Re: OT: interesting global warming quote found elsewhwere

Eeyore wrote:

bill.sloman@xxxxxxxx wrote:

James Arthur wrote:
bill.slo...@xxxxxxxx wrote:
Jim Thompson wrote:
James Arthur wrote:
Joerg wrote:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?page_id=354
This shows how much political hardball seems to be played in that
"scientific" world. Pretty sad, actually:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=224
This URL doesn't work. Changing it to end ?page_id=224 ended up
getting me to a blog posting by Steve McIntyre on Friday, June 17th,
2005 at 6:49 am, basically bitching that the rest of the world doesn't
share his particular obsession.
The last paragraph is shocking:
"One of the first places that we would recommend such procedures is the
temperature data set used by the IPCC. Other researchers have tried
without success to get access to the supporting data. One of them shared
with us the response he received from the principal author of the
dataset: “We have 25 years invested in this work. Why should we let you
look at it, when your only objective is to find fault with it?”"
The 2nd-to-last paragraph is stunning as well. Such sloth. The work
shows it.
Sloth? Referees aren't paid.

That doesn't excuse not doing their job. Their job is to
double-check the work to help avoid errors. We all make
mistakes; this process is supposed to catch them and prevent
outright fraud.

Fraud is generally quite rare in academic publications.

Once an experiment has been reported in the literature in most circumstances it will be repeated by others after publication. You cannot avoid the odd individual committing scientific fraud if they are intent on doing so or deluded (eg N-rays). Most get found out pretty quickly and their reputation and research career is wrecked.

A recent high profile example from the biosciences being in Korea.

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/314/5807/1853
and
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2006/feb/business/js_fraud.html

Mendels genetic peas are statistically so close to the theoretical values that it is exceedingly unlikely that the results he reported were exactly what happened for instance. He was still eventually proved right, although it wasn't fully accepted until after his death.

But with the benefit of modern statistics we can see that his reproducibility was too good!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel

That isn't the referees primary job, which is to work out whether the
authors know what they are talking about.

Sounds like you're trying to make excuses again about the whole concept of
peer-review.

Peer review essentially checks that the equations make sense and the arguments presented are plausible and well constructed.

Why SHOULDN'T they review the data ? Some guy may be perfectly competent but if
his raw data is ***, so will be the resulting paper.

If the paper is compromised by bad data someone will notice and publish a better paper. That is how science progresses. Letters pointing out faults or alternative interpretations are common.

How does someone review terabytes of machine readable data anyway on a realistic timescale ?

Regards,
Martin Brown
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **
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