By Jo Nova
This is where the worship of “expert” peer review science gets us — a science crime syndicate
Once science stopped being about winning arguments and became just the-number-of-papers-someone-published, it became an empty shell. And once billions of dollars, depended on sacred ‘experts’, it was doomed.
Long gone are the days when papers were hardly ever retracted and pal review was “the big problem? Now, fake papers and fake editors are so rife they are their own specialist industry. Networks of brokers connect paper-mills up with authors and publishers and place batches of papers in journals with ‘friendly editors’. When Richardson et al analyzed PLOS ONE, they found 33 editors who seemed to have an extraordinarily high rate of retractions. One in particular had approved 79 papers of which, 49 had already been retracted.
Given the vital importance of peer review and science to the UN, the Labor Party and the Greens, the question is will they immediately launch an inquiry and set up a Royal Commission… or do nothing at all, and mention it to no one. Shh!
If an entire modern economy depended on getting science right, there would be constant monitoring and reporting studies like this. Instead some scandalous and systemic failure of science is reported every few years and all the people who “follow the science” don’t give a toss.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg –the study acknowledged that many fake papers had not even been discovered yet. And this paper doesn’t even mention the replication crisis where only half of all papers can even be replicated. Or worse, that the papers that were harder to replicate were more likely to be cited.
Wait til they find out thousands of real papers are worthless because they rely on broken climate models that got the core assumptions wrong decades ago. And that’s not just the papers pretending to predict the climate, but tens of thousands of other papers calculating the floods that won’t happen, or the birds that won’t be extinct, or the cost of building seawalls we won’t need, and of building planes that won’t fly on recycled canola oil. A whole generation of scientists spinning their wheels…
(A) Retractions are increasingly published in batches. The ∼2010 spike in the number of large-batch retractions is almost entirely attributable to a large swath of conference proceedings articles retracted by IEEE. For the first time since this spike, the majority of 2023 retractions were reported in batches larger than 10 articles.
Scientific fraud has become an ‘industry,’ alarming analysis finds
Sophisticated global networks are infiltrating journals to publish fake papers
The problems Richardson and his colleagues documented are growing fast. The team built a list of papers identified in 55 databases of likely paper mill products, looking at the number of suspicious papers published each year between 2016 and 2020.
Richardson and his colleagues found that the problem goes far beyond networks of unscrupulous editors and authors scratching each other’s backs. They identified what appear to be coordinated efforts to arrange the publication of batches of dubious papers in multiple journals.
The team looked at more than 2000 papers flagged on PubPeer for containing duplicated images and identified clusters of papers that all shared images. Those sets of papers were often published around the same time and in a limited selection of journals. Looking at patterns of duplicated images is an “absolutely innovative” method for investigating these networks, Abalkina says. “No one has done this before.”
The rate of fake papers appears to be doubling much faster than the rate of retractions is:
They found that the number of suspected paper mill products doubled every 1.5 years—10 times faster than the rate of growth of the literature as a whole, although still a small proportion of papers overall. The number of retractions and papers flagged on PubPeer had also risen fast, doubling every 3.3 and 3.6 years, respectively, but not keeping pace with the increase in suspected fraudulent papers.
“This means that the percentage of fraudulent science is growing,” Abalkina says. That poses particular risks to fields like medical science, where the fake papers sometimes make their way into systematic reviews and meta-analyses, potentially distorting our understanding of drugs and treatments, she says.
At this rate, soon fake science will eclipse the real stuff, and if we could rule out Woke Science as well, perhaps it already has?
(B) Annual global scientific activity as measured by items labeled as “journal article” or “conference proceeding article” in OpenAlex (47), as retracted articles reported by Retraction Watch, as PubPeer-commented articles and as suspected paper mill products. We make use of the linear trends observable in the log–linear plot to extrapolate these observations for the period 2020–2030. We show the 95% CI using shaded bands. The number of suspected paper mill products shows the largest growth rate, with a doubling time of 1.5 y.
This paper mentions the word “fraud” 59 times. Commenters should be aware (sorry) the word gets caught in the filter here for legal reasons. So please use it carefully.
REFERENCE
Richardson et al (2025) The entities enabling scientific fraud at scale are large, resilient, and growing rapidly, August 4, 2025, 122 (32) e2420092122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2420092122
Good article. We need to be looking to weed out the fake science including from our side of politics and especially on issues that are so important in Australia, like the health of the Great Barrier Reef.
Of course, Peter Ridd’s use of the AIMS coral cover data is a case in point. I’ve written very extensively about how inappropriate it is to use this categorical data, base on subjective manta tows, that are only of reef perimeters, and then invent SE/uncertainty values as he does.
