and feedback than he’s ever had. NPR asked him for an interview, and professors offered him ideas. The free market in ideas will always beat the bureaucratic committees. Blog science, substack articles and tweets may yet rescue science from the government funded strangehold. The only formula for finding the truth is free speech.
In his followup article he talks about the response to his article: the fears and the inevitable rage and yelling from the people who’ve worked so hard at climbing the ladder of citations.
Richard Smith, the former editor of the British Medical Journal, commented:
It’s fascinating to me that a process at the heart of science is faith not evidence based. Indeed, believing in peer review is less scientific than believing in God because we have lots of evidence that peer review doesn’t work, whereas we lack evidence that God doesn’t exist.
It’s a long feature article and well worth reading. Though it’s no accident, of course, that archaic bad systems of publication still control science 30 years after the spread of the internet — the gatekeepers of science and government don’t want to lose control of the monoculture they created.
See also — Everywhere in science there’s a mysterious lack of ground-breaking papers
h/t Bill in AZ, via Vox Populi
Bravo Jo. For this climate change sceptic for some thirty years it is a great pleasure to read the above. Those charlatans who based policies on peer reviewed science will be squirming and not before time.
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Peer review was started by publishers who didn’t have the in-depth knowledge to understand whether the papers submitted to them were nonsense or correct. They sought the advice from experts in whatever field the paper addressed.
It didn’t take reviewers long to realise they could bluff the publisher. They could praise papers that supported their own work and denigrate papers that didn’t, and the publishers would never know.
Added to that, many journals didn’t have a pool of reviewers to call upon in all subjects so they asked the authors of papers to suggest possible reviewers. In a perfect world with integrity this might work, but not in the real world. Authors suggested people who they thought would rubber-stamp their papers. It was often a case of “you positively review mine and I’ll positively review yours”.
And the other big problem these days is the amount of work for reviewers. It used to be seen as a professional obligation that might happen every few months. The sheer number of papers now means a massive workload for reviewers and as a result the reviews are often very cursory.
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Retraction Watch is a website that exposes academic misconduct and many retracted papers.
LINK
Worth visiting.
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“Peer review”
“Consensus science”
“Trust the science”
“A majority of climate scientists agree”
All are just euphemisms for an argument from authority – the most unscientific method.
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Peer review is presumed to be confirmation by scientists of the truth of what is being said. Not at all. Generally it’s checking for obvious errors and reasonable conclusions based on summaries of data which is not supplied or verified. And the checking for obvious errors is obviously failing.
Plus you only send to people you think will agree with the conclusions because you know their point of view anyway. This is particularly true in the new sciences which run on consensus, like ecology or Climate Change. They are all in the same game.
Climate Change/Global Warming is a particular offender as everyone just agrees that CO2 is man made. It isn’t. And there has never been any proof. Quite the contrary, there is plenty of proof that it is not true. Or that CO2 is of any significance. However endless articles state these consensus facts as a presumption, matters of agreed fact not proven fact. But that’s fine in new science, not Rational science.
And with the takeover of so many journals and societies by climate extremists, your chance of being published is zero if you disagree. For example, recently in Australia the group representing 35,000 sciences in many fields has come out in favor of ‘The Voice’. The head of the group is an ex The Age newspaper journalist, not a scientist at all. And the head of the WHO is now not a medical doctor for the first time in history and that resulted in millions of unnecessary deaths.
Rational science is under real threat as fake science has become a self sustaining industry.
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Like “The Union of Concerned Scientists” where Anthony Watts worked out that the first credential for membership was a valid credit card and enrolled his dog.
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I put myself on the mailing list of the Union of Concerned Scientists just to see what they are up to. They send out a constant stream of ridiculous ideas and campaigns which have no credibility except in their own minds and they constantly ask for money.
Some people must donate because they are still here, years later.
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Union of Concerned Scientists… are NOT concerned about actual science…
… except to use propaganda and misinformation pervert it. !
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Perverting science appears to be a penchant of government.
There has been criticism of the Biden administration in the US, for instance, urging the NSF to fund research aimed at:
imbedding racist ideology into AI to increase sensitivity to bias against disadvantaged groups;
prioritising diversity, equity and inclusion into engineering studies; and
mandating equitable mathematic instruction.
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A good case in question is the ‘Bureau’ lack of responses to years of hard work by Jennifer Marohasy on the so called homogenised temperature data. What is the ‘Bureau’ protecting? Not only a self sustaining industry but what has become a widely adopted religion today.
