In 1999, I had a stroke of luck. I asked one of the IPCC officials for the data from which one of their maps was compiled, and I received it. I wrote a paper analyzing the results, and submitted it to Geophysical Research Letters. They just sat on it. I instead published it on John Daly’s website. Today, it is still the only paper recognized by Google on “Regional Temperature Change.”
I now know my paper was not critical enough, since we have proof that the basic data and its processing is far more dubious than I had envisaged.
I tried to update my paper and resubmit it. Nothing doing. Since the small group — revealed within the CRU emails — control most of the peer reviewers, very few peer reviewed papers which criticize that group are allowed to appear in the most prominent published literature which dominates the academic establishment.
I have only been able to find a place to release my criticisms on the internet, now the only realm where unfettered scientific discussion is possible.
“Peer review” versus open source. The net continues to smash priesthoods, first in “journalism,” and now in “science.”
There’s also a great comment over there. Leftists love to quote the phrase about “the military-industrial complex” in Eisenhower’s farewell address. They’re less fond of this bit:
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Gee, who might that be…?
[Update a few minutes later]
More stonewalling of the heretics, this time in France. Maybe they should be thankful that they were merely stonewalled, and not literally stoned. And of course, “stonewalling” had an entirely different meaning under the rule of the Taliban, who these high priests of this flawed religion are starting more and more to resemble.
[Update a while later]
Calling it what it is — green totalitarianism:
The most important take home lesson is that global frauding was the clear and conscious work of a political machine aiming to steal your money, your liberties, and your country. It was a massive, worldwide attempt at a coup d’etat, and the victims were going to include all the free and prosperous peoples of the world. Hitler had his Reichstag fire. Today’s transnational left had its global warming fraud. The political goal was exactly the same: maximum power through maximum fear.
It wasn’t “manufactured doubt.” It was manufactured crisis, and as Rahm told us, you don’t want to waste one of those.
“Peer review” vs.”Open Source”. That is brilliant and goes right to the heart of the lack of transparency in some areas of the science community, including the death grip on publishing. It’s very comparable to the MSM priesthood vs. the blogosphere where the truth is getting out.
http://www.desmogblog.com/vincent-gray
A search of 22,000 academic journals shows that Gray has never been published in a peer-reviewed journal on the subject of climate change. “Gray has published peer-reviewed scientific work on coal, his most recent article having been published 17 years ago.”
“Listed as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Natural Resource Stewardship Project (NRSP), a lobby organization that refuses to disclose its funding sources. The NRSP is led by executive director Tom Harris and Dr. Tim Ball. An Oct. 16, 2006 CanWest Global news article on who funds the NRSP, it states that “a confidentiality agreement doesn’t allow him [Tom Harris] to say whether energy companies are funding his group.”
Ah, yet another ad hominem attack. Because they can’t defend the fraud itself.
A search of 22,000 academic journals shows that Gray has never been published in a peer-reviewed journal on the subject of climate change.
At this point, I’d say that’s a badge of honor.
Pay more attention to Richard Feynman. 😉 He would quite easily talk about how perr-review methods didn’t work, as far as I remember.
Just think of this — how often do people write up and publish their failures? Do you have any idea how much time and money is wasted repeating failed experiments over and over because no one writes them up? It’s way too time-consuming and expensive to bother. Plus you would lose prestige. And who would want to read it? But imagine if it was in a database somewhere and you could look it up when you were getting ready to do an experiment.
(Note: Why yes, I once spent months repeating an experiment that had failed years before *in my own lab*. But the guy who had originally done it had received his PhD before I joined the lab as an undergrad. The head professor was a very wonderful fellow, but had forgotten the experiment had already been done. Because, of course, once it failed no one bothers to write it up and publish it. When I finished it and the results were surprising, he whacked himself in the middle of hte forehead and admitted that he just wasted my time. I don’t consider it a total waste — it was excellent practice to mutate the gene, test that it was mutated, express the protein, purify it, crystalize it, and calculate it’s shape by two different methods… but it would have been better if I’d also advanced science. :P)
If that can happen within a lab, how many times has that happened in *another* lab that had no way of knowing?
Yes — all publicly funded research should be published open source in a vast database with free commenting. Always thought it should. Complete with failures.
Eisenhower himself presided over one of the greatest growth spurts of the industrialised-science colossus: the Sputnik Crisis, which quadrupled the NSF’s budget in 1959 alone and gave the world ARPA and NASA, among other things. Even before Sputnik he was (according to Where Wizards Stay Up Late http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832674/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1259363746&sr=8-1 ) particularly friendly to the world of scientific research. So Eisenhower was alert to both the promise and the peril of the then-new dispensation; he wasn’t an “anti-science” boob. Actually the whole speech seems wise and prescient at the moment. His remarks about the need to strike balances in the face of demands for spectacular programs of action is very relevant to the economic and policy end of the AGW question.
