Trump On Paris Climate Agreement: 'Not With Me, Folks!'
In this newsletter:
1) Global Temperatures Plunge 0.5° Celsius In April
GWPF Observatory, 29 April 2017
2) Trump Promises To Make ‘Big Decision’ On ‘One-Sided Paris Deal’ Soon
Press Trust of India, 30 April 2017
3) Court Delivers Trump Victory On Climate Rule
Washington Examiner, 28 April 2017
4) Energy Policy in Trump's First 100 Days
Competitive Enterprise Institute, 25 April 2017
5) Warmists Just Lost The Antarctic Peninsula – It Is Now Cooling
Watts Up With That, 27 April 2017
6) New York Times Columnist Blasted By ‘Nasty Left’ For Climate Change Piece
New York Post, 28 April 2017
7) Michael Guillen: Has Science Lost Its Way?
Fox News, 27 April 2017
GWPF Observatory, 29 April 2017
2) Trump Promises To Make ‘Big Decision’ On ‘One-Sided Paris Deal’ Soon
Press Trust of India, 30 April 2017
3) Court Delivers Trump Victory On Climate Rule
Washington Examiner, 28 April 2017
4) Energy Policy in Trump's First 100 Days
Competitive Enterprise Institute, 25 April 2017
5) Warmists Just Lost The Antarctic Peninsula – It Is Now Cooling
Watts Up With That, 27 April 2017
6) New York Times Columnist Blasted By ‘Nasty Left’ For Climate Change Piece
New York Post, 28 April 2017
7) Michael Guillen: Has Science Lost Its Way?
Fox News, 27 April 2017
Full details:
1) Global Temperatures Plunge 0.5° Celsius In April
GWPF Observatory, 29 April 2017
Global temperatures have dropped 0.5° Celsius in April according to U.S meteorologist Ryan Maue. In the Northern Hemisphere they plunged a massive 1°C . As the record 2015/16 El Nino levels off, the global warming hiatus is back with a vengeance.
Global Temperatures Drop To Pre-El Nino Levels
Despite NOAA’s Denial, A Growing Number Of Studies Confirm the Global Warming Hiatus
Despite widespread denial among climate activists, a growing number of scientific research papers in recent months have confirmed the global warming hiatus, trying to explain its possible reasons (for the latest studies see here, here and here). The latest study claims that the Southern Ocean played a critical role in the global warming slowdown.
2) Trump Promises To Make ‘Big Decision’ On ‘One-Sided Paris Deal’ Soon
Press Trust of India, 30 April 2017
President Donald Trump has promised to make a “big decision” on the “one-sided” Paris climate deal soon as he alleged that the US is being unfairly targeted by asking to pay money while major polluting nations like Russia, China and India are contributing nothing.
President Donald Trump marked his 100th day in office in a speech in Pennsylvania by promising to make a “big decision” on the “one-sided” Paris climate deal in the next two weeks – full speech here
In a campaign-style rally in Pennsylvania, a state that helped tip the election in his favor, Trump said the Paris Agreement on Climate Change is “one sided.”
“I will be making a big decision on the Paris accord over the next two weeks and we will see what happens,” he said in his speech to mark the first 100 days of his presidency.
“…like the one-sided Paris climate accord. Where the US pays billions of dollars (for the Paris Climate Accord) while China, Russia, and India have contributed (to pollution) and will contribute nothing,” Trump alleged as the audience booed to the Paris Agreement.
The Paris climate deal within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 2015 by 194 countries and ratified by 143. It aims to hold the increase in average global temperature to below 2 degrees above pre-industrial level by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Trump claimed that it is estimated that for compliance with the agreement could ultimately shrink Americas GDP by USD 2.5 trillion over a 10-year period.
“That means factories and plants closing all over our country,” he said and alleged that the Washington’s ‘dishonest media’ would not report because it is is part of the problem.
“Their priorities are not my priorities, and they are not your priorities, believe me,” he said.