When Julia Gillard was PM she famously referred to ‘carbon dioxide pollution and acification’ Gillard was totally naive about pollution and very few Aussies called her on it.
Ocean acidification fears were overhyped and Carbon Dioxide is THE gas of life. A generation of equally naive Aussie women breathed in the mantra back then and held their breath! Thank you Jo for encouraging exhalation.
My view is that Aussies enjoy the cleanest air in the world and only after travelling to to the US and China can we hope to fully comprehend pollution. I visited LA in 1961 after having spent 7 years in PNG. The eyes stung, so bad was the pollution back then. Fifty years later in Shanghai the eyes were not so bad but other aspects were so much worse than LA.
Deprograming is required now!
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Here is a generator of nonsense fake papers in computer science which have produced papers that have passed peer review.
https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
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Get that world infamous professor of majick tricks, M.E. Mann, onto it: he’ll straighten things out and bend them into shape, existentially speaking, for a fee.
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He never did provide his data, even after making that explicit promise to the Canadian County Court in his libel case against Dr. Timothy Ball. Which Mann consequently lost, thereby at least in Canada proving Dr. Ball correct. His discredited hockey stick graph is still being used as if it is real. And on a par with the CO2 graph which purports to show CO2 levels are unprecedented by bolting modern CO2 data onto ancient ice core data. And of course adjusting the data so they join perfectly.
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Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph is 100% fake but for probably 98% of regular people, as well as 100% of the Left, that’s the ONLY thing they “know” about supposed anthropogenic global warming and they believe it to be true.
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The nonsense phrase, “in a warming world”, precedes all sorts of nonsense ‘solutions’ for non-existent problems, as if it’s holy writ – which I guess it is for faithfool believers and climatebaggers (apologies to the wordsmith who coined that wonderful term on this site recently).
These shaky little islands are awash with gobbledygook UN-speak: one particular dribbler is Bronwyn Hayward, a professor of political science (!) who is a co-author of numerous IPCC reports. She regurgitates slogans & phrases, eg. BBB, 1.5 degrees, managed retreat, before it’s too late, all preceded by “in a warming world”.
Show me the warming! FAIL ✖️
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Sounds like just about any paper in climate “science”.
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Why would anybody imagine that “Peer Review” could survive the incredible societal changes that have impacted our world over the last six decades.
The original concept was a logical, sensible framework to guide and check research and ensure that the end product was of benefit to the world.
The original environment in which Peer Review flourished is long gone.
Modern pier review is now simply a rubber stamp that endorses research for the sole purpose of enabling the continuation of high level university employment; any benefit to the public is purely coincidental.
We no longer live on solid ground; the swamp is all around us.
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Fake “consensus” comes from junk science in junk papers. Of course, consensus is not part of the scientific method anyway, despite what the Left constantly claim.
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There are some out there that have been recording the retraction of papers. There is even a close to home (University of South Australia) example reported just this week on Monday.
I recall a (Canadian I think) journalist/author wrote a book a few years back detailing how she found that in many cases the “peers” doing the reviews were just university students who hadn’t graduated in their field yet. Had a quick look but couldn’t find a link sorry.
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Earl:
Possibly Donna La Framboise.
She did comment on the reviewers in the IPCC.
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Peer review answers the questions…
“Do we want to publish this in our journal ?”
and more importantly…
“Do we want to allow this paper into the scientific/public discussion”
It is a publication mechanism, that is all.
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Alternatively, as government funded research took over the world … not-so-clueless public servants wanted expert reviewers to make sure they were wasting money on something embarrassingly stupid, and fraudulent.
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Jo refers to Spontaneous Generation above as a failed theory,
That caught my eye because almost all scientists seem to believe that life on earth did arise spontaneously at some point in the past and that the same thing will happen or has already happened on every planet in the universe which lies in the so called habitable zone around its parent star.
Hence we have SETI ( the search for extra terrestrial intelligence).
My question is this: If life did evolve spontaneouly, why does it not happen all the time and if it does happen all the time why do we not find any evidence if it?
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According to the science, life didn’t arise spontaneously but from a serious of fortuitous chemical reactions which at some point generated a product that was self replicating.
Depending upon one’s point of view, there maybe religious beliefs to either supplement or supplant that.