For sure, the coral cover claims made by Peter Ridd are extensively cited most recently in the John Christy, Judith Curry, Roy Spencer, et al. DOE report. As I explain in my submission they need to be retracted.
—————–
*UPDATE*: [Read Peter Ridd’s reply at #1.4 below. – Jo]
—————-
Background
In Section 2.2.2, the DOE report uses AIMS long-term monitoring data to argue that coral reefs may not be as vulnerable to CO2-driven pH changes as commonly portrayed. It cites the “most recent annual summary of GBR conditions from the Australian Institute of Marine Science” (AIMS, 2023), claiming a “strong rebound” in coral production that “surprised some observers.”
The DOE report by Christy et al. accepts AIMS perimeter-based surveys at face value, without addressing their limitations. The trends are portrayed as evidence of resilience, but they derive from categorical, subjective data that excludes key habitats, leading to potentially misleading extrapolations about total reef health.
AIMS’s long-term monitoring program relies on manta tow surveys around reef perimeters, where divers visually estimate coral cover in broad categories: 0-10%, 10-30%, 30-50%, 50-75%, or 75-100%. These are subjective guesses, not precise measurements, and exclude the reef crest—the shallowest, most coral-dense area vulnerable to bleaching and cyclones.
This approach cannot reliably quantify total coral cover or trends across the entire GBR (2,300 km long, structurally diverse), not even at individual reefs. I’ve made the following observations with respect to John Brewer Reef.
1. Exclusion of Reef Crests and Key Habitats.
Surveys deliberately avoid the crest due to access issues at low tide, missing the areas with highest coral density and susceptibility to damage. For example, Tropical Cyclone Kirrily (January 2024) devastated the crest at John Brewer Reef, reducing cover from 100% to 0% in places—yet AIMS perimeter data only showed a drop from 23% to 17%. This destruction went unrecorded, making claims of “rebounds” incomplete.
2. Categorical Data Preventing Reliable Statistics:
The broad categories embed a 25% margin of error, rendering precise trends or uncertainties impossible. Coral cover is not measured as a continuous sample mean, so standard errors (SE) or statistical significance cannot be calculated—you need means and standard deviations for that.
Physicist Peter Ridd is widely cited on this issue. I have attempted to discuss the misinformation that he disseminates on this issue with him, but he defers to his right under freedom of speech. Science has never been about freedom of speech, rather science is about attempting to get to the truth.
It is nonsense to claim, as Ridd does, an uncertainty of +/-0.04 (or +/-4%), in presentations using similar AIMS data (e.g., his 2023 chart labelling “record high coral” with borrowed uncertainty from a 2016 paper). He is routinely cited uncritically by so-called sceptics, particularly in the US, UK and Australia.
The DOE report echoes Ridd’s optimistic framing but avoids his explicit uncertainty addition; still, presenting categorical data as robust trends is misleading.
3. Subjective Guesses and Lack of Verification:
Estimates are visual approximations without photographic or video records for validation. Surveys mix habitats (e.g., slopes vs. lagoons) without adequate replications per type, doubting the sampling plan’s adequacy. Variability by habitat is never quantified, ignoring the GBR’s diversity. The original sample design was for rapid location of crown-of-thorn starfish outbreaks.
4. Inappropriate Extrapolations and Ties to Ridd’s Claims:
Ridd compiles regional AIMS data into GBR-wide graphs, adding unfounded uncertainties and claiming increases “despite bleaching” from unsurveyed crests. His quote: “Once the uncertainty margin is taken into account, this year’s result is not statistically different from last year’s record high… AIMS thus effectively hide just how wonderful the data is.”
This is statistically invalid for categorical data. The DOE’s Figure 2.4 resembles Ridd’s charts but sticks to regions—yet it uses them to imply overall resilience, without critiquing the source. These issues make AIMS data unsuitable for definitive claims about reef health or CO2 impacts.
Implications for the DOE Report
By uncritically citing AIMS data, Section 2.2.2 overstates GBR resilience, potentially misinforming U.S. policy on greenhouse gas emissions and ocean pH effects. The “strong rebound” narrative masks unmeasured damage, creating a counter-intuitive illusion: “record highs” sound positive but ignore crest losses from events like cyclones, which the report attributes to pre-2011 declines without noting ongoing risks.
This weakens the report’s emphasis on data integrity elsewhere (e.g., discrepancies between models and observations in Part II). If AIMS surveys are not trustworthy for total coral cover—due to exclusionary sampling and categorical flaws—it questions their use to counter pH concerns. The report critiques bias in alarming studies but overlooks similar issues in optimistic ones, like Ridd’s.