And at one point he was intending to speak of the military-industrial-congressional complex; it was apparently out of politesse that the third edge of the iron triangle was not named in the final speech.
Ah, yet another ad hominem attack
More like circular logic:
* Your opinion is meaningless unless you publish in our journals.
* We won’t let people like you publish in our journals.
* You haven’t published in our journals.
* Therefore your opinion is meaningless.
This is one of the many things that so many of us object to, and what people like “Gray Science” are either oblivious to, or find to be perfectly acceptable behavior.
And if we are going to toss around affiliations as reasons to denigrate someone’s opinions, let’s start by ignoring the opinions of anyone associated with East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit…
How about I just ignore your opinions because they’re laughable, especially the part where listing credible scientific publications of the astute Mr. Gray constitutes a criticism of his apparently non-existent verifiable scientific observations or work in the hard sciences, whether they be in peer reviewed in reputable scientific journals or not.
You guys epitomize the anti-science American tin foil hat intellect.
Gray Science: you are serving to help demonstrate exactly why “peer reviewed” has failed and “open source” is succeeding. You can post your information about Gray’s funding sources. We can decide if that constitutes useful and/or valid criticism of Gray, and we can go check out your criticism ourselves. We can look at what Gray has to say.
What you cannot do is shut us up because you disagree with us, as those involved in “peer review” try to do.
If Gray is wrong it will become evident because he is wrong, not because you shut him up. If Gray is right it will become evident because he is right. Either way it shows the failure of “peer review.”
Thanks for your help.
…oh and:
“You guys epitomize the anti-science American tin foil hat intellect.”
Devastating logical argument, that. I am so impressed by your obvious superior pro-science, anti-American, non-tin foil hat intellect that I can no longer argue with you. Why don’t you impress us with similar demonstrations of your extreme intellectual prowess?
Who’s ‘we’? You speak for yourself. Gray spoke, in an op ed.
I apologize if you find my necessity to ascribe your ‘blog comment thoughts’, like Mr. Gray’s nonsensical non evidential rantings, to the circular file, but they don’t even begin to approach the scientific sophistication of papers I can freely download in real time from all over the world. Your nutty ideas fail even the simplest open source tests.
Good luck with the tin foil hats, I hear they work well against orbital lasers as well.
they don’t even begin to approach the scientific sophistication of papers I can freely download in real time from all over the world.
Yes, those “scientifically sophisticated papers” that we now know are based on bogus and buggy computer models and unreplicable data. Garbage in, garbage out, no matter how “sophisticated.”
And you, sir, are a pompous ass. And not as incandescently brilliant as you obviously think you are. Actually, incandescently idiotic would be a more apt description. Not to mention one so proud of his imbecilic graffiti on my blog that he is ashamed to use his real name.
You guys epitomize the anti-science American tin foil hat intellect.
Read the Wegman report to get an idea of how perverted peer review has become and then talk about tin hats.
I’m hoping that their next peer review comes from a jury of peers.
The smartest people in the room have code that silently has a code overflow whose results were used in producing the historical temperature record.
And we’re advised to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
Er…I feel some people are misunderstanding the quality standard represented by “peer review.” It’s certainly not the case that being published in “peer reviewed” journals means an expert has vetted your work as sound. That’s nuts. No reviewer has the time and resources necessary to thoroughly double check the work underlying an article presented for publication.
In fact, the quality standard set by appearing in peer-reviewed journals is exactly that which is more recently presented as the “open source” standard, and the latter generally evolved from the former. The idea is that if your work is published in a journal in such a way that any reader can duplicate the work exactly, then it can be subjected to any test anyone else wants to apply to it, now or in the future.
In other words, the job of the reviewer is, beyond weeding out utter nonsense, primarily to simply make sure the author has written down and explained precisely everything he did, so that someone else can duplicate the work (and test it however he likes). The reviewer certainly makes no guarantee that the work is correct: only that the published account of the work is sufficient to duplicate it.
It is also true, however, that the secondary job of the reviewer is to assess the novelty and importance of the work, because, historically, the best journals received far more papers than they could publish. There had to be some way of pruning the submissions down. That did not mean one went unpublished, however: a rough pecking-order of reputation had long been established, and if you were turned down by the top journals, you could almost always succeed in those lower down, with far larger page counts.