It seems the possibility of life being generated anyway, especially complex life and beyond that intelligent life, is extremely rare, contrary to earlier thinking. You need a stable star of the right spectral class, habitable zone, the right mix of elements, the right size of planet, water, the right position in the galaxy, and vast numbers of other criteria which need to be satisfied. Life beyond earth may be much rarer than at first thought when it was believed it was relatively common, even according to the Drake equation.
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Correction. “Serious” in my first sentence is meant to read “series”. Unauthorised change by spell checker.
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“According to the science”. A touch of humour for today’s topic?
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Life-form A evolves spontaneously.
Some time later, life-form B evolves spontaneously.
A eats B.
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Small girl goes to mother and asks “How did humans can about?”
Mother replies “first there were humans which became more human and then more humans, and now your are”.
When she goes to her father who replies “first there were primitive monkeys, who became apes, when into humans”.
When the child queries the results the mother pointed out that “both were correct, but I was referring to my side of the family whereas your father was referring to his family”.
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And……
5 million papers published- are they all bad? Is there any estimate of that proportion?
It is all very well to assert that one bad apple ruins the entire crop, but is there another method?
Faith based science, ideological science have been tried, but we’re far worse than peer review
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Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, wrote in 2015 that “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness” (2). So, this very learned person thinks about 1/2 of medical studies published are rubbish.
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I the early 1980s Robin Warren and Barry Marshall in Perth, acting in defiance of settled science, discovered helicobacter pylori, that it was the cause of stomach and other ulcers, and that it could be successfully treated.
20 years later they were awarded the Nobel Prize.
That’s how our system works. 20 years for a good thing if you are lucky.
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And…… you didnt even read the article.
Here’s a new one for you, how’s about fact based science?
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-widely-reported-study-on-the-effects-of-microplastics-in-fish-is-about-to-be-retracted
https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/05/04/microbead-fish-study-retracted/ the authors of the study, Oona Lönnstedt and Peter Eklöv of Uppsala University, were “guilty of scientific dishonesty”.
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https://joannenova.com.au/2019/01/fake-science-on-fake-fish-from-james-cook-uni/
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Guess who keeps banging on about microplastics in the ocean? Our good old CSIRO- I follow their twitter feed and you would not believe the bad science that is promoted by their social media people.
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The report on the retracted paper says “By 2050, scientists predict that there’ll be more plastic than fish in our oceans. So, regardless of the fact that this one paper appears to have contained some really dodgy science, it should not lessen or concern about the small pieces of plastic clogging up our waterways.“, and they provide a link to “overwhelming evidence that they[microbeads]’re damaging marine ecosystems”. But the ‘overwhelming evidence’ they link to makes no mention whatsoever of any damaging effect of microbeads. All it says is that there are a lot of microbeads.
In the meantime, as many in the media are now reporting, bacteria/enzymes are developing that eat plastic. They are dong it on land, in landfill, and in the oceans. As is almost always the case, the answer is not to ban plastics but to work forward constructively from where we are now. Certainly, we should dispose of plastic waste carefully, and then we may need to actively harness the plastic-eaters – or we might be able to just leave them to it. Who knows, maybe the plastic-eaters will simply flourish on their own without our intervention. That would be a great outcome, but it would reduce the need for government grants (like the fully recovered coral in the Great Barrier Reef).
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What percentage of bulldust would you deem acceptable to be published as fact?
From the article…
If an engineer designed a skyscraper where only 25% of the flaws in his design were found and corrected would you deem this acceptable?
Trillions $$$ and potentially millions of lives depend on truth in “the science”.
Once upon a time, a long time ago I had faith in “peer review”. Not now.
Peer review is now on a par with so-called fact checkers. It is junk!
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“Faith based science, ideological science have been tried”
Yep, and a lot of it is called “Climate Science”.
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Faith remains the dominant element in climate science. This is exactly what demonising CO2 has become. It is based entirely on faith founded on the flawed assumption that a delicate radiation balance controls Earth’s surface temperature when that is clearly wrong. The surface temperature is limited by convective processes to a precise level related to atmospheric mass – the sustainable limit of open ocean surface temperature is 30C with the current mass. Doubling the CO2 content from 285ppm will increase the temperature limit by 0.006C
Bay of Bengal hit 31C on May 8.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2023/05/08/0000Z/ocean/surface/level/overlay=sea_surface_temp/orthographic=-275.26,1.80,566/loc=86.421,15.404
Five days later is was back under 30C as the convective control system went into overdrive:
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2023/05/13/0000Z/ocean/surface/level/overlay=sea_surface_temp/orthographic=-275.26,1.80,566/loc=86.421,15.404
The power of the wind throughout the vertical extent of the atmosphere reaches up to 1000 times more than the radiative power fluxes at the surface or the top of atmosphere.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2023/05/13/0000Z/wind/isobaric/250hPa/overlay=wind_power_density/orthographic=-209.06,-40.31,566/loc=85.585,-52.911
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“one bad apple ruins the entire crop”
It started with Mickey Mann and friends… and is now well putrefied !