“They are all part of a broken system that has profited from this global theft and plunder of American wealth at the expense of the American worker. We are not going to let other countries take advantage of us anymore because, from now on, it is going to be America first,” Trump said.
Full story
3) Court Delivers Trump Victory On Climate Rule
Washington Examiner, 28 April 2017
John Siciliano
A federal appeals court gave the Trump administration a major victory Friday by placing a case on hold regarding former President Barack Obama’s landmark climate change regulation.
The decision means the court will not issue a ruling before the Trump administration has time to propose repealing the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of Obama’s climate agenda.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had been reviewing the case since the fall. The hold on the case gives the Environmental Protection Agency time to conduct a review that ultimately will lead to the repeal of the Clean Power Plan.
A group of 28 states, and more than 100 industry groups and companies, had sued the EPA over the Clean Power Plan.
Friday’s decision halts the case for 60 days, with the EPA required to provide status updates on its review every 30 days.
Full story
4) Energy Policy in Trump's First 100 Days
Competitive Enterprise Institute, 25 April 2017
Marlo Lewis Jr
April 29th will mark the end of President Trump’s first 100 days in office. He has taken several significant actions in energy and climate policy, and seems to be on a roll. What really matters, of course, is how much he accomplishes during the next two to four years, and how much of his energy agenda endures after that.
E&E Daily reporter Arianna Skibell reminds us that the 100-day benchmark originated with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who pushed Congress to enact 15 major pieces of legislation—the foundation of what became the New Deal—within 100 days of taking office. The conditions for that achievement—a highly visible domestic crisis and large congressional majorities favoring the president’s agenda—have no analogue today. Journalists and pundits persist in comparing presidents based on their first hundred days partly because of the influence of pro-New Deal historians, who popularized that metric to ensure that F.D.R.’s early legislative accomplishments would always seem especially impressive.
That said, President Trump has shown himself to be a high achiever in politics no less than in business. According to the White House press office, Trump has:
On energy and climate policy, Trump has taken big steps to change the direction of the country. His March 28th Energy Independence Executive Order:
The one critical energy and climate issue on which Trump has not yet taken action is the Paris Climate Agreement. As my colleague Chris Horner and I discussed previously:
Withdrawing the United States from this treaty would put a stop to Obama’s attempted end-run around the constitutional treaty process, and ensure that elections, not U.N.-organized, political pressure campaigns, determine the direction of U.S. domestic economic and energy policy. If President Trump fails to do this, domestic and foreign opponents of Trump’s energy policies and possibly activist courts can continue to invoke this “international commitment,” and any future U.S. administration will have free rein to pick up where Obama left off.
President Trump’s energy and climate record is one of solid achievement so far. However, until Trump cancels America’s participation, the Paris Agreement will provide the framework for global political pressure campaigns directed against Trump’s pro-growth energy agenda and legal pretexts for rebooting the EPA as the nation’s unlawful climate legislator.
5) Warmists Just Lost The Antarctic Peninsula – It Is Now Cooling
Watts Up With That, 27 April 2017
Anthony Watts
A warming trend of 0.32 °C/decade during 1979–1997 to a cooling trend of − 0.47 °C/decade during 1999–2014.
Remember the much ballyhooed paper that made the cover of Nature, Steig et al, “Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year”, Nature, Jan 22, 2009 that included some conspicuously errant Mannian math from the master of making trends out of noisy data himself? Well, that just went south, literally.
And it just isn’t because the Steig et al. paper was wrong, as proven by three climate skeptics that submitted their own rebuttal, no, it’s because mother nature herself reversed the trend in actual temperature data in the Antarctic peninsula, and that one place where it was warming, was smeared over the entire continent by Mannian math to make it appear the whole of the Antarctic was warming.
The peninsula was the only bit of the Antarctic that suited the Warmists. They gleefully reported glacial breakups there, quite ignoring that the Antarctic as a whole was certainly not warming and was in fact tending to cool. The study below however shows that the warmer period on the peninsula was an atypical blip that has now reversed.