Recommendations
To enhance accuracy and balance:
1. Qualify or remove AIMS-based claims in Section 2.2.2, adding caveats about methodological limitations (e.g., perimeter-only surveys, categorical data).
2. Consult independent statisticians to evaluate deriving trends/uncertainties from categorical data and include alternative methods like drone or full-habitat in-water surveys.
Conclusion
Science is a method, not the truth—it demands rigorous scrutiny of data sources. The DOE report advances important discussions on CO2 impacts but falters in uncritically using AIMS data, which cannot support claims of GBR resilience.
This is just an extract from something much more substantive that I have written at my new Substack, https://jennifermarohasy.substack.com/p/radical-honesty-on-the-great-barrier
———————————-
[Ridd replies #1.4. – Jo]
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Most papers go through a peer-review process with an editor that has the final say. It sounds like that will not happen for the DOE report. https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-fix-is-in
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That’s a big conclusion to draw by Dessler, a scientist.
Of course the authors of the report will respond to comments and give their opinion on whether it changes their report or conclusions. But one of the authors stating that, based on the feedback received from Dessler, they “wouldn’t change any of the conclusions” is simply stating their opinion regarding the impact of the feedback. It doesn’t automatically mean they have the final say.
If the process for adjudicating and amending the report hasn’t been declared, it’s premature to state “the DOE is not going to appoint a review editor”.
As for a peer review process. Has there even been a more public and open peer review before? I don’t know. But this one seems pretty open.
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In peer review, the submitter can not be the adjudicator who decides whether the work is worthy of being published.
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A social media post from one of authors giving their opinion on the impact of a review received is not the peer review process either. It’s just their opinion stated casually and publicly.
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Dear Simon, so editors of journals have “the final say” in science? Who made them Gods?
If only you had arguments or evidence to support your religious belief, you wouldn’t need to pretend that editors of science journals have some supernatural power of truth.
Your sacred editors are just the people who don’t offend the board members of the media cartels that own the journals.
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The solution to your issue is better peer review and stricter gate-keepers. The dodgier journals are incentivised to take your money and allow your ‘paper’ to be published. The peer reviewers have to be domain experts, the editor should do what good editors do and not allow cr@p to be published.
Religion has nothing to do with it. When I see evidence that conflicts with my beliefs, I change my mind. That’s what good scientists do too.
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The solution is public televised debate between the best on both sides. Free speech and free media. Let the public decide.
Let there be no artificial fake Gods of Science who hold a gatekeeper role.
Re: Changing your mind — what evidence would falsify your belief Simon? Not 40 years of satellite data, not 3000 Argo bouys, not 28 million weather balloons or 1,000 tide gauges. If you are a good scientist, you’ll answer the question Simon.
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Peer review generally means your friends who agree with you. And editor means anything which does not fit the narrative is just not published.
Also peer review is not agreement that conclusions are right or wrong. At best it is a process to examine that there are no glaring errors in the publication and ideally and optionally that the conclusions are supported by the evidence, which is difficult when the data is not actually presented. This was the case for Michael Mann’s infamous Hockey Stick, someone who later claimed the data was his personal property, even if the work was publicly funded.
Man made CO2 driven Global Warming was invented by billionaire Al Gore in 1988 in his first run for US President. Like Tim Flannery, he was a non scientist who studied English at University.
But he struck gold as the UN and World Meterological Society jumped on it. The IPCC was formed and suddenly Politicians were in charge of the weather and the boring business of the weather was a ticket to big salaries, fame and world travel. The IPCC was headed by an Indian Train engineer who claimed to have flown 360,000km a year telling people not to fly. Even meteorologists were shut out. The big money was for Climate Scientists who argued amazingly that the weather had nothing to do with the Climate.
To show how this affected real science, I was taken by Table 1 in this paper by Stallinga in Portugal in his list of papers which showed that CO2 swaps out with the ocean about every five years. Click on Table1 and you will see 36 papers showing CO2 rapidly cycles through the oceans. And given the equilibrium ratio of ocean CO2 to atmospheric CO2 is 50:1, it means 98% of all fossil CO2 ends up in the ocean. But the dates of the papers are significant. 1957 through 1992. Nothing after 1992, 33 years ago.
My favourite and simplest is Fergusson, Royal Society 1958 where he proved conclusively and simple that fossil fuel CO2 could have been as high as 13% but was only 2.03%
So much for editors and peer review. Afer the UN/Al GOre/WMO declared that fossil fuel CO2 piled up in the atmosphere, all papers which made this look absurd simply stopped.