Even in those days, however, the people most like to be turned down for publication were less the occasional wild-eyed crackpot (or brilliant eccentric) who challenged the status quo and more the junior or foreign scientist who wrote something that confirmed the status quo in a particularly unenlightening or boring way.
Of course, that’s how it’s supposed to work, but human beings don’t always conform to their ideals. They may have screwed up thoroughly here, I don’t know.
The argument for judging the quality of submitted work as well as the clarity is less compelling in this Internet Age, when anything can be published super cheaply. Who cares if PloS or some other online screed is extended by 500 fully-electronic “pages” per month? It’s not like electrons are in short supply.
But…it won’t last. The fact is, people need ways of sorting out the gold from the trash, and there is always trash, gobs of it. All pools of low entropy attract parasites. If you set up a wonderful new open-source journal of science, then for a while it would attract good work, and be very valuable, as well as doing without the pain of peer review judging quality. But that would only last as long as it was new, and somewhat of a challenge to get to, until, that is, the “spammers” (there are always spammers) found it. Then, like Usenet, like e-mail, and so on in a long sad stream back to the first virus hitching a ride on the first cell, the spammers would flood it with trash.
And then some bright person will suggest: hey, how about if we have people already recognized as experts in the field vet each paper before we publish it, so we improve the signal to noise ratio? Of course, they’ll just weed out the obvious nonsense…at least at first…
I don’t have any solution. I’m just pointing out that solutions are in the general way extremely nonobvious, and anything obvious is almost certainly not a genuine solution.
Yes, those “scientifically sophisticated papers” that we now know are based on bogus and buggy computer models and unreplicable data. Garbage in, garbage out, no matter how “sophisticated.”
That’s a pretty sophisticated perspective on reality you’ve got there.
Design or program much?
Design or program much?
That has got to be the funniest line you’ve come up with yet.
Is it really possible to be this aggressively ignorant, or is this some sort of trolling put-on?
“You guys epitomize the anti-science American tin foil hat intellect.”
“First they ignore you.
Then they ridicule you.
After that they fight you.
And then you win.”
People, I think we’re somewhere between Level 2 and Level 3 Level 2 right now.
Grayscience says:
And the CRU and the IPCC is funded by the government.
Or do you think a government bureaucracy will knowlingly fund and support scientific research that reduces its size and power?
Grayscience said:
I smell something fishy here. Free downloads from people who hid their data and the computer code for their model?
Grayscience says to Aerospace Engineer Rand Simberg:
ROFLMAO!
I agree mostly with Carl but do disagree with the priority he says is set by journals. Carl, I’m not sure if you meant that as an ideal or practice. I’d agree as an ideal but in practice I find that most journals want:
1) Is this article relevant to our journal?
2) Is the work new?
3) Have the authors properly referenced existing work (can you say “h-index“)? By the way, I’m pretty sure this is why so many articles start: “The study of X has been progressing at a manic paces since 199Y [1-20].” Those are 20 references to likely referees.
4) And finally, can the work be reproduced? In the case of many data, signal, image processing papers, I find it simply cannot be reproduced from the information presented in a 12 page paper. I just don’t see reproducibility as enforced in the modern literature.
Certainly reproducibility was not a priority set for publishing paleo-climate results. It appears that the originating lab struggled at reproducing its own results (HARRY_READ_ME.txt).
As to the problem of discerning value in articles, I think the internet has already found a solution for researchers. Its called arXiv.org.
If you are really on the cutting edge, you know who is doing the best work and you lurk at arXiv for papers by the field’s leaders, possibly their students if the lead’s name doesn’t always appear on their articles (rare) and maybe download some others to see if there’s anything interesting coming from others. You certainly don’t wait for the 3-6 month (sometimes years for some journals) the peer-review process to complete.
In a sense you’re the peer reviewer and if the author persistently spouts gibberish you learn to ignore his papers. If the papers are subsequently published, well… Good for him, his resume and his tenure review.
Is it really possible to be this aggressively ignorant, or is this some sort of trolling put-on?
Maybe it’s an Exxon countertroll. Evil corporations trolling the blogs. “Gray” sure isn’t convincing anyone here. If he’s sincere, he’d be better off hanging with others of his ilk (dKos, etc) rather than trying to convince us with arguments that continually blow up in his face.
” And not as incandescently brilliant as you obviously think you are…”
Careful Mr. Simberg. If you make him mad he might taunt you a second time.
Let’s try this again, mr Gray Science.
Real science does not require credentials. Politics requires credentials. But in *real* science, being published or not, being famous or not, being funded or not, even being college-educated does *not* change whether your idea or criticism has merit or not.
Many scientists who were brilliant were self taught. Or tinkered in their garage. Many were burned at the stake, or committed suicide because their ideas were ridiculed, even though they were right.