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‘ … ideological science …’
AGW.
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Try replication.
That’s the basis of real science.
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Well “Climategate” belled the cat on this “peer review” scandal and forever killed the credibility of this system. Mates reviewing mates to reinforce hoax science.
The John Cook “97% of scientists agree with AGW” paper that is still quoted and relied on to boost the AGW argument, another that readily springs to mind.
By the way, has anyone heard from Phil Jones or the UEA since Climategate, I know Michael Mann is still touting his wares and trying to sue anyone that highlights the highlight of his career.
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if the factual basis and reasoning are not given then the paper should go straight to the trash, as it is totally useless.
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I know Dr Curry’s math’s guru Nic Lewis has forced the retraction of a number of studies after they had passed peer review.
And a few years ago Steve McIntyre forced the retraction of a Gergis, Karoly study about one their favourite CC studies.
Dr Karoly even emailed Steve to thank him for finding the errors in their published study.
But the agreement of so many scientists that the Human race is facing EXTINCTION very soon has to be the greatest con and fraud throughout our history.
The Biden loony BELIEVEs all of their junk and yet hardly anyone on his side of politics or any so called scientists dare to criticise this lunacy.
The DATA proves that there’s no CC CRISIS or EMERGENCY OR EXISTENTIAL THREAT at all, but our clueless OECD govts intend to WASTE endless TRILLIONs of $ for decades and achieve a guaranteed ZERO return.
So how can any average person look up the real world data in minutes and yet these so called scientists still BELIEVE in their FANTASY world?
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The Chinese are, from what I have read, some of the worst offenders, given that their scientists are required to publish a certain number of papers in order to maintain their funding and jobs, and to secure promotions. Using the number of papers published as a KPI is not a good idea, but, as you say in the article, where are all the groundbreaking papers from east or west? Science has become corrupted, like so much else in society, that now it is not able to do the job it was intended to do. Yet another example of government strangling something good, not enabling, then the corporates took over science funding and it got even worse. We need to lift the price of money, stop all this destructive funding by corporates and government, make cash great again.
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“Science has become corrupted, like so much else in society, that now it is not able to do the job it was intended to do.”
Its job was obviously to soak up the ever-increasing number of science graduates that evolved from Western Govts believing that everyone should have a tertiary degree. That idea was pushed by the university staff of course, who happily lowered the requirements to get more graduates. With a flood of semi-literate graduates hitting every field of endeavour in society, it was obvious the falling standards would follow them.
Maybe we should go back to having the top 5% getting a top education and the rest getting a real job.
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Not just China. A few years ago, on a tour of a leading medical research organisation a long way from China, I was told that they judged their staff by the number of peer-reviewed papers they had published.
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A key failing of peer review is that papers are not required to contain the data in such form that the conclusions can be independently verified. Pathetic excuse is that it is their data , their secret formulas, they worked hard to get it (public $) and their work is part of ongoing research so it’s unfair to give it away. Basis of future grants is the same but laced with self promotion about breakthroughs that never eventuate. In doing so it feeds this culture of rewarding garbage.
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Many journals permit or require data that is too large to put in the paper to be put in a data repository either in printed or electronic form.
E.g. https://www.nature.com/sdata/policies/repositories
Of course, if it’s junk science, it’s junk science. The data deposited might have been fraudulently altered e.g. by BoM’s secret and undocumented “homogenisation” process, or their failure to produce all side-by-side mercury and probe temperature measurements.
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It’s very easy to game the system believe me.
Eg just show the “data” that supports the theory. Why bother the poor reader with the spurious info….
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I know of a case in a large Australian Government department working in the science area. It has been made clear by the department that there is no future there for heterosexual, Anglo, white males of any age and that they are not wanted. So they installed a 30 year old female as a head of department as a “diversity hire” who was alleged to be a genius with 180 peer reviewed papers. There is no way an individual of that age could produce that many papers if they were of any decent quality or that she had personally done much of the work (or any) herself. Meanwhile, they are trying to get rid of all those genuinely learned heterosexual, Anglo, white males by offering them generous early retirement packages. Wokeness leads to failure, not achievement.