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“Peer review generally means your friends who agree with you.”
Not sure to whom you submit your papers for peer review but my experience has been that the journal’s editorial team selects potential reviewers from the specific research field who are qualified to provide a critical and unbiased evaluation of the paper’s quality, validity, and significance. I have never been told who were the reviewers of my papers.
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Secret Peers Business……………….
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Climate science is a closed shop. Even meteorologists are not welcome. The mantra is Climate is not the weather. Climatebaggers.
Even lifelong world famous atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen is not welcome. With a PhD from Harvard in Applied Mathematics and a lifetime in modelling the atmosphere he
dares to disagree with many promoters of man made Climate Change. He was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at MIT from 1983.
And the view on peer review is his view.
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‘ … an editor that has the final say.’
Its also up to the editor what papers are published in the first instance. Scroll down Natures climate change papers and you’ll notice that its all one way traffic. This is a flaw in the system, editors have a distinctive bias in favour of AGW.
https://www.nature.com/nclimate/articles?year=2025
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First, forgive me, as I am not a scientist. The answer to the following is probably evident to a scientist, but not to me. 😉
I note that Ridd makes the following statement in the exec summary of his latest coral paper:
Are you saying that he is wrong, or that he is simply not able to properly support such statements?
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The AIMS dataset is the largest, longest and most extensive coral record of the largest reef system in the world. I’ve no doubt it has many flaws as Jennifer so carefully documents, however there is no better or bigger dataset. Plus we know AIMS would be more likely to err on the side of finding a crisis.
Since there is no better data, being pragmatic, I won’t throw out the AIMS data — even though we all wish we had more detailed, comprehensive records instead. Cyclones may devastate individual reefs, but corals have been dealing with tropical cyclones (and temperature and pH changes on a daily basis) for hundreds of millions of years and recovering, and I don’t believe we can or are changing the cyclone trend.
I endorse Jennifers call for better data on the Great Barrier Reef and am grateful she is documenting the damage at John Brewer Reef so carefully.
But I endorse Peter Ridd’s conclusion that the AIMS data still tells us something very useful, which is what we’d expect given corals tenacious survival despite 125m sea level rises, ice ages, volcanoes and asteroid impacts.
On this thread of fake science papers, let’s not forget that no one has done more than Peter Ridd to fight for replication in science.
All of us who speak against the Blob’s abuse of science have paid a high price and we are all stronger if we work together. Let’s keep our canons pointed at the enemy.
The topic today is the deliberate abuse of science for profit or status, and the false glory afforded to peer review.
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Well said Jo.
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Thanks Jennifer, For those interested, I have responded to most of these objections at this page https://platogbr.com/308-2/ . I deal with the deficiencies in the AIMS data (many of which Jennifer alludes) and explain why I still think the data is useful. There is also a file on the uncertainty margin at that link.
The only other thing I will add is a reply to Jennifer’s comment “but he defers to his right under freedom of speech.” This is not true, and quite ridiculous. There is simply a disagreement on how useful is the AIMS data.
I encourage Jennifer to continue to raise concerns about the data as it will hopefully help improve things in the future. However, I am of the view the data is still useful as it stands.
Peter Ridd
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If’n you think it is bad, NOW … wait for the coming AI scientific apocalypse.
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I think we’re already in it. I’d wager a large proportion of those ‘paper mill’ studies are generated using AI. It’s the old lawyer’s trick of beating discovery by hiding the document you don’t want found underneath a mountain of frivolous documents, in the hopes that your opposition doesn’t have the manpower to check every document in the mountain. Now scientists are using the same tactic to avoid scrutiny.
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Can the other (far😏) side not use AI to detect AI?
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Certainly. However if the Institutions are bought and paid for, then scientific truth, and even logic, is an early casualty.
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The pile of *faux* papers was so high it reached a critical tipping point and in a self-fulfilling prophecy (and thanks to gravity) collapsed in a stinking mess.
Meanwhile the sun is shining, the moon is setting, there’s not a breath of wind, the waves are lapping and the coffee smells/tastes GREAT!
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Ugh … ‘papers’.
“Buster, I b’lieve a piece of paper will just lay there and let ya’ put anything on it.”
Wisdom from Earl, brother of Buster, brick masons that I hauled brick and mortar for on my first job in high school.
They never spoke to me directly.
“Earl, I b’lieve I’m about outta mud.”
My cue.
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It ain’t just the climatecon industry. In some binge reading recently were a few psychology books, that failed discipline now calling itself Psychological Science. To pass you have to do some research, preferably nothing previously done to launch you into a PhD. One enterprising chap got his PhD on the “favourite-colour shirts/T shirts/tops men wore on a Friday night out. So comprehensive was his research he only “studied” his student peers. Now an “expert” with a PhD. Career in academia which might suggest such a topic does not equip you for life in the real world.
