The Peer Review Scam: Why not review your own paper?
The Peer Review Scam: Why not review your own paper?
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/11/the-peer-review-scam-why-not-review-your-own-paper/
If you suffer from an uncontrollable urge to claim that peer review is a part of The Scientific Method (that’s you Matthew Bailes, Pro VC of Swinburne), the bad news just keeps on coming. Now, we can add the terms “Peer Review Rigging” to “Peer-review tampering”, and “Citation Rings”. Not only do personal biases and self-serving interests mean good papers are slowed for years and rejected for inane reasons, but gibberish gets published, and in some fields most results can’t be replicated. Now we find (is anyone surprised?) that some authors are even reviewing their own work. It’s called Peer-Review-Rigging. When the editor asks for suggestions of reviewers, you provide pseudonyms and bogus emails. The editor sends the review to a gmail type address, you pick it up, and voila, you can pretend to be an independent reviewer. One researcher, Hyung-In Moon, was doing this to review his own submissions. He was caught because he sent the reviews back in less than 24 hours. Presumably if he’d waiting a week, no one would have noticed. Nature reports: “THE PEER-REVIEW SCAM” Authors: Cat Ferguson, Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky are the staff writer and two co-founders, respectively, of Retraction Watch in […]Rating: 8.7/10 (37 votes cast)
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German Climate Institute Frets Media Are Showing So ‘Little Interest’ In Latest IPCC Report!
German Climate Institute Frets Media Are Showing So “Little Interest” In Latest IPCC Report!
Payback for blind climate alarmism: Media interest in the latest IPCC Report is small By Dr. Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt The climate alarm narrative just isn’t working anymore. People have seen through the blind climate alarmism and have had enough. The profiteers of climate fear are now becoming seriously worried about the future. Climate institutes are fearing research budgets will be cut in the future. Newspapers are all too reluctant to lose their exciting climate alarm stories. And insurance companies are fretting over their extreme weather policies. The Deutsche Klimakonsortium (DKK) [German Climate Consortium] recently set up a workshop in order to discuss the waning public interest in their own subject matter. In its newsletter, the DKK summarizes the results of the event: DKK Workshop: ‘How is climate communication (still) doing today?’ On September 16 [2014] the public relations working group of the DKK convened in an internal workshop on today’s possibilities and challenges in climate communication. The background was the observation that the media attention has shifted away from the analysis of climate change and over to solution possibilities and the societal challenges of climate change. This was clearly visible by the weak media interest in the latest IPCC Climate report (AR 5) compared to the AR 4 of 7 years earlier, directors of the press and public relations of various research institutes have determined. Suggestions on the perspective of press and public relations work from Ute Kreis, University of Hamburg, Dr. Annette Kirk, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Dr. Dirk Notz, Research Group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and a journalist (Christopher Schrader, Süddeutsche Zeitung) provided for a lively discussion.” So interest in the 5th IPCC Report was scant. For this the IPCC likely only has itself to blame because it is no longer able to come to terms with the new research findings and the fact that CO2 climate sensitivity must be reduced in accordance to newest scientific results. Insteresting is that Christoph Schrader of the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper is apparently well integrated in the IPCC circle. Almost regularly we have to report on his climate-alarmism-tainted reporting at this blog. And also Dirk Notz is a die-hard IPCC-man whose dubious studies we’ve come across (see “Hamburg Max Planck Institute with questionable evidence on Arctic sea ice“).