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By way of comparison, Einstein wrote about 300 scientific papers over his lifetime.
Who is the better scientist? The diversity hire with 180 papers at 30 years old or Einstein?
In 1905, his Annus Mirabilis, at age 26 he wrote only four.
1. Photoelectric effect. “Über einen die Erzeugung und Verwandlung des Lichtes betreffenden heuristischen Gesichtspunkt” (“On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light”)
2. Brownian motion.”Über die von der molekularkinetischen Theorie der Wärme geforderte Bewegung von in ruhenden Flüssigkeiten suspendierten Teilchen” (“On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat”)
3. Special relativity. “Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper” (“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”)
4. Mass-energy equivalence. “Ist die Trägheit eines Körpers von seinem Energieinhalt abhängig?” (“Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?”)
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Whenever I read of someone having published umpteen hundreds of papers I take it as a given that the assertion is fraudulent. Some senior academics do stick their name on papers written by postgraduate students. This probably covers most if it. Otherwise it is not physically and intellectually possible to produce so much stuff. Although one should not overlook serial plagiarism. Anyway, the humanities died long ago, and science, not surprisingly has followed suite. I tried to interest the editor of a journal, last year, to consider commissioning an article on truthfulness. There was no reply.
So why continue to give enormous sums of money to so-called universities and other outfits? It is past time for some serious auditing.
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To which Department do you refer David. A cryptic clue will do!
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AI will soon overtake peer-reviewed EVERYTHING!
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It will be generating very credible papers. And the data.
I was intrigued that when pushed, AI finds references and links but a proprotion could be credible fake references with links. AI was lying but gave you want you wanted, references. We think of AI as infallible, but it is also capable of deceit, pretending, trying to please and giving you what you want, credible answers and not necessarily the truth. Who need Michael Mann?
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AI is much discussed lately. The only change I see is that the cost of computer hardware is no longer a significant factor in the computer industry. Write your software as big as you like, you’ll have no trouble getting a computer to run it.
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garbage in, garbage out.
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AI will write the papers.
AI will peer-review the papers.
And of course all journal editors will be AI.
This could get interesting.
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AGAIN, Willis Eschenbach checked the DATA on so many of their stupid CC fantasies and couldn’t find their EMERGENCY at all.
BUT they still intend to WASTE TRILLIONs of $ for decades on their CC lunacy and the poor taxpayers in the OECD countries will obviously have to pay the bill.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/04/25/wheres-the-emergency/
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Perhaps this will be read more if is posted earlier.
If this is the weong place for this I appologize
Jo and others please consider.
ICJ letter
Hi Gentlemen/Ladies,
I has been observed that any attempt to prove or convince the IPCC or the WEF, the UN or any of its cohorts that CO2 is not a culprit of any significant effect on climate is futile.
With this UN request to the ICJ to provide a statement on the obligation of states with regard to their anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases there exists the possibility of influencing and/or convincing the ICJ that CO2 is NOT a contributor to climate variation.
Without going into the multitude of real science reasons why the rare gas, CO2, with its limited ability to absorb the infrared radiation exiting from the planet, and the other methods like conduction and convection in the atmosphere that can cool the planet, it MUST be possible to assemble a cadre of the most respected qualified an erudite world-wide scientists to create a multi-faceted presentation to the International Court of Justice in the Hague for their consideration of 2023/12 (chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/187/187-20230420-ORD-01-00-EN.pdf) and to argue that the advisory opinion on the responsibilities of governments to consider climate change must remove consideration and restrictions of “anthropogenic emissions of green-house (carbon) gases” from their advisory opinion.
It must be shown, proven and stressed that climate change (if any) and the effects on the people and planet are NOT associated with anthropogenic carbon based emissions in ANY significant way.
With this Gore-inspired root cause of catastrophic global warming scam refuted and defeated the whole push for Net Zero will be shown to be a useless and wasteful exercise.
I doubt I will be able to share this suggestion to all the relevant people so request the people who manage to receive this pass it on to those that you know who will be able to help conspire to initiate and complete this written statement to the ICJ, and have it delivered.
Yours Sincerely Don A BSc, Melb.
PS. Restricting the statement to purely explaining CO2, its effects, benefits and refuting all the CO2 lies, and avoiding talking about climate change at all, might avoid being ignored like this was. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/there-is-no-climate-emergency-say-500-experts-in-letter-to-the-united-nations/
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Read chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/187/187-20230420-ORD-01-00-EN.pdf
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That’s not the first sound Carpe Diem that I have seen ignored.