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There is a major government department in Australia that does scientific research of which I have an acquaintance.
Recently they appointed an obvious DEI / quota fulfillment female as head of the department. She was only about 30 but had an implausibly high number of peer reviewed publications for that age, about 200. Apparently that didn’t raise alarm bells with anyone, at least among those who appointed her.
It turns out at some sort of meeting someone asked her a question about the contents of one of “her” papers and she admitted she hadn’t actually done the work nor understood it but only had her name on the paper because as a department head she claimed she was entitled to having her name on them. In fact, she probably demanded it.
Einstein had 300 peer reviewed papers in his lifetime and just 5 in his “annus mirabilis” year, 1905. And he definitely understood and did the work.
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With the ‘Climate Alarmism Scam’, it’s follow the money.
With Science, it’s follow the data.
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It’s is increasingly apparent that fewer and fewer in the scientific community have deep knowledge about anything and are also terrified of stepping outside of the realms of the Official Narrative as we have seen with the climate scam, covid or the Great Barrier Reef.
Scientific “research” is frequently also on particular popular political topics with predetermined conclusions to give the sponsors (politicians with taxpayer money) what they want to hear.
We saw how people were and are persecuted for disagreeing with the Official Narrative on catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, covid treatment and the persecution of Prof. Peter Ridd among other things, even human origins and ancient migration paths.
As Australia becomes more censorious under Uniparty plans to further restrict speech the willingness to speak out will diminish even further. Similiarly in other countries except the United States under TRUMP.
Not allowing dissenting opinions is not science, it’s propaganda.
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From the above article –
This paper mentions the word “fraud” 59 times. Commenters should be aware (sorry) the word gets caught in the filter here for legal reasons. So please use it carefully.
Now I understand why I was moderated the other day. Thanks.
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If the F word is being caught in the filtration system, then a replacement is needed. What about “Fword”, pronounced as by Elmer Fudd. It even rhymes.
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Buckle up, because science just got a wild makeover! Gone are the days of stuffy profs hoarding the keys to the ivory tower. The internet’s kicked the doors down, turning everyone into a DIY researcher. From scrolling pre-pub journals to vibing with podcasts or letting GROK do the heavy lifting, science is now a free-for-all. Sure, this party invites more fraud—yep, that five-letter F-word—but dodgy science was always gatecrashing anyway. Back then, progress crawled at the pace of a grumpy prof’s retirement. Now? It’s a full-on sprint.
Dissenters and mavericks, once whispering in the shadows, are now shouting from the X platform, dropping truth bombs and maybe snagging a Netflix deal. Climate “science”? Pfft, it’s a political circus, not a lab. Politicians sniffed votes in doomsday vibes 30 years ago, and the fear train’s still chugging. But don’t worry, the pendulum’s swinging back—might not take another 30 years, but it’ll flip.
Here’s the kicker: I’m Team Technologist over Team Scientist any day. Those folks take the egghead stuff and make it work in the messy real world, where stats are simple—did it work or nah? So, cheers to the fraudsters shaking up the system! If only we could remix politics with the same chaos.
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I worry about the increasingly flawed research and the wasted billions of $ carried out for a zero return.
This lunacy requires the Federal and State govts to toughen up and at least start to unwind these paper trails and the billions of $ involved.
Hopefully some long prison sentences could eventually help to unwind this so called scientific research.
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You mean… get the Govt out of science?!!! Of course, like anything the Govt touches, it will be killed by that corrupt touch! If there was no money in science from Govt it would be a totally different beast, at the moment its just another welfare program.
The question is, will the Age of Reason go down with the Age of Science? Once science is so discredited as to be both worthless and mocked, will people just work with their feelings and what their friends tell them? Is this the aim of Govt all along, to make them the only source of truth?
Well, it pushed the world along in a rush to our current height of civilisation, but nothing lasts forever. Like democracy, we had high hopes for it but no idea how easily it was corrupted.
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Isnt this what Eisenhower warned about – quote: During the 1961 address, in which the president famously warned of the danger to the nation of a growing armaments industry referred to as a “military-industrial complex,” he included a few sentences about risks posed by a scientific-technological elite. He noted that the technological revolution of previous decades had been fed by more costly and centralized research, increasingly sponsored by the federal government.
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields… ,” Eisenhower warned. “Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.”
While continuing to respect discovery and scientific research, he said, “We must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
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You do realise that your “Number of articles” y-axis is exponential rather than linear? Why would you do that, unless you are trying to be deliberately misleading?
