Keep in mind, guys, its reversible. Even in a nightmare scenario, where the world evolves to provide well for the human community using clean and abundant energy, and it turns out that global warming isn’t so, what will we have lost? We can still crank up the coal-burning generators and get back to producing loud, shiny crap.
So, really, nothing is lost.
How? Where?
But are they really oversights? Is it possible for two papers that have made it through peer review and been published to reach contradictory conclusions?
I would imagine that it’s not always possible to know whether the judgment is incorrect at the time of publication.
No, I don’t understand that, but if you say so, I will take your word for it.
Is it possible for two papers that have passed through the peer review process to reach contradictory conclusions?
No, that’s not how I used it. Another poster tried to score rhetorical points based on the fact that I didn’t know the answer to somebody’s question. I was using intention’s quote to basically show that there’s no shame in admitting that one doesn’t know something.
When a paper is published in a peer-reviewed journal, the entire process used is published. This way, someone else can use this same process and publish the results, which will either confirm the original results or point out flaws in the original study-this way, opinions are pretty much eliminated, leaving the facts of the matter. This is why some call science a self-correcting procedure.
My first question is this: Is it possible for two published papers that have passed peer review to reach contradictory conclusions without either author falsifying data?
My second question is this: How and where did I go by a press release?
sigh
Look up the word “mistake”, note that it does not mean the same thing as “lie”, then get back to us, o.k.?
I agree that “mistake” does not mean the same thing as “lie.”
Now, back to my questions:
Is it possible for two published papers that have passed peer review to reach contradictory conclusions without either author falsifying data?
How and where did I go by a press release?
Unfortunately the question isn’t totally resolved. Does “mistake” can include errors in judgment that can not immediately be seen as being incorrect, even when pointed out? In other words, do you agree that a situation can arise in which scientist A makes judgment call A, and scientist B makes judgment call B, leading to contradictory results, but it’s not immediately clear which judgment call is correct?
Could you quote me where I do that?
By the way, the actual list of scientists that supposedly have published on some aspect disputing the AGW consensus is available from the Hudson Institute here. Note that it is a list of scientists as they promised and does not actually give any references to the papers that supposedly dispute the consensus. Furthermore, you might have noticed that the press release itself says:
This statement about how the researchers might or might not describe themselves seems like a bit of an understatement as their list includes at least three regular contributors to the RealClimate.org website (Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann [yes…the very same one who the contrarians pillar over the “hockey stick” graph!!!], and Stefan Rahmstorf)! As many will know, RealClimate is a website set up by climate scientists to expound on the subject and is, to put it mildly, no friend of the AGW doubters!
Another name I recognized on their list is Brian Soden, who is one of my personal favorite climate scientists and has done very good work showing how the climate models seem to be handling the water vapor feedback essentially correctly and how they do a good job correctly getting the dip in temperatures that occurred after Mt. Pinatubo erupted with a full climate model but not with one in which the water vapor feedback (that amplifies climate change) turned off. This in my view is some of the most elegant work suggesting that the climate models are getting the climate sensitivity calculation at least roughly correct.
And, then there is William Ruddiman, probably listed because some contrarians like his controversial hypothesis that man might have put enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere over the last 8000 years since agriculture developed (due to clearing land and releasing methane through, e.g., rice cultivation) that we stopped the climate from going into another ice age. Clearly, this hypothesis has some appeal to them since it argues that our influence on the climate has been a good thing. However, unfortunately for them, it does not argue that we should now be putting way more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere…and in fact seems to require a climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases that is at or above the upper end of what range the IPCC estimates as most probable, implying the AGW will be at the high end or beyond of the IPCC projections!
In summary, I think that we can conclude that this list is pretty much completely bogus. The only semi-interesting question is what fraction of those listed are scientists who really do challenge the consensus.
Wow… they might’ve just as well said, “Yeah, we’re makin’ this shit up.”
Of course it’s possible - there are humans involved. In the words of my Logic professor, though:
In fact, I can’t think of a single scenario in which two completely contradictory papers would get simulatneously published in the same journal (or similar journals).
The peer-review process doesn’t just examine the data that has been collected, the equations used, etc., it also examines the conclusions that are drawn in the paper. If these two scientists have truly conflicting results/conclusions, then at least one of them has some problems with their research and will be called on it.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Can you provide an example of some sorts (even a fictional one), so I can better understand?
The question that was asked, though, wasn’t one that required any kind of specialized intelligence, so “I don’t know” wasn’t really a valid answer. It’s like asking, “which is the larger amount: 50 cents, or 1 dollar?”