Could I suggest copy that submission verbatim, get another 500 signatures and resubmit it.
Try sending a copy at the same time to your local paper if there is one. If your primary correspondent throws your letter in the bin and then sees it in the public arena he/she will have to read it to know what the public is being told.
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The very nature of “consensus” science prohibits the recognition of new discoveries. If no one else knows, then there can be no consensus. Peer review guarantees mediocrity.
It is so obvious to anyone with an ounce of curiosity that open ocean surfaces cannot sustain a temperature over 30C, which means that radiation balance is a function of surface temperature not the other way around.
Bay of Bengal hit 31C on May 8.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2023/05/08/0000Z/ocean/surface/level/overlay=sea_surface_temp/orthographic=-275.26,1.80,566/loc=86.421,15.404
By May 13, the temperature was under 30C as the temperature control kicked into overdrive.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#2023/05/13/0000Z/ocean/surface/level/overlay=sea_surface_temp/orthographic=-275.26,1.80,566/loc=86.421,15.404
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that’s because consensus science is driven by ideology, not data.
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Interesting piece dating from 1989
The New Science of Pork-Barrelling Joseph Martino ‘Pork Invades the Lab’, Reason, March 1989.
State governments and universities in the US have begun to use hardline lobbying tactics to obtain Federal science grants. One of the plums was the Department of Energy’s Superconducting Supercollider, worth almost 5,000 jobs during construction and many thousands of positions thereafter. Several states worked hard to win the prize but nobody took any notice of the scientists who argued that it was not needed at all.
Research grants are now firmly planted on the political agenda, spelling the decline of the pre-1983 ‘peer review’ system where universities and other agencies had to compete on the scientific merits of their applications.
Now that our scientists are trying to shrug off their ‘wimp’ label, will they get into the game of cultivating political patronage, and where will this lead?
The lawyer/economist Gordon Tullock wrote a little-known classic book The Organization of Inquiry which charted the steps in the decline of a discipline as peer review was corrupted by institutional pressures in the postwar world of Big Science funded by Big Government. This messy draft conveys some of the flavour.
http://gordianknot.homestead.com/Theses/GordonTullockontheDeclineofScientificEmpires.html?_=1583007394505
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Two rules I now follow scrupulously – (1) follow the money. (2) if you mix science with politics, all you end up with is politics. So to mix these together a lot of “science” these days is corrupted by money ( research grants etc) and then further corrupted by ideology. Peer review just further consolidates both those. Someone else on this blog recommended the following book – ” The illusion of evidence based medicine” authored by Jon Jureideni (Aussie – Prof of Pschiatry etc University of Adelaide ) Lemon B Mc Henry. 2020, Wakefield Press. Very illuminating read, particularly with regard to publishing of medical trial studies.
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Behind all this is the problem of Govts borrowing and printing money. If they had physical gold as wealth, or some stable and limited means, we could get them out of science and back to building roads and dams, where they belong. There is no need for Govt to be involved in universities or science grants, they have a record of negative rates of return on everything they touch.
If a scientist wants money he should either find a rich sponsor in the private sector, or crowdfund his ideas on the web. Now we have big corporations demanding the Govt pay them to set up factories in their country, something I consider peak corruption, but I’m sure it will get worse!
Once politicians found limitless money to give away, a lot of society went backwards.
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When I read a paper now, the very first thing I do is check to see who funded the research. That will immediately give a strong indication of how likely the paper is to be fraudulent or not.
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Is there any hint in the scientific establishment of recognition of the fact of their tanking reputations?
Must be nice in the Ivory Tower.
I’m guessing encroaching reality can be kept at bay for a long time.
Just scream “anti-science conspiracy theorists” from the parapets.
Hurl methane in the general direction of all that dare to question.
https://youtu.be/ey0wvGiAH9g
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Here’s Dr John Christy’s version of their so called emergency BS and FRAUD.
He’s using the REAL world data and doesn’t use the BS from their FANTASY world and so he obviously agrees with Eschenbach.
But he does the best job of explaining the so called HOT SPOT and it starts after the first 5 minutes.
The entire video is really worth 40+ minutes of our time and most of it is very easy to understand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2Cd4MLUoN0
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Then there is the role of the pre-print journals – now the “go to” source for a lot science commentary. Just as Jo’s article points out, not only is a lot of junk science published after peer review, also good ground breaking science is being rejected because it doesn’t fit the narrative. At least with the pre-prints you see some of these research studies prior to publication. Good or bad.
