Scientist are known to mislead. Cook papers. Massage stats. Exaggerate. Particularly climate scientists. Why would or should you or I listen to scientists or, for that matter, Greta Thunberg? Unless you want to believe she's a saviour? The new messiah?
Church of Sweden Says Greta is "Successor of Christ"
Retraction Alert: Pretty sure this blog will be one of a minuscule number of places that will cover this retraction. Haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere. Other then at Science 2.0.
"An ocean heat uptake paper published in Nature has been retracted, and it is a credit to the authors for pulling it, but it's also an indictment of the kind of insular culture that corporate peer review creates. Especially when the science is a political hot potato like climate, where no one wants to be critical lest they feel like they are aiding global warming deniers. Or worse, being labeled that themselves as part of a #cancelculture agenda."
The way science 2.0 represents this retraction is annoying because the bottom line is the paper was rife and I do mean RIFE with errors and exaggerations. Rather then suggesting that one is 'aiding deniers' wouldn't it be much more accurate to state the paper was servile to a specific political agenda? One that covered up truth and reality in order to promote agenda or CONSENSUS. And consensus is not science. Consensus is collusion.
Consensus: a general agreementCollusion: Agreement or cooperation undertaken to deceive others
From here on in consensus science will be noted/regarded as collusion science- Continuing on with the collusion science paper that was retracted:
But what about when competitors are not allowed to fact check? Is the 'look elsewhere effect' creating false confidence? For that we have post-publication peer review. Ironically, that is also going to be more prevalent in a hot button area like climate studies than it is for something journalists just casually rewrite, like press release claims of 3 billion fewer birds.And post-publication peer review worked here.
Nic Lewis looked at the Resplandy et al. ocean heat uptake estimate and then looked at their statistical methodology and showed their results were overstated and their uncertainty greatly understated - by up to 400 percent. The authors conceded the points, made some corrections, which caused other issues, and finally agreed with the journal's request to pull the paper back, presumably to rework it and publish it somewhere else. The problem is that retractions get little coverage. Retraction Watch is going to address it, sure, but the widespread coverage it got (similar to supposedly 3 billion fewer birds) will never be matched by the criticisms or the withdrawal of the paper.It may be time for science journalists to stop pretending that peer review means what it used to mean. There are now 50,000 journals out there, there are not enough experts to review them all, and so 'editorial review' ("this looks like data") has become common, but as science has become more data heavy, statistical methodology has become more important. And most scientists are not as strongly grounded in that as they are their core research fields. Journalists covering the new IPCC report, or at least the media kit, are not going to know that IPCC used this paper despite it being flagged almost immediately and being the subject of debate for the last 10 months. The authors of the retracted paper told Retraction Watch IPCC probably meant to cite a different paper by many of the same authors.Post-publication peer review can't accomplish everything, it certainly won't keep large bodies from citing work they want to feel is true, but hopefully it will lead to more diversity in pre-publication peer review. Science wins when critics are allowed to try and find flaws in statistics.
Surely the IPCC wanted to feel the paper was true. But it wasn't. Go back to 2017 and this post : Peer Review = ConspiracyThere are a myriad of issues with the peer review process. Peer review is not a universal remedy, able to prevent dishonesty and/or misleading/totally incorrect science that will be cited by agencies promoting specific agendas that this type of 'science' is tailor made for. It's not the panacea it's too often presented as.