Highlights
Fig. 4. Temporal evolution of the difference between the MAATs and the 1966–2015 average temperature for each station (3-year moving averages).
Full paper: Science of The Total Environment. Volume 580, 15 February 2017, Pages 210–223
Full post
6) New York Times Columnist Blasted By ‘Nasty Left’ For Climate Change Piece
New York Post, 28 April 2017
Chris Perez
A New York Times columnist who was “harangued” for months by “bullying Trump supporters” says he’s now being blasted by the “nasty left” — after he penned a piece about how absurd it was to blindly support climate change, without listening to both sides of the argument.
Former Wall Street Journal writer Bret Stephens has now managed to draw ire from the left after his column ran online Friday.
As a noted “never Trumper” and climate skeptic, he has seen his fair share of hate mail and Twitter trolls over the past year-and-a-half — but nothing like what he’s endured since his article was posted, he says.
“After 20 months of being harangued by bullying Trump supporters, I’m reminded that the nasty left is no different. Perhaps worse,” Stephens tweeted Friday afternoon, as the hateful messages kept rolling in.
“Go eat dog d—s,” fumed one Twitter user.
“When is the Times going to get rid of you?” another asked.
Stephens even managed to tick off fellow journalists.
“You’re a s–thead. a crybaby lil f–kin weenie. a massive twat too,” tweeted Libby Watson, staff writer at Gizmodo.
“I’m gonna lose my mind,” seethed Eve Peyser, politics writer at Vice.
“The ideas ppl like @BretStephensNYT espouse are violently hateful & should not be given a platform by @NYTimes,” she said.
In the column, Stephens never states that he believes climate change is a farce. He simply asserts that people should look at claims from both supporters and deniers, in the attempt to get all the facts.
“Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities,” he writes.
“That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.”
Stephens even describes how he knows people will blast him for the piece, despite the fact he’s arguing for both sides.
“By now I can almost hear the heads exploding. They shouldn’t, because there’s another lesson here — this one for anyone who wants to advance the cause of good climate policy,” he says. “As Revkin wisely noted, hyperbole about climate ‘not only didn’t fit the science at the time but could even be counterproductive if the hope was to engage a distracted public.’”
Describing the idea in another way, Stephens says: “Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong.
“Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” he adds. “None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.”
But social media users didn’t care, with some — including several scientists — going so far as to order a subscription boycott of the Times on Friday.
“Each and every one of us should fully boycott the NY Times — don’t link to them, don’t click on their links. Their actions are inexcusable,” wrote one Twitter user. “You cannot be an ostensible paper-of-record and allow a science denier to spread propaganda.”
Adriana Heguy, a genomics scientist and professor of pathology at NYU, urged her colleagues to scrap their subscriptions, as well.
Full post
7) Michael Guillen: Has Science Lost Its Way?
Fox News, 27 April 2017
There were many impassioned political orations delivered at Saturday’s so-called March for Science. Sadly, I heard nothing about the truly serious problem plaguing science today.
Reproducing experiments is to science’s credibility what verifying financial statements is to a company’s credit rating. The astronomical failure to confirm research that was published in highly respected, peer-reviewed journals suggests something is very wrong with how science is being done. Fifty-two percent of the 1,576 researchers surveyed for the study call it “a significant crisis.”
The crisis appears to be exacerbated by a marked reluctance among scientists to out the epidemic, to contact one another about irreproducible experiments. “That may be because such conversations are difficult,” Nature speculates. “If experimenters reach out to the original researchers for help, they risk appearing incompetent or accusatory, or revealing too much about their own projects.”
The crisis afflicts even science’s most revered ‘facts,’ as cancer researchers C. G. Begley and Lee Ellis discovered. Over an entire decade they put fifty-three published “landmark” studies to the test; they succeeded in replicating only six – that’s an 11% success rate.
A major culprit, they discovered, is that many researchers cherry-picked the results of their experiments – subconsciously or intentionally – to give the appearance of success, thereby increasing their chances of being published.