(Paraphrased, the question was, “Which has more scientific validity: a paper published in a peer reviewed journal, or research that is instead given straight to the mass media?”)
And is anyone trying to debate that there is shame in admitting that one doesn’t know the answer to something? If not, then it was a strawman.
If scientist A and scientist B each come to different conclusions, based on a single body of evidence, then problems should be identifiable in one or the other’s (or both) papers. As I mentioned earlier in this post, though, I may just be misunderstanding what it is you’re trying to claim here.
If you’re asking if it’s possible for two scientists to conduct independent research, and reach completely different conslusions, then the answer is “yes”, and this type of thing would be caught in the review process. If both conclusions cannot be correct, then there are some errors to be found.
I somehow missed this when I skimmed the article. Brilliant!
LilShieste
My bad on this…If you go to the full press release [PDF file] on the Hudson Institute website, they indeed list the relevant papers. Thus, we are able to see why certain scientists make the list.
Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt made the list because of a paper entitled “Solar Forcing of Regional Climate Change during the Maunder Minimum”. So apparently, a study that claims that a decrease in solar irradiance was the cause of the colder global temperatures (and even more notably, regional climate shifts) in the 1600s is evidence against AGW. Strangely enough, this study relied heavily on the very climate models that the AGW skeptics critique.
Stefan Rahmstorf made the list for a paper entitled “Possible solar origin of the 1,470-year glacial climate cycle demonstrated in a coupled model”. (And, there are a total of 8 authors on this…So it increases their author count by 8.) Again, this is a paper that uses “evil” climate models to demonstrate their effect. It is also interesting that this would be classified as supporting Singer and Avery’s hypothesis since the abstract very clearly says that it is an effect that operates only under glacial conditions and would not during the current interglacial period (Holocene):
And, just in case that is not clear enough, they repeat this notion in their concluding paragraph, making particular note of the lack of any clear and pronounced observed 1470 year climate cycle during the Holocene:
It certainly takes a lot of creativity by Avery and Singer to conclude that either of these two paper’s supports their point-of-view!
You can start by looking at this paper:
http://eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/204_2001GL014360.pdf
Do you agree that it has passed peer review? Do you agree that it apparently contradicts, to some extent, the conclusions of other published work?
Frankly, I don’t understand the paper 100% so I will try to either read it more carefully over the weekend or find a different example if this one is unsatisfactory.
If you ask that question to somebody who is not familiar with American currency, it would be reasonable for them to respond “I don’t know.” In my case, I don’t know enough about peer review to answer the question. My only experience with peer review was when my spouse’s dissertation was being reviewed for publication. Honestly, I wasn’t too impressed. It seemed like the reviewers’ comments said a lot more about the reviewers’ personal agendas than it did about the merits of the dissertation.
How about you explain what you understood this comment to mean:
Actually, there should sometimes be some shame in admitting to being ignorant of some things.
I would characterize an inability to fashion even a guess as to which of the two (a publication in a peer reviewed journal versus a press release) should be given greater credence as pretty shameful.
I am assuming, of course, that you are an adult.
I’ve been trying to stay out of this side discussion about peer-review since it is unclear to me what its purpose even is but I feel the need to weigh in with my view here as someone who has refereed some 75 papers in physics journals and has been an author on about 30.
Peer review is not meant to be a guarantee that a paper is correct. It is merely meant to be some check that there are not glaringly obvious errors, that the work is presented completely and clearly enough to allow people to understand what was done and in principle replicate it, and that its relation to previous work is presented accurately, and that the work itself meets the journal’s criteria of being a significant enough advance over previous work.
It is an imperfect filter in that it does allow some bad papers to get through and does reject some good papers. However, in my experience, it works well enough to serve its function, which is to provide such a filter that significantly increases the signal-to-noise ratio above that of the non-peer-reviewed sources and thus allow science to advance. (Note also that peer-review is not supposed to weed out any paper that turns out to be wrong. It is fine to come up with a hypothesis that further work shows is not correct. Peer-review shouldn’t be thought of as a stamp of correctness as much as an indication that the ideas and evidence presented are compelling enough, and presented clearly and completely enough, to be worthy of consideration by the scientific community.)
There will certainly be some cases when individual authors will feel “screwed” by the process (e.g., of not having a good paper accepted). Personally, I can identify only one case where I feel we sort of got screwed in this way.
