by Donna Laframboise, Big Picture News
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a press release
today. It tells us the IPCC assesses “thousands of scientific papers
published each year,” and that its latest report relies on “more than
6,000 references.”
That sounds impressive until one remembers that academic publishing
is in the grips of a reproducibility crisis. A disturbing percentage of
the research published in medicine, economics, computer science,
psychology, and other fields simply doesn’t stand up. Whenever
independent third parties attempt to reproduce/replicate this work –
carrying out the same research in order to achieve the same findings –
the success rate is dismal.
The influential 2005 paper, Why Most Published Research Findings Are False, is now very old news. Headlines declaring that ‘science is broken’ have become commonplace. In 2015, the editor-in-chief of The Lancet declared that “much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.”
So here’s the bottom line: We know that studies about promising drugs
typically fail when strangers attempt to reproduce those studies. We
know that flashy physics research published in Science and Nature
has been wholly fraudulent. We know that half of economics papers can’t
be replicated, even with assistance from their own authors. We know
political bias distorts the peer-review process in psychology. (All of
this is discussed in a report I wrote in 2016).
We therefore have no earthly reason to imagine that climate science is exempt from these kinds of problems.
If half of the scientific literature is untrue, it therefore follows that half of climate research is also untrue.
This means that 3,000 of the IPCC’s 6,000 references aren’t worth the paper they’re written on...
[read more here]
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