“They presented specific experiments that supported their underlying hypothesis, but that were not reflective of the entire data set,” report Begley and Ellis, adding this shocking truth: “There are no guidelines that require all data sets to be reported in a paper; often, original data are removed during the peer review and publication process.”
Another apparent culprit is that – and it’s going to surprise most of you – too many scientists are actually never taught the scientific method. As graduate students, they take oodles of courses in their chosen specialty; but their thesis advisors never sit them down and indoctrinate them on best practices. Consequently, remarks University of Wisconsin-Madison biologist Judith Kimble: “They will go off and make it worse.”
This observation seems borne out by the Nature study, whose respondents said the three top weaknesses behind science’s reproducibility crisis are: 1) selective reporting, 2) pressure to publish, and 3) low statistical power or poor analysis. In other words, scientists need to improve on practicing what they preach, which is: 1) a respect for facts – all of them, not just the ones they like, 2) integrity, and 3) a sound scientific method.
No one is suggesting science is rife with evil-minded cheats or incompetents – certainly, I am not. As a scientist – who slept an average of five hours a day pursuing PhD studies in physics, math, and astronomy at Cornell – I’m all too familiar with the pressures that can cause my honest, well-intentioned colleagues to succumb to subtle errors in practice and judgement.
The attendees of the so-called March for Science made a lot of noise about wanting more money and respect from the public and government – what group wouldn’t want that? But nary a whisper was heard from them or the media about science’s urgent reproducibility crisis. Leaving unspoken this elephant-sized question: If we aren’t able to trust the published results of science, then what right does it have to demand more money and respect, before making noticeable strides toward better reproducibility?
Michael Guillen Ph.D., former Science Editor for ABC News, taught physics at Harvard. His novel, “The Null Prophecy,” debuts July 10.
see also GWPF Report: Donna Laframboise: Peer Review — Why Skepticism Is Essential
GWPF Observatory, 29 April 2017
Global temperatures have dropped 0.5° Celsius in April according to U.S meteorologist Ryan Maue. In the Northern Hemisphere they plunged a massive 1°C . As the record 2015/16 El Nino levels off, the global warming hiatus is back with a vengeance.
Global Temperatures Drop To Pre-El Nino Levels
Despite NOAA’s Denial, A Growing Number Of Studies Confirm the Global Warming Hiatus
Despite widespread denial among climate activists, a growing number of scientific research papers in recent months have confirmed the global warming hiatus, trying to explain its possible reasons (for the latest studies see here, here and here). The latest study claims that the Southern Ocean played a critical role in the global warming slowdown.
2) Trump Promises To Make ‘Big Decision’ On ‘One-Sided Paris Deal’ Soon
Press Trust of India, 30 April 2017
President Donald Trump has promised to make a “big decision” on the “one-sided” Paris climate deal soon as he alleged that the US is being unfairly targeted by asking to pay money while major polluting nations like Russia, China and India are contributing nothing.
President Donald Trump marked his 100th day in office in a speech in Pennsylvania by promising to make a “big decision” on the “one-sided” Paris climate deal in the next two weeks – full speech here
In a campaign-style rally in Pennsylvania, a state that helped tip the election in his favor, Trump said the Paris Agreement on Climate Change is “one sided.”
“I will be making a big decision on the Paris accord over the next two weeks and we will see what happens,” he said in his speech to mark the first 100 days of his presidency.
“…like the one-sided Paris climate accord. Where the US pays billions of dollars (for the Paris Climate Accord) while China, Russia, and India have contributed (to pollution) and will contribute nothing,” Trump alleged as the audience booed to the Paris Agreement.
The Paris climate deal within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 2015 by 194 countries and ratified by 143. It aims to hold the increase in average global temperature to below 2 degrees above pre-industrial level by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Trump claimed that it is estimated that for compliance with the agreement could ultimately shrink Americas GDP by USD 2.5 trillion over a 10-year period.