Best to stick to the quality peer reviewed journals. It is hard for a layperson to discern them though from the fake journals with similar sounding names which the flakier researchers use.
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“Best to stick to the quality peer reviewed journals. ”
I hope you’re not including ‘Nature’ in that invisible list… This advertising floss has been shown to be rubbish!
“Nature is the world’s leading multidisciplinary science journal. Nature publishes the finest peer-reviewed research that drives..”
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I know the log number scale is hard for you Simon, but I did know and also knew most readers here are familiar with it.
Since the fake papers are rising exponentially, the log scale reduces the appearance of the problem we are dealing with too. Are you concerned with that too? Or are you being deliberately misleading (or stupid)?
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Thank you. Some folk do look at the axes.
Auto
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In what way do you fear that it misleads?
The concern is:
The “exponential” y-axis flattens the graph and makes the problem Jo is highlighting appear less of an issue. If the y-xis was linear you’d see Jo’s concern highlighted even further with a big uptick. Hockey stick style.
If you’re concerned that Jo has shown the y-axis this way to exaggerate the concern then you need not worry. It’s not.
Are you concerned that the graph is under playing the problem too much?
The projections are speculation though.
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The exponential is presentational. The alternative is breaking the axis on a linear scale.
It is hard to display sets of data that varies at different scales so that the variation is visible on all scales.
In this case it is pretty clear what the y axis represents.
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That’s an amazing piece of modern verbalism: best read on a log scale axis.
Whether vertical or horizontal is irrelevant.
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Not Exponential! The “y” axis is logarithmic.
Standard presentation in many scientific presentations and clearly marked in this instance..
The growth in retracted papers however does seem to be exponential.
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True… log not exp.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V83JR2IoI8k&list=RDV83JR2IoI8k&start_radio=1
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How will we know that the next vaccine we are encouraged to give to our children is safe? It may be perfectly safe, and hopefully not RNA based or mandated.
Australia has not performed well on this stage or any other policy I can think of. Vested interests and lies.
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It’s also of concern the tremendous waste of scientific resources applied to totally BS topics of no genuine scientific merit, especially those related to the anthropogenic global warming scam and “renewables”.
Just imagine if this money wasn’t being thrown away and was used for research into something useful to progress humanity?
Similarly for all the money thrown away building solar, wind and battery plantations. In Australia it could have been used to drought-proof, flood-proof and irrigate the entire country and still have plenty left over to spend on other useful projects.
And the anthropogenic global warming scam, covid etc. has caused the development of an unquestioning ethos in the scientific community. Ask the wrong questions and you will be censured or even fired. That’s not science.
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Presumably this excludes all the fraudulent papers on evolution from the past hundred years or so. That was the precedent which resulted in the snowball we are now seeing. If Materialism is the driving philosophy then cause-and-effect is irrelevant, so why not expand the world of make-believe if it makes a few dollars? What we are seeing here is the final harvest of the crop that was already sown. Things don’t just happen in a void.
‘Science is a method, not the truth’. I couldn’t agree more, but it is a somewhat naive view of the discipline, which was once known as natural philosophy. The method does not exist in its own right, but is born of a combined theology and philosophy. If those two are wrong-headed, then so is science.
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We are told to trust the science.
No.
“the science” has been corrupted to the point where it can’t be trusted.
Peer review has as much credibility as “fact checkers”.
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The Left are at war against the Scientific Method and have replaced it with Post Modernism which posits that there is no such thing as objective reality or truth. It is whatever you believe it to be and each person has their own “truth”.
That’s why you frequently hear Leftists say “my truth”, not “the truth”.
It’s all part of the Left’s war against Renaissance and Enlightenment values and the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions and a return to feudalism where “you will own nothing and be happy” as the WEF advocates for we non-Elites but not for themselves.
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So many crap journals out there trying to bolster publication records and make a buck at the same time. There are also a number that are trying to undermine rigorous science by directly promoting various science denial feelings and ideas with data free dribble.
I copped a link to this journal as a counter argument. Where does one begin?
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You do realise that anything the left side of politics thinks is according to “the science”?
sarc.
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ACHIEVING NET ZERO
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2022/03/Kelly-Net-Zero-Progress-Report.pdf?mc_cid=3de10e3d7a&mc_eid=4961da7cb1
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The story of man made CO2 driven rapid catastrophic Global Warming is nonsense. You cannot just publish a paper saying that. This insistence on published papers and peer review is ridiculous.