Science is not and never has been consensus. In fact, brilliance is generally when someone looks completely mad and overturns everything people “knew” was right and true.
That doesn’t mean every guy who looks liek a crackpot is right. Of course not. Chances are they’re just nuts and wrong. But you cannot validate or invalidate anyone’s scientific ideas, be it a new idea or a criticism or whatever — based on their credentials. That’s not science, that’s politics.
“In other words, the job of the reviewer is, beyond weeding out utter nonsense, primarily to simply make sure the author has written down and explained precisely everything he did, so that someone else can duplicate the work (and test it however he likes).”
I do enjoy Carl’s posts so. He always nails the issue. In my reading of the “peer reviewed” climate science literature, “papers I can freely download in real time from all over the world,” I have been astounded at the lack of detail. In the journals in which I have been published, we have to define every quantity and list every equation in the model, or at least refer in a direct line to a source in which such information can be found. These guys would never have been published in my journals. You almost get the feeling that their goal is to hide what they are doing, rather than allow others to replicate their results. But, surely that way madness lies…
But you cannot validate or invalidate anyone’s scientific ideas, be it a new idea or a criticism or whatever — based on their credentials.
And if you had any innate or learned critical thinking skills at all you would have noticed that I never addressed the esteemed Mr. Gray’s ‘credentials’ in any way, but merely reported that a superficial search by SourceWatch has revealed that Mr. Gray has ZERO scientific publishing history, peer reviewed, self published or otherwise, and that he is, in fact, a coal industry shill. You’ll just have to trust me that computational quantum chemists and theoretical astrophysicists the world over are laughing at you tin foil hat tea baggers, and not with you. Wink wink.
But I guess his op ed reveals great insights to you mastubatory scribes.
The December 18, 1989 issue of Physical Review Letters (PRL) carried a paper entitled “Anomalous Weight Reduction on a Gyroscope’s Right Rotations about the Vertical Axis on the Earth” by Hideo Hayasaka and Sakae Takeuchi of Tohoku University, Japan. It presented detailed experiments with three dissimilar gyroscopes, all of which exhibited up to 12 milligrams of weight loss when rotating vertically in a right hand sense, and no weight loss when rotating in a left-hand sense. Normally PRL publishes no more than 8 weeks after submittal. This paper took 21 months to clear the peer-review process, because of its extraordinary claims.
An on-line account states: “Reportedly the paper was delayed because the PRL editors and referees were very skeptical of the reported effect but could find nothing wrong with the experimental techniques described. After repeated revision of the paper, some re-refereeing, and much editorial deliberation, paper was finally published.”
No one has been able to get the same results (though the attempts at replication about which I’ve read were very, very sloppy, compared to the original). It is a dead issue in physics. But PRL did not simply block it because it was “impossible.”
This is the peer-review process in action. The perversion apparently envisioned by some on the Left, and in the AWG movement (a Venn diagram looks almost like one circle…) is definitely NOT peer-review.
[This was originally entered under the “How Widespread is the Damage?” commentary, purely unintentionally. Sorry about that.]
“Is it really possible to be this aggressively ignorant, or is this some sort of trolling put-on?”
Of course it is Raoul. GS is obviously a fake moniker for Thomas Lee Retardofritz.
If you are really on the cutting edge, you know who is doing the best work and you lurk at arXiv for papers by the field’s leaders…
Joe, this is exactly what blew up in the climate science research community’s face. They, too, felt they knew who was doing the “best” work, and they, too, paid most attention to the papers produced by those leaders. And not surprising, when it became necessary to cull papers for the limited amount of journal space, they selected only those from those they “knew” were doing the “best” work. And here we are.
I’m not criticizing you. As I said, this is how it must be. You have to have some way to separate the wheat from the chaff. Most people learn who is doing the “best” work from their research advisor, and from what appears in the top journals and who gives invited talks at big conferences, who makes the rounds being invited to give department seminars, and so forth. In other words, young scientists absorb the Establishment attitude about who is doing “the best work” and there’s your consensus.
But, alas, there too are your scientific fads and your embarassing grotesque belly-flop when the consensus is misguided.
I don’t think that’s necessarily an evil thing. The only evil thing here is that so much politics and money and social-engineering by the Stalinists got focussed on the science, which made its normal human failures very expensive indeed to scientific credibility.
Given his gratuitous sexual language, I’d say that
GayGray Science favors the “peer review” in Playgirl Magazine, amirite?Hell, I’m still trying to figure out what “mastubatory” means. Sounds like some kind of surgical procedure, like what they did to Rosemary Kennedy. Maybe GS had a similar experience.