“That means factories and plants closing all over our country,” he said and alleged that the Washington’s ‘dishonest media’ would not report because it is is part of the problem.
“Their priorities are not my priorities, and they are not your priorities, believe me,” he said.
“They are all part of a broken system that has profited from this global theft and plunder of American wealth at the expense of the American worker. We are not going to let other countries take advantage of us anymore because, from now on, it is going to be America first,” Trump said.
Full story
3) Court Delivers Trump Victory On Climate Rule
Washington Examiner, 28 April 2017
John Siciliano
A federal appeals court gave the Trump administration a major victory Friday by placing a case on hold regarding former President Barack Obama’s landmark climate change regulation.
The decision means the court will not issue a ruling before the Trump administration has time to propose repealing the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of Obama’s climate agenda.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had been reviewing the case since the fall. The hold on the case gives the Environmental Protection Agency time to conduct a review that ultimately will lead to the repeal of the Clean Power Plan.
A group of 28 states, and more than 100 industry groups and companies, had sued the EPA over the Clean Power Plan.
Friday’s decision halts the case for 60 days, with the EPA required to provide status updates on its review every 30 days.
Full story
4) Energy Policy in Trump's First 100 Days
Competitive Enterprise Institute, 25 April 2017
Marlo Lewis Jr
April 29th will mark the end of President Trump’s first 100 days in office. He has taken several significant actions in energy and climate policy, and seems to be on a roll. What really matters, of course, is how much he accomplishes during the next two to four years, and how much of his energy agenda endures after that.
E&E Daily reporter Arianna Skibell reminds us that the 100-day benchmark originated with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who pushed Congress to enact 15 major pieces of legislation—the foundation of what became the New Deal—within 100 days of taking office. The conditions for that achievement—a highly visible domestic crisis and large congressional majorities favoring the president’s agenda—have no analogue today. Journalists and pundits persist in comparing presidents based on their first hundred days partly because of the influence of pro-New Deal historians, who popularized that metric to ensure that F.D.R.’s early legislative accomplishments would always seem especially impressive.
That said, President Trump has shown himself to be a high achiever in politics no less than in business. According to the White House press office, Trump has:
- Worked with Congress to enact more legislation and signed more executive orders in his first hundred days than any president in a half century;
- Worked with Congress to enact 28 pieces of legislation, more than any other president since Truman;
- Signed 25 executive orders, the most of any first 100 days in over 50 years (will be over 30 by day 100); and
- Removed more job-killing regulations through legislation than any president in U.S. history.
On energy and climate policy, Trump has taken big steps to change the direction of the country. His March 28th Energy Independence Executive Order:
- Directs the Environmental Protection Agency to review and, if appropriate, suspend, revise, or rescind the Clean Power Plan and related rulemakings;
- Disbands the Obama administration’s Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Carbon;
- Lifts the Obama administration’s coal leasing moratorium on federal lands;
- Directs the Department of Interior to review, and if appropriate, suspend, revise, or rescind Obama administration regulations restricting oil and gas exploration on federal lands;
- Overturns Obama’s climate policy executive orders; and,
- Directs executive agencies to “review all existing regulations, orders, guidance documents, policies, and any other similar agency actions ... that potentially burden the development or use of domestically produced energy resources, with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear energy resources.”
The one critical energy and climate issue on which Trump has not yet taken action is the Paris Climate Agreement. As my colleague Chris Horner and I discussed previously:
Withdrawing the United States from this treaty would put a stop to Obama’s attempted end-run around the constitutional treaty process, and ensure that elections, not U.N.-organized, political pressure campaigns, determine the direction of U.S. domestic economic and energy policy. If President Trump fails to do this, domestic and foreign opponents of Trump’s energy policies and possibly activist courts can continue to invoke this “international commitment,” and any future U.S. administration will have free rein to pick up where Obama left off.
President Trump’s energy and climate record is one of solid achievement so far. However, until Trump cancels America’s participation, the Paris Agreement will provide the framework for global political pressure campaigns directed against Trump’s pro-growth energy agenda and legal pretexts for rebooting the EPA as the nation’s unlawful climate legislator.