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The Science Free Royal Society Report On Extreme Weather
The Science Free Royal Society Report On Extreme Weather
By Paul Homewood http://ipccreport.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/has-the-royal-society-abandoned-science/ Paul Matthews has a good analysis of the Royal Society’s new report “Resilience to Extreme Weather”. The Royal Society, formerly a highly regarded institution, is increasingly abandoning science in favour of political propaganda. Its latest piece of scaremongering, Resilience to extreme weather, is packed full of emotive images of floods. and completely vacuous graphics like this: (there are at least 4 such meaningless diagrams) but contains virtually no science. In the introduction, Paul Nurse claims that “By presenting evidence of trends in extreme weather and the different ways resilience can be built to it, we hope this report will galvanise action by local and national governments…”. But unfortunately Nurse and his chums seem to have forgotten to include any evidence of trends in extreme weather. All we get is examples and anecdotes. Throughout the entire 100+ page report, there is not a single graph showing past trends in extreme events (there are plenty showing the results of speculative computer models for the future). Graphs of UK rainfall are often shown at Paul Homewood’s blog, for example in his recent post Rainfall Patterns In The South West, relevant to the Somerset flooding, where it can be seen that there is no trend in rainfall and the wettest month occurred in 1929. I wonder why no such graphs are shown in the Royal Society report? Similarly there is no data provided in the report on hurricanes and typhoons, despite there being a suitable figure on this in IPCC AR5 WG1 Chapter 2: Hurricane Sandy is mentioned several times in the report, but there is no mention of the current record-breaking lull in hurricane activity. Tucked away in the middle of the report are the distinctly un-alarming remarks from the IPCC SREX (2012), such as “Low confidence that anthropogenic warming has affected the magnitude or frequency of floods at a global scale”. Read the rest here. Last year, the Royal Society relied on the UK govt for 67% of its income, some £48 million. https://royalsociety.org/about-us/reporting/ This funding has helped support a year on year rise in the salary bill of 11%, and an increase in the number of employees earning over £100K from two to four. Meanwhile, the numbers paid over £60K has risen from ten to fifteen, a veritable gravy train. https://royalsociety.org/~/media/about-us/reporting/2014-17-9-trustees-report.pdf Is it any wonder they produce …
‘A Quarter Of The Energy We Use Is Just In Our Crap’: Black Friday And The Destruction Of Planet Earth
‘A Quarter Of The Energy We Use Is Just In Our Crap’: Black Friday And The Destruction Of Planet Earth
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/11/28/3597347/black-friday-climate-hypermaterialism/
CREDIT: AP Black Friday has become an orgiastic celebration of unbridled consumerism. And earlier this month, Pope Francis wrote a letter to world leaders saying, “There are constant assaults on the natural environment, the result of unbridled consumerism, and this will have serious consequences for the world economy.” Black Friday is a sort of reverse “Hunger Games,” an annual ritualized competition, but one built around overabundance, rather than scarcity. It is perhaps the inevitable outcome of a country whose citizens are commonly referred to as “consumers.” So what better time to think about how the global economic system is a Ponzi scheme, an utterly unsustainable system that effectively takes wealth from our children and future generations — wealth in the form of ground water, arable land, fisheries, a livable climate — to prop up our carbon-intensive lifestyles? We cannot stop catastrophic climate change — in the long term and possibly even the medium-term — without a pretty dramatic change to our overconsumption-based economic system. We have already overshot the Earth’s biocapacity — and the overshoot gets worse every year. “A quarter of the energy we use is just in our crap,” physicist Saul Griffith explains in his detailed discussion of our carbon footprint. You can watch the MacArthur genius award winner soberly dissect his formerly unsustainable lifestyle here and here. Or listen to the MSNBC interview of “Reverend Billy Talen of the Church of Stop Shopping.” Seriously (sort of). Or you can read the Onion’s black humor, “Chinese Factory Worker Can’t Believe The Shit He Makes For Americans.” The tragic irony is that much of this holiday shopping is supposedly for our kids — and yet this overconsumption is a core part of our climate inaction, which, as President Obama has said, is a betrayal of our children! Now it’s true, as I’ve said, that if we ever get really serious about avoiding catastrophic climate change, we could dramatically cut national and global emissions for decades under the auspices of our basic economic system. You could use a high and rising price for CO2 plus smart regulations to encourage efficiency at a state and national level. Also, the end to hyper-consumerism is not something amenable to legislation. It is most likely to come when we are desperate — when …