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Oh boy. The science cheerleaders are not going to like this.
Open review is much better than peer review.
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Far more people read it for a start, plus you get people from all persuasion having a look at your work.
If it is an “important” paper, and there are major errors, they will generally be found.
You just have to get used to the “noise” of people who obviously haven’t a clue what they are talking about.
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“30,000 scientific journals that publish nearly 5 million articles a year”.
Says it all, really. No wonder disruptive science has dwindled.
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Jo needs a better library card.
The peer reviewed journal count passed the 100,000 mark in the 1980’s , and the last time I looked my university was subscribing to ~35,800 of them.
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science is business now.
business doesn’t like disruptions.
interferes with the flow of profits.
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The fact that peer review doesn’t necessarily promote excellence isn’t the biggest problem here, because its failures don’t just result from a culture of arse-covering administrations. No, the most dangerous issue here is, once again, a theoretically neutral process is in fact highly politicised. Peer reviewers themselves have become gatekeepers who police government-funded research, ensuring that only papers supporting the approved narrative are passed for publication.
This is why there is such a preponderance, for example, of research supporting AGW. From beginning to end, today’s scientific industry is biased toward leftist research and conclusions, from the distribution of funding to ‘approved’ projects, to the selective approval to publish and on to the number of citations each paper receives. It also affects the likelihood that the author(s) will be invited to present their findings at conferences and seminars.
With this system of fraud fully implemented end to end, it enables the fraudsters to claim that “all scientists” agree that AGW is real and an imminent threat, that marijuana is beneficial to our health and that male babies can be born with female brains.
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Actually, if you don’t believe in God you can’t believe in science. Without God there is no cause; without cause there is no science. Cosmogony is a classic illustration of this relationship, in that it tries to inform us that everything came from nothing.
The fact that post modern science ignores such fundamental logic tells us everything we need to know about how silly the discipline has become.
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Both science and religion are based on perceptions of reality, the nature of the universe, and of truth. Each has its schools which use dogma, scripture and authority.
I’ve often heard claims that you can’t properly accept a faith’s dogma if you reject its truth claims. But science and religion both have a hierarchy of truth claims, and the fundamental claims are axiomatic and not based on conclusive evidence, but rather on faith and limited evidence.
Scientists and religionist can be factious, disagreeing about dogma even down to the fundamental level. Most scientists for instance accept both QED and General Relativity while admitting they appear to be incompatible.
I suspect that the person who can’t simultaneously accept incompatible beliefs doesn’t exist.
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Of relevance is what Professor Julius Sumner Miller said in an interview in the 1940’s, as quoted in Wikipedia:
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The recent appraisal of the Bureau’s (USA) Putin-Trump ‘collusion claim’ came to the same conclusion: no “evidence” and a lack of “analytical rigor”. Foot, meet mouth.
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Yeah. And here’s another example.
“It looks like red meat isn’t so bad for your health after all, as a recent study debunked years of claims that consuming red meat leads to a host of health problems, such as stroke, heart disease, and cancer, according to Big Think.
Scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) analyzed past research that led to the demonization of red meat and found the research to be supported by “weak evidence” and “lazy scientists.” ”
https://thepostmillennial.com/red-meat-is-not-a-health-threat-new-study-debunks-years-of-junk-research?utm_campaign=64483
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AGAIN here’s my version of a very benign climate and easily supported by the data.
African life expectancy just 36 yrs in 1950 and today 64 yrs.
And a big drop in infant mortality over that time.
But they also had to suffer 90% of global HIV AIDs deaths and also 90% of malaria deaths.
Yet Africa’s population has increased from 227 million in 1950 to 1460 million in 2023 and projected to increase to 1490 million in 2024 and nearly 4000 million by 2100.
These increases are incredible, but the UN projections also estimate that life expectancy for Africans will be 76.5 years by 2100.
This is the first time in 200,000 years that humans have been able to increase at this rate and still Africans have a long way to go before they get even a small percentage of our energy levels.
Hopefully further education and cheap or free lessons or condoms etc could lower those pop estimates over the next 77 years.
But Africans also have a very low average age of about 19 years and Aussies about 37 yrs and Japanese about 47 yrs.
But there’s the proof that our climate today is very benign and it’s the best climate for Humans EVER.
