An immature concept
of science
has captured
the public mind.
Science has moved toward
being a validator
of what's socially acceptable,
Some “scientists”
no longer understand
the point of real science.
They see their science
as the repository
of ultimate truth.
But "truth" only applies
to junk science,
arbitrarily declared
to be "settled science".
Real science is not final,
but constantly evolving
knowledge.
Unfortunately,
the publication of
flawed study results
has become so common
that it’s no longer
even surprising.
A recently published
Nature paper
resulted in the usual
'climate change --
-- it’s-worse-than-we-thought'
headlines in the
Washington Post, BBC,
New York Times, etc.
In days
the paper’s results
were assessed to have
“major problems”
by an author of
multiple CO2
climate sensitivity
papers
(Lewis and Curry, 2015, 2018).
A glaring miscalculation
was quickly spotted,
that undermined
the conclusion,
that estimates of
climate sensitivity
to a doubling
of the CO2 level
may be too low.
And yet the paper
was able to
pass through
peer review anyway.
In 2016,
Dr. Michael Mann
was the lead author of
an embarrassingly
non-scientific paper
fraught with
glaring methodological
and statistical errors.
A post-publication reviewer
(statistician Dr. William Briggs)
wrote in his
point-by-point critique
of the paper that
“Mann’s errors are in no way
unique or rare; indeed,
they are banal and ubiquitous.”
Despite the glaring errors,
the paper made it
through peer-review
and was published
in Nature‘s
Scientific Reports
journal anyway.
Analyses indicate that
as many as 7 of 10
peer-reviewed journals
are apt to publish
a deliberately-written
“hoax” paper.
“Any reviewer with more than
a high-school knowledge
of chemistry and the ability
to understand a basic data plot
should have spotted the paper’s
shortcomings immediately.
Its experiments are
so hopelessly flawed
that the results
are meaningless."
" … The hoax paper
was accepted by
a whopping 157 journals
and rejected by only 98.
Of the 106 journals
that did conduct peer review,
70% accepted the paper…”
(Murphy, 2017
The Failure of Peer Review)
Earlier this year,
a review paper
(Larcombe and Ridd, 2018)
published in the journal
Marine Pollution Bulletin
delivered a stinging rebuke
to the modern version
of science’s disturbing
lack of replicability
and verifiability.
The authors go on to detail
a large volume of examples
when peer-review
failed to detect errors
in Great Barrier Reef (GBR)
coral research.
Confirmation bias
appears to permeate
the peer-reviewed literature,
slanted in the direction
of finding evidence
for a catastrophic decline
in coral health.
This isn’t the first time
that marine research
has been called out
for overselling calamity
(see Cressey, 2015,
“Ocean ‘calamities’
oversold,
say researchers
– Team calls for
more skepticism
in marine research.”)
and falling
“into a mode
of groupthink
that can damage
the credibility
of the ocean sciences”.
As just a single example
among the many provided,
Larcombe and Ridd
reviewed the De’ath et al.
(2009) study
in which an
“unprecedented” decline
in Great Barrier Reef corals
was alleged to have occurred
between 1990-2005.
After a reanalysis
of the measurements
and methods used,
Larcombe and Ridd
used corrected data
to show there has
actually been
“a small increase
in the growth rate”
of corals
since the early 1900s
instead of the
dramatic decline
after the 1990s
documented in the
peer-reviewed paper.
These errors slipped past
the reviewers’ notice too.
This paper
[De’ath et al. (2009):
Declining coral calcification
on the Great Barrier Reef.]
studied 328 corals on the GBR,
and indicated a 14% reduction
in growth rates
between 1990 and 2005.
Subsequent reanalysis
of the data indicated
that the apparent
recent reduction
in growth rate
was caused by:
(a)
Problems with the
physical measurements
of calcification,
which systematically biased
recent growth bands
to give lower growth rates
(D’Olivio et al., 2013;
Ridd et al., 2013),
and
(b)
An unjustified assumption
that coral growth rate
does not change
with the age of the coral
(Ridd et al., 2013).
D’Olivio et al. (2013),
working on a different set
of GBR corals,
showed an increase
in coral calcification rates
( on middle
and outer
shelf reefs,
which together
represent 99%
of GBR corals ),
of 10% per decade,
for the period
~1950 to ~2005,
... but a decrease
of 5% per decade
between 1930 and 2008
on inner-shelf reefs,
( which represent
only 1% of GBR corals ).
"Therefore,
it would be hard to glean
from these datasets
that there is
a documented
decline in
coral ‘growth’
parameters,
and even harder
to attribute change
to a particular cause.”