5) Warmists Just Lost The Antarctic Peninsula – It Is Now Cooling
Watts Up With That, 27 April 2017
Anthony Watts
A warming trend of 0.32 °C/decade during 1979–1997 to a cooling trend of − 0.47 °C/decade during 1999–2014.
Remember the much ballyhooed paper that made the cover of Nature, Steig et al, “Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year”, Nature, Jan 22, 2009 that included some conspicuously errant Mannian math from the master of making trends out of noisy data himself? Well, that just went south, literally.
And it just isn’t because the Steig et al. paper was wrong, as proven by three climate skeptics that submitted their own rebuttal, no, it’s because mother nature herself reversed the trend in actual temperature data in the Antarctic peninsula, and that one place where it was warming, was smeared over the entire continent by Mannian math to make it appear the whole of the Antarctic was warming.
The peninsula was the only bit of the Antarctic that suited the Warmists. They gleefully reported glacial breakups there, quite ignoring that the Antarctic as a whole was certainly not warming and was in fact tending to cool. The study below however shows that the warmer period on the peninsula was an atypical blip that has now reversed.
Highlights
- We examine climate variability since the 1950s in the Antarctic Peninsula region.
- This region is often cited among those with the fastest warming rates on Earth.
- A re-assessment of climate data shows a cooling trend initiated around 1998/1999.
- This recent cooling has already impacted the cryosphere in the northern AP.
- Observed changes on glacial mass balances, snow cover and permafrost state. [….]
Fig. 4. Temporal evolution of the difference between the MAATs and the 1966–2015 average temperature for each station (3-year moving averages).
Full paper: Science of The Total Environment. Volume 580, 15 February 2017, Pages 210–223
Full post
6) New York Times Columnist Blasted By ‘Nasty Left’ For Climate Change Piece
New York Post, 28 April 2017
Chris Perez
A New York Times columnist who was “harangued” for months by “bullying Trump supporters” says he’s now being blasted by the “nasty left” — after he penned a piece about how absurd it was to blindly support climate change, without listening to both sides of the argument.
Former Wall Street Journal writer Bret Stephens has now managed to draw ire from the left after his column ran online Friday.
As a noted “never Trumper” and climate skeptic, he has seen his fair share of hate mail and Twitter trolls over the past year-and-a-half — but nothing like what he’s endured since his article was posted, he says.
“After 20 months of being harangued by bullying Trump supporters, I’m reminded that the nasty left is no different. Perhaps worse,” Stephens tweeted Friday afternoon, as the hateful messages kept rolling in.
“Go eat dog d—s,” fumed one Twitter user.
“When is the Times going to get rid of you?” another asked.
Stephens even managed to tick off fellow journalists.
“You’re a s–thead. a crybaby lil f–kin weenie. a massive twat too,” tweeted Libby Watson, staff writer at Gizmodo.
“I’m gonna lose my mind,” seethed Eve Peyser, politics writer at Vice.
“The ideas ppl like @BretStephensNYT espouse are violently hateful & should not be given a platform by @NYTimes,” she said.
In the column, Stephens never states that he believes climate change is a farce. He simply asserts that people should look at claims from both supporters and deniers, in the attempt to get all the facts.
“Anyone who has read the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change knows that, while the modest (0.85 degrees Celsius, or about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming of the Northern Hemisphere since 1880 is indisputable, as is the human influence on that warming, much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities,” he writes.
“That’s especially true of the sophisticated but fallible models and simulations by which scientists attempt to peer into the climate future. To say this isn’t to deny science. It’s to acknowledge it honestly.”
Stephens even describes how he knows people will blast him for the piece, despite the fact he’s arguing for both sides.
“By now I can almost hear the heads exploding. They shouldn’t, because there’s another lesson here — this one for anyone who wants to advance the cause of good climate policy,” he says. “As Revkin wisely noted, hyperbole about climate ‘not only didn’t fit the science at the time but could even be counterproductive if the hope was to engage a distracted public.’”
