Archives par mot-clé : Narrative

better to know...?, climate-debate

How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Have Corrupted Science

by A. Finley, Oct 2, 2023 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Scientists were aghast last month when Patrick Brown, climate director at the Breakthrough Institute in Berkeley, Calif., acknowledged that he’d censored one of his studies to increase his odds of getting published.

Credit to him for being honest about something his peers also do but are loath to admit. [emphasis, links added]

In an essay for the Free Press, Mr. Brown explained that he omitted “key aspects other than climate change” from a paper on California wildfires because such details would “dilute the story that prestigious journals like Nature and its rival, Science, want to tell.”

Editors of scientific journals, he wrote, “have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives.”

Nature’s editor, Magdalena Skipper, denied that the journal has “a preferred narrative.” No doubt the editors at the New York Times and ProPublica would say the same of their own pages.

Mr. Brown’s criticisms aren’t new. In 2005 Stanford epidemiologist John Ioannidis wrote an essay titled “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”

He contended that scientists “may be prejudiced purely because of their belief in a scientific theory or commitment to their own findings.”

“The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true,” Dr. Ioannidis argued.

“Many otherwise seemingly independent, university-based studies may be conducted for no other reason than to give physicians and researchers qualifications for promotion or tenure.”

In addition, many scientists use the peer-review process to suppress findings that challenge their own beliefs, which perpetuates “false dogma.”

As Dr. Ioannidis explained, the more scientists there are in a field, the more competition there is to get published and the more likely they are to produce “impressive ‘positive’ results” and “extreme research claims.” …snip…

The peer-review process is supposed to flag problems in studies that get submitted to journals. But as Dr. Ioannidis explained in a Sept. 22 JAMA editorial, the process is failing:

…

better to know...?, climate-debate

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen Rejects ‘Climate Change’ As ‘A Quasi-Religious Movement Predicated on An Absurd ‘Scientific’ Narrative’

by R. Lindzen, Dec 5, 2022 in WUWT

Dr. Richard Lindzen’s new paper: An Assessment of the Conventional Global Warming Narrative – Published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation – September 22, 2022: Climate change is “a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative. The policies invoked on behalf of this movement have led to the US hobbling its energy system.” – “The Earth’s climate has, indeed, undergone major variations, but these offer no evidence of a causal role for CO₂.”

“Unless we wake up to the absurdity of the motivating narrative, this is likely only to be the beginning of the disasters that will follow from the current irrational demonization of CO₂.”

By: Admin – Climate Depot

Click to access 2022-09-22-Lindzen-global-warming-narrative.pdf

…

 

CO₂ is a particularly ridiculous choice for a ‘pollutant.’ Its primary role is as a fertiliser for plant life. Currently, almost all plants are starved of CO₂. Moreover, if we were to remove a bit more than 60% of current CO₂, the consequences would be dire: namely death by starvation for all animal life. It would not likely lead to a particularly cold world since such a reduction would only amount to a couple of percent change in the radiative budget. After all, a 30% reduction of solar radiation about 2.5 billion years ago did not lead to an Earth much colder than it is today, as we earlier noted in connection with the Early Faint Sun Paradox.

…

The Earth’s climate has, indeed, undergone major variations, but these offer no evidence of a causal role for CO₂. For the glaciation cycles of the past 700 thousand years, the proxy data from the Vostok ice cores shows that cooling precedes decreases in CO₂ despite the very coarse temporal resolution (Jouzel et al.,1987, Gore, 2006). Higher temporal resolution is needed to show that warming preceded the increase in CO₂ as well (Caillon et al, 2003). For earlier variations, there is no suggestion of any correlation with carbon dioxide at all, as shown in Figure 9a, a commonly presented reconstruction of CO₂ levels and ‘temperature’ for the past 600 million years or so.

…

Australia, climate-debate

New Study Finds Australian Sea Temperatures Multiple Degrees Warmer Than Today During The Last Glacial

by K. Richard, Nov 17, 2022 in NoTricksZone

Sea temperatures in regions near Australia have failed to cooperate with a CO2-driven climate narrative.

Glacial conditions and ~200 ppm CO2 levels were thought to have prevailed throughout most of the last 60,000 years across the Earth.

But a new study finds sea temperatures near Australia were “3 to 5°C warmer than the modern average temperature” during several millennia of this period.

Proxy evidence suggests average subsurface water temperatures in the Southern Ocean/Australia region may have been “>7°C warmer than modern” during the last 10,000 years (the Holocene).

The eastern and western core graphical record indicates the amplitude of sea surface temperature swings reached 5 to 7°C from 30,000 to 60,000 years ago – a time when CO2 levels were thought to be stable and low (near 200 ppm).

These records once again affirm sea surface and subsurface temperature changes do not align with the narrative suggesting Earth’s climate changes are driven by fluctuations in CO2 concentrations.

climate-debate

Regime Pseudoscientists Enforce Climate Change Narrative

by M. Rectenwald, Oct 12, 2022 in ClimateChangeDispatch

It does this by pathologizing said subjects and their views.

For example, the field has been mobilized to discredit so-called conspiracy theorists by attempting to identify the mistaken mental processes that conspiracy theorists exhibit. [bold, links added]

The methods and results of such studies have proven to be less than stellar, to say the least.

Now, the field is also being wielded to discredit “climate change deniers.”1 By pathologizing the thinking processes of these stubbornly mistaken subjects, the views of said subjects can be safely dismissed.

After all, the theory of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is obviously true, or so says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the planetary authority on the matter.

Likewise, those who doubt or deny ACC must be crazy. The point of psychological studies is to discover just what is wrong with these people and how, if possible, to change their minds.

Of course, such studies focus exclusively on the “deniers,” without ever considering climate change believers and whether something is wrong with them. The field lacks even a semblance of symmetry.

Never mind that “the science” is dubious or that climate change is ludicrously being blamed for heart attacks, obesity in children, increased violence, and terrorism, among other medical and social maladies.

Believing in a causal connection between a questionable climate change theory and these phenomena must be perfectly rational, according to this kind of research.

Such is the thrust of a recent study of Australian climate change skeptics conducted by a lecturer in psychology and a professor of geology at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

Entitled “Associations of Locus of Control, Information Processing Style and Anti-reflexivity with Climate Change Scepticism in an Australian Sample,” the study examines climate change skeptics in terms of thinking styles rather than “values” and “sociodemographic” factors.

Since past research has found values and sociodemographic factors to be intractable, the researchers in this study seek to identify factors that presumably can be changed and that should likewise prove useful for the study.