We know all about CO2. What is puzzling is that man made CO2 driven climate is pushed so hard by pseudo science articles which are more like opinion pieces by Climate Crazies. Even respectable groups like NASA, NOAA and more surround every piece of new data with the language of CO2 Armageddon. The voice of authority. The data usually says quite the opposite, like this graph of CO2 from New Zealand. The text is contradicted by the data! I have had people angry that I called this a straight line. It’s no exponential like fossil fuel emissions.
The IPCC was created in 1988 before many people thought this CO2 driven man made rapid warming was real, except Al Gore and James Hansen. At the time we were being told we were heading into a new ice age. Disasters sell newspapers. It’s was science in the class of Ripley’s Believe it or NOT!
Al Gore as a non mathematical person who could see a path to the White House in his first attempt in 1988. He needed a scare story to get public attention. Hansen could see fame. The WMO was poorly funded, meteorology being an utterly boring science. Accountants were more popular. And the UN needed the cash for their 80,000 people.
The fact is CO2 is in huge and rapid exchange with the oceans on this water planet. Just like your breathing now. O2 in at 22% and out at 13%. CO2 in at 0.042% and out at 7-14%. All life on earth is made from CO2 and all food is made from CO2 and all life on earth has genes and chromosones and breathes. And the massive CO2 exchange with the oceans is just ignored. According to Climate Scientists, it’s just the plants, animals and us and a fixed amount of CO2. So they say the poor plants cannot keep up with our terrible excessive CO2 pollution.
It’s all such nonsense, but you cannot publish a paper saying that. None of it is news or takes experiments. The annual contribution of fossil fuels to total CO2 is 0.02%
Net Zero is even worse. But huge business, trillions in crippling costs even for Australia. For no reason.
The big secret is that atmospheric CO2 exchanges with the ocean in five years. So ocean CO2 ’emissions’ every year are 20% where fossil fuels CO2 just reached 1%. And the ratio of ocean to air CO2 remains at 50:1. So 98% of all fossil fuel is swept straight into the oceans where 98% of it remains.
This was all established as far back as 1958 in a paper in the Royal Society, which no one cites. A New Zealander G.J.Fergusson, member of both NZ and UK Royal Societies.
In the intervening 60 years, we have seen absolute proof that the tiny annual contribution to total CO2 from fossil fuel makes zero difference. As for catastrophic Climate Change, in the 37 years, in Australia we have seen the millenium drought come and go, just like the Federation Drought in 1890 which was hotter and longer.
So why publish? All this fossil fuel CO2 Climate Science is absurd. Even Judith Curry left the university and runs her own business climate consultancy and says that all climates are very obviously determined by only two forces, the sun and the oceans. CO2 is irrelevant. How do you write a paper about that?
Climate Change is politicians’ science, not real science. And we now have many punitive laws on carbon dioxide for no good reason except the cash and crippling Western Democracies, the only ones to go alone with all this nonsense from science ignorant politicians. And always the cash seems to go to China which has tripled its CO2 output in just 20 years while PM Albanese says they should be congratulated as leading the world in Net Zero. There are only two explanations. And assuming he is not mad, only one.
If there was a referendum on Nett Zero, Australians would vote it down by miles. So we are never asked. We are told ‘the Science is Settled’. But no one in politics cites any publications. We now have consensus science. Like the Middle Ages. Carbon indulgences to ward off Armageddon.
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Exactly TdeF. How can anyone make money from saying, “climate change is all natural” man has no effect on this phenomenon. Just relax and get on with your life and maybe just adapt. Unfortunately, we’re stuck in this endless Titanic loop. I’ve dubbed it Titanic because it aligns with the shipbuilders who designed that ship. Which was, man is so powerful we can build a ship that can’t be sunk. Same with CC, look, us human beings are some powerful we can change the climate. Or as that charlatan Tim Flannery pronounced- we are the Weather Makers or some such rubbish. No we cant – well not unless we start a nuclear war and produce a long winter. I blame the politicians, they learnt that scaring the bejesus out of the population got them votes.
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The one accusation I have not suffered is being in the pay of Big Oil. Big Oil is selling all they dare pump. Their problem is that oversupply will drop prices but they have no problem finding customers. And I have no idea why any oil company would pay scientists anything. Big Coal maybe, but even politicians like Margaret Thatcher could see the value in destroying the Unions. Now there is no coal power in the UK. And they import American wood chips to feed the big DRAX power station. Somehow this makes sense to Net Zero. Same amount of Co2 but different source.
But at least this blog leaves these ideas for politicians to read and future impoverished Chinese slaves to puzzle over. How did we let this happen?