Describing the idea in another way, Stephens says: “Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong.
“Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” he adds. “None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know — as all environmentalists should — that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.”
But social media users didn’t care, with some — including several scientists — going so far as to order a subscription boycott of the Times on Friday.
“Each and every one of us should fully boycott the NY Times — don’t link to them, don’t click on their links. Their actions are inexcusable,” wrote one Twitter user. “You cannot be an ostensible paper-of-record and allow a science denier to spread propaganda.”
Adriana Heguy, a genomics scientist and professor of pathology at NYU, urged her colleagues to scrap their subscriptions, as well.
Full post
7) Michael Guillen: Has Science Lost Its Way?
Fox News, 27 April 2017
There were many impassioned political orations delivered at Saturday’s so-called March for Science. Sadly, I heard nothing about the truly serious problem plaguing science today.
The single greatest threat to science right now comes from within its own ranks. Last year Nature, the prestigious international science journal, published a study revealing that “More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments.”
Reproducing experiments is to science’s credibility what verifying financial statements is to a company’s credit rating. The astronomical failure to confirm research that was published in highly respected, peer-reviewed journals suggests something is very wrong with how science is being done. Fifty-two percent of the 1,576 researchers surveyed for the study call it “a significant crisis.”
The crisis appears to be exacerbated by a marked reluctance among scientists to out the epidemic, to contact one another about irreproducible experiments. “That may be because such conversations are difficult,” Nature speculates. “If experimenters reach out to the original researchers for help, they risk appearing incompetent or accusatory, or revealing too much about their own projects.”
The crisis afflicts even science’s most revered ‘facts,’ as cancer researchers C. G. Begley and Lee Ellis discovered. Over an entire decade they put fifty-three published “landmark” studies to the test; they succeeded in replicating only six – that’s an 11% success rate.
A major culprit, they discovered, is that many researchers cherry-picked the results of their experiments – subconsciously or intentionally – to give the appearance of success, thereby increasing their chances of being published.
“They presented specific experiments that supported their underlying hypothesis, but that were not reflective of the entire data set,” report Begley and Ellis, adding this shocking truth: “There are no guidelines that require all data sets to be reported in a paper; often, original data are removed during the peer review and publication process.”
Another apparent culprit is that – and it’s going to surprise most of you – too many scientists are actually never taught the scientific method. As graduate students, they take oodles of courses in their chosen specialty; but their thesis advisors never sit them down and indoctrinate them on best practices. Consequently, remarks University of Wisconsin-Madison biologist Judith Kimble: “They will go off and make it worse.”
This observation seems borne out by the Nature study, whose respondents said the three top weaknesses behind science’s reproducibility crisis are: 1) selective reporting, 2) pressure to publish, and 3) low statistical power or poor analysis. In other words, scientists need to improve on practicing what they preach, which is: 1) a respect for facts – all of them, not just the ones they like, 2) integrity, and 3) a sound scientific method.
No one is suggesting science is rife with evil-minded cheats or incompetents – certainly, I am not. As a scientist – who slept an average of five hours a day pursuing PhD studies in physics, math, and astronomy at Cornell – I’m all too familiar with the pressures that can cause my honest, well-intentioned colleagues to succumb to subtle errors in practice and judgement.
The attendees of the so-called March for Science made a lot of noise about wanting more money and respect from the public and government – what group wouldn’t want that? But nary a whisper was heard from them or the media about science’s urgent reproducibility crisis. Leaving unspoken this elephant-sized question: If we aren’t able to trust the published results of science, then what right does it have to demand more money and respect, before making noticeable strides toward better reproducibility?
Michael Guillen Ph.D., former Science Editor for ABC News, taught physics at Harvard. His novel, “The Null Prophecy,” debuts July 10.
see also GWPF Report: Donna Laframboise: Peer Review — Why Skepticism Is Essential
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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