On the flip side, there will again be papers that get in that have no business being there…or at least had glaring errors that should have been found and corrected in the refereeing process. I have twice written comments on papers that were published in very good physics journals (Physical Review Letters and Applied Physics Letters), once submitting it formally to be published (which it was) and once just sending it to the author who then did note my results when he gave a talk on his work at a meeting. In both these cases, the errors were pretty obvious to me on a first read of the paper and left me wondering why they weren’t caught in the refereeing process…but such stuff happens and it is not realistic to prevent it completely. (I imagine I have probably let some things through when I have refereed that caused another scientist to wonder, “Who was the idiot who reviewed this paper and let that through?”)
Still, while individual authors might get unjustly screwed or unjustly benefitted by such errors in the refereeing process, I don’t think it really hurts the progress of science as a whole that much as long as the percentage of these is not too high.
As applied to the current issue at hand, the fact that Singer and Avery have chosen to present their conclusions by press release and a book for the masses rather than publishing in the peer-reviewed literature is a bad sign. And, the fact that just a little bit of investigation on my part has turned up serious problems makes it clear to me why they have chosen to do this…i.e., that their work is garbage. As for the peer-reviewed papers that they reference, one would have to study them all in detail to draw quantitative conclusions but I have already identified a couple papers above that are probably fine papers but don’t actually support their conclusions. I know there are a few papers that fall into the category of garbage papers that probably never should have been published. (Many of these are probably published in less prestigious journals that don’t turn down many papers or multidisciplinary journals where the journal would have a hard time finding suitable referees really qualified to review it.) And, then there are presumably some papers that, whether they turn out to right or wrong, are legitimate work. (I don’t know about the particular paper of Lindzen’s that brazil84 linked to above but certainly there are many scientists who would say that Lindzen’s papers in support of his "iris hypothesis presented a legitimate enough hypothesis and argument that it was the correct decision to publish them for consideration by fellow scientists, even if they believe that this hypothesis had some serious strikes against it from the start and that subsequent evidence shows that it does not seem to be correct.)
Thank you all for feedback. I knew the press release was not in any way, shape or form going to stop the AGW debates. I just was hoping for reassurance about the objectivity of scientists in the face of potentially contradictory findings.
Just 'cause I’m kind of bored, I decided to look at a few more of the papers in Avery and Singer’s list. For example, consider Nicolas Caillon et al., “Timing of Atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature Changes Across Termination III,” Science 299 (2003): 1728-31. This is a paper with 6 authors and so it adds another 6 scientists to their list.
What this paper discusses is the fact that a careful look at the timing of the rise of CO2 levels at the end of one of the previous ice ages shows that it lagged the start of the Antarctic glacial warming by ~800 years. Presumably, this is thought to cast doubt on the idea that CO2 causes warming rather than that warming causes outgassing of CO2. However, since at least the mid-1970s, it has in fact been understood that the trigger for glaciation and deglaciation is orbital oscillations and that the cooling or warming then triggers changes in CO2 levels that further magnify the effects. In fact, let’s look at what the authors say in this paper in regards to its relevance to the current issue of anthropogenic warming:
Then there is Gerald H. Haug, “Climate and the Collapse of Maya Civilization,” Science 299 (2003): 1731-1735, another 6 author paper. Here is the abstract:
Unlike the previous paper, this paper at least does not directly state any support for the consensus view of AGW…but it doesn’t speak against it either. In fact, I am hard-pressed to find any relevance whatsoever for regarding the issue. I guess Avery and Singer would argue that it shows that there were (at least regional) climate variations during this interglacial period. But, I can hardly see how this claim is at all controversial…or in contradiction to the consensus regarding AGW. Its inclusion is frankly just sort of bizarre.
jshore, as always, an excellent post. I believe, however, that you underestimate the number of erroneous papers that are published by refereed journals:
People often accuse me of thinking that the consensus AGW scientists are liars, or are engaged in some conspiracy. While there are some climate scientists who engage in falsifying or hiding data, results, and code, in the main my thoughts run more along the lines that Ioannidis refers to when he says that the erroneous scientific studies are attributable to “more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis.”
I also agree with the article when it says “We need to pay more attention to the replication of published scientific results.” This is crucial, but when groups like those of us at ClimateAudit engage in that activity, people say things like “oh, similar results are adequate, no need to replicate them exactly”, or “forget about that study, we’ve moved on” …
Me, I don’t believe anything I read in the journals, refereed or not. I’ve seen too much self-serving garbage published even in the most prestigious journals to think that peer review is any kind of scientific imprimatur. The only test of science is replicability … and unfortunately, far too many climate science studies have either failed that test, or never been subjected to it.
w.