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We voted NO on the VOICE referendum, the Victorian state premier is still continuing with a treaty or her version of the Voice. Kids will be taught of the nasty colonisers history of Australia. Voting does nothing, I’m afraid. Other solutions are needed.
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Voting did something in the USA.
But yes, we have to do more than just tick a ballot once every few years.
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The Australian populace will wake up eventually. Hopefully it won’t be too late.
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Let us suppose somebody was setting out to destroy the west. One key thing you would attack is the west’s ability to innovate. And, the easy ways to do that are to firstly get rid of manufacturing, because without the common sense of those using the research there is no one to check it, and the second would be to encourage and epidemic of fake “research”.
But, whether or not this has been done intentionally, the effect is the same: the destruction of the global leadership of the west in science.
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An autocratick guvuhmint wants an obedient and unthinking and uncreative population.
Will the last person leaving the building please switch off the lights?
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It’s possible Mike, though I also think it is an inevitable consequence of Big-Government buying out science as a marketing program for Big Government policies, and also because it is trying to stuff it into a bureaucratic formula, as though discovery is a process that fits a timeline and can be judged by a committee. The citation index becomes a substitute for public debate
The more money the government throws at science the worse the commodification of science gets. As long as big money lands on an area, parasites will evolve to get a free ride if they can.
And given the corrruption in every aspect of life in China, and I believe to some extent in India too, their governments probably don’t need to order researchers to fake papers. Look at how people paint trees green in China to fool their own government.
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I remember when the climate zealots wrote and got published a paper, purely to “win” and argument on Wikipedia. That told me all I needed to know about “peer review” in climate and the credibility of their “science”.
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And I remember a time when people published their results without politicians and journalists and random members of the public caring at all. Science was for scientists.
This populist “Climate Science” is the first alleged science in which you need no science qualifications at all!
Like Tim Flannery whose degree in English at Latrobe in 1972 was about as low as you could go, let alone as scientist. I was appalled to hear his televised opinions on nuclear energy. He would have real trouble with even basic science concepts. And as he said about his “hot rocks” fiasco in South Australia, “the technology is straightforward”. How on earth would he know? And everyone lost their cash, including $93Million from the Federal Government, but who cares? It’s free money. A billion here. A billion there.
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BWAHAHA, BWAHAHA, BWAHAHA…Australians are paying BILLIONS OF DOLLARS ON ALBOS NET ZERO…ELECTRICITY using FAKE CLIMATE ALARMISTS REPORTS…What a F….G SCAM.
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We are told to trust the experts. That would be a good idea if the experts were trustworthy, or even experts for that matter. There is nothing about a science degree that makes a person virtuous or trustworthy. They are people prone to all the same human frailties as people without science degrees. Sadly modern science is now largely marketing. Conclusions that support a product, idea, or policy are purchased.
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There are incentives that produce a market for fakery — fake degrees, fake research, fake journals. One incentive is the excessive demand to publish or perish. One University where I worked demanded only one peer-reviewed paper per year to maintain tenure track status. An especially productive researcher might publish more, but a demand to publish more which some universities do, only burdens journals, department budgets, library budgets, and reviewers, with papers of lesser quality. One does not produce high quality work by command.
I have published not a great deal, maybe two dozen to three dozen works in peer-reviewed journals. I have acted as a reviewer probably about the same. So I have seen this issue from both sides. Several of these journals who requested I review were probably mostly motivated by publishing fees, but they asked me to perform a service and I gave it my best. I have a lot of sympathy for the plight of junior faculty trying to advance to tenure status being beat up by arrogant, unhelpful reviewers. I don’t often deep-six a paper, but it is a great deal of work to clean up a mess, and this effort is a clue to the authors that a work should be reconsidered.
As a recipient of reviews I have had reviewers who were incredibly helpful and improved my work greatly. They caught a great error in one case. I have tried to emulate such people. On the other hand, I have received horrid reviews occasionally. Usually this happens in contentious subjects. Regarding a paper on measuring past climates that I submitted to a prestigious journal one reviewer said it should never be published even if completely rewritten; the other reviewer said it could be published if I would cite his various works. I withdrew this paper in disgust.
In a different subject area of even greater contentiousness than climate, it took going through five journal submissions over a period of several years to finally get it published. I had five co-authors, from three different countries but it was mainly me and one other author, an Israeli, who finally pushed it to completion. In one instance a reviewer sent our paper to a third party which is a violation of reviewer ethics. In another outsiders learned somehow of the paper and threatened an editor.
If you want to demystify academia, then spend some time there. You will find a number of marvelous people, but also quite a stunning number of worthless fakers — no wonder there is fake science, fake journals, and fake reviews.
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