Here’s the link.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AFR/africa/life-expectancy
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So, the rational response to the constant debunking of the sceptic’s ‘evidence’ is to attack peer review?.
Much easier to actually put up some real evidence.
[You have a few minutes to show us a better argument because this is years old and boring. You want our money, so you provide the evidence (See this post). Our job is easy — just to quote “your teams” mistakes. Peer reviewed references at the link. – Jo]
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nice reversal of the onus of proof fallacy there.
it’s the warmists that are are required to provide evidence to support their claims,
and constantly fail to do so
still waiting 🥱.
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“Much easier to actually put up some real evidence.”
Awaiting some scientific evidence of CO2 causing warming… (once you figure out what science actually is)
Peer review has been an ABJECT FAILURE in the farce of climate science eg Mann et al. !
There has not been a constant debunking of realist posts or papers… just dogmatic and ignorant disregard of real science.
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If only l had a dollar for every time over the last few years when l read that a study on ivermectin was inadmissible because it was not “peer reviewed”
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Nearly as ridiculous as citation index. Thev brain dead assessment of papers by th e number of other “scientists” who notice the papers with the most publicity.
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Gotta love science and scientists…
The classic human “dieting” approach to losing weight (fat) was developed a century ago by “scientists” too.
Their study ran for 4 weeks and they concluded that calorific reduction was how to lose weight.
The problem is that the body adjusts to that calorific reduction as an evolutionary survival mechanism AFTER around 4 weeks and fat loss can slow to a crawl as the body reduces its metabolic rate.
Oops!!
The eating habits of the world for a hundred years dictated by a fundamentally flawed study. 😆😆😆
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EconTalk had an interview with Adam Mastroianni about this in February. Recommended listening.
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Peer review? pfft..I mean really, how does one peer review a “climate computer simulation? – As I’ve said elsewhere, if the “reviewers” stare at the code and “data” long enough, they transform that simulation into their own CAGW hyperreality. Start truly believing that the “model” is the truth..Its laughable.
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In fact peer review as it relates to CAGW has been redundant for decades…You see the “science is settled” according to the believers. One could publish Grimms’ Fairytales, and conclude that the earth is doomed due to human emissions of CO2, and it would be “approved” as climate science..
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Peer review has achieved EXACTLY what it was deliberately corrupted for, to control the flow of information to PROTECT the catastrophilia that passes for Mann Made Global Warming ™.
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Some years ago I requested my local federal MP(Graham Perrett) to get the Canberra science brains trust to point out the errors in Dr John Nicol’s analysis of the greenhouse effect. As the JoNova community would be aware Nicol shows that CO2 can not produce the climate catastrophe that our energy industry has convinced itself to be afraid of. The reply did not bother to make the intellectual effort to address the question..but said because the paper had not been published via a peer review process then it did not warrant consideration. I recall someone called Einstein pointed out that scientific fact is not a “majority is correct “process. It just needs one analyst to get it right. The problem we have is that the majority don’t want to admit we don’t have a looming catastrophe.
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Peer Review – the original Facebook “fact checkers”…..
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I think that the masses believe that peer review involves the relevant people working through the papers to arrive at the same conclusions. I probably thought the same until delving into the global warming cesspit and learning that it was just a read through of the paper in an hour or so. But then, of course, we also have pal review where you get your mates to review your paper which is rife in the global warming community. And Climategate showed us the corruption of the journals in allowing certain groups to prevent publication of papers they didn’t like – take a bow Phil Jones.
It was also Jones who refused to provide data to people in case they proved him wrong. It is a disgrace that all background information for published papers is not available to others to review and maybe show up problems, but given what this article says, maybe should read most likely.
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The most important crushed groundbreaking new discovery. The groundbreaking paper was crushed because the meteorologists who wrote it worked in a forest. http://www.syntrillium.net/sigasaswelt/ressource/pdf/unified_theory_of_climate_poster_nikolov_zeller.pdf This paper does not need Peer Review because you can check the facts with NASA data. Like with Einstein, the facts speak for themselves, you can check the facts with the data. This groundbreaking new discovery was suggested for the Earth by James Clerk Maxwell in Theory of Heat (1871). But Maxwell only had data for the Earth. So we had to wait for NASA data and two forestry workers to complete the work.
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The underlying problem is the failure of The Royal Society to recruit more royals as reviewers, even when some of them have married Editors of learned journals like Teen Vogue .
https://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2023/05/global-warming-pursues-royals-in-ny-car.html
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