I am not a scientist. I don't publish scientific papers. I have many close friends who are very accomplished scientists who have published in very good journals. The peer review process is based on honest review by expert colleagues in the field. In some fields that can be a very small number of reviewers. If one of the reviewers is a competitor or enemy that can cause a lot of trouble. That's usually why there is more than one reveiwer. In the cause of the great fraud, the reviewers seemed to have colluded to prevent opposing research from being published. Science depends a lot on peoples innate honesty and good intentions. Science shuld be a search for the truth, not a political agenda. here's another problem for the fraudsters, their methods include using computer models, which many experts in that field say are faulty. These computer models are becoming more prevalent in science. This article makes some very good points.
Scientists have let a massive flaw slowly creep into the scientific review system as they have ignored the gradually increasing significance and complexity of computer software. Standards created to deal with relatively simple and standardized scientific hardware no longer work to double-check much more complex and nonstandard scientific software.
Eric S. Raymond, the famous computer scientist and writer, has called for open source science. I think this is the way we should go. In the past, it cost too much to print out all a study’s data and records on paper and ship that paper all over the world. With the internet, we have no such limitations. All scientific studies should upon publication put online all of their raw data, all of their protocols, all of their procedures, all of their records and the code for all of their custom-written software. There is no practical reason anymore why only a summary of a scientist’s work should be made public.
Scientific software has grown too large and complex to be maintained and verified by a handful of individuals. Only by marshaling a scientific “Army of Davids” can we hope to verify the accuracy and precision of the software we are increasingly using to make major public decisions.
In the short term, we need to aggressively challenge those who assert that studies that use complex custom software have been “peer reviewed” in any meaningful way. In the long term, we have a lot of scientific work to do over again.
I Support Lord Black
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2 comments:
Yes Dr., sad but true but science has always been political. It likely will always be political. It is good that people are fighting to get out alternative viewpoints on this subject but each side has it's own agenda too. Usually the truth is somewhere in the middle. (real conservative)
Being an "official" scientist, with the title and letters after their name, doesn't confer some magical omniscience or infallibility. It just means someone jumped through the hoops to get the title. Science is about method, data, accuracy, impartiality, etc. Once these people started hiding their methods and raw data, they stopped being real scientists. Once they stopped accepting the real data and started massaging them to fit their pre-concieved notions, they became frauds.
If anything, the believers of AGW should be more up in arms than anyone else, demanding investigation. This sort of crap is sullying the legitimacy of their cause. By trying to brush it off or bury the scandal tells does more to prove it's not about truth, but ideology, than anything else.
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