Timothy Birdnow

Certainly a lot of climate SCIENCE is fraudulent. Michael Mann and the like. And there were a number of famous frauds over the years, many to show that the journals will publish anything that sounds good.

Data sets can be fudged, or misleading. In fact, 2% of scientists have admitted to fudging data. https://phys.org/news/2009-05-scientists-fabricate-falsify.html It is much harder to fake than, say, paleontology, which has a sordid history of fake fossils and the like. It's also harder to fake then climatololgy, where you have limited data and rely heavily on proxies - essentially fossils. Michael Mann is a classic example of research data fudging to get the results he wanted. Here is a NY Times article about data fudging and hoaxes at Bell Labs. https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/26/us/panel-says-bell-labs-scientist-faked-discoveries-in-physics.html

It's much harder to hoax or cheat in the hard sciences but it does happen on occasion. There was the Sokal hoax, where physicist Alan Sokal wrote a bogus paper entitled Transgressing the boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity https://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/ It was done to test to see if science journals would publish crap. They did. And then there was the Bogdanov Affair, https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html

Yes, these were outed as fakes but not before being published and taken seriously by some. They were intended as fakes. But this illustrates that bad science can get through to mainstream science journals.

This is easily rebutted, but not so in some fields where dealing with data that is hard to quantify or that is incomplete. I remember a number of years ago claims of a superluminal neutrino which probably was a timing error in the data (that's what physicist Lubos Motls said at the very beginning.) But there is still argument and some people still claim they found faster-than-light neutrinos.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:51 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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