Global cooling

[DC]

Mr. Luddite, why you have electricity in your house

If I remember correctly Ben Franklin went out and tested a theory by flying a kite with a key on it in a lightning storm himself and dicovered electricity not a peer reviewed journal. I watced the young Thomas edison movie a couple of days ago and he was kicked out of school. He invented the light bulb but I think he favored dc instead of ac.

[Ear]

If I remember correctly Ben Franklin went out and tested a theory by flying a kite with a key on it in a lightning storm himself and dicovered electricity not a peer reviewed journal. I watced the young Thomas edison movie a couple of days ago and he was kicked out of school. He invented the light bulb but I think he favored dc instead of ac.

You don't remember correctly, Franklin didn't "discover electricity".  Electricity was well-known long before Franklin started experimenting with it... what he did with his kite and key was prove that lightning is an electrical phenomenon.

[Ear]

Interesting... I went looking, and found Jason Sorens' statements regarding this issue.  We should recognize that pointing to Dr. Sorens and saying "look, he thinks x, and we all like him, so x must be true" is a valid case of "appeal to authority"... but citing articles in respectable peer-reviewed scientific journals is not.

Here's the thread in which Dr. Sorens weighs in:

http://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?topic=10180.0

His comments first appear on page 3 of the thread.

[DC]

Just being in a journal wouldn't be proof either. It would have to be reviewed . That would be the review part. It could also be debunked 10 years from now.

Your right that is an appeal to authority but that was Frank not KBCraig and you can  look at Frank's karma to see he doesn't reflect the views on this forum.

[Ear]

Just being in a journal wouldn't be proof either. It would have to be reviewed . That would be the review part.

True enough.  That's why, earlier in this thread, I said something to the effect that citations from peer-reviewed journals should include the rebuttals made after the initial publication.

Pons and Fleischmann published their sadly imperfect findings regarding cold fusion in a very well-respected scientific journal, and that doesn't make their findings true.  The rebuttals came in hard and fast, and killed their assertions... because, thanks to peer review, we found out almost immediately that their results could not be independently reproduced.

[Ear]

Wikipedia has some excellent information on this subject:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#Greenhouse_gases_in_the_atmosphere

Among other things, it points out the following:

The current scientific consensus is that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been attributable to human activities". The extent of this consensus was the subject of a study?published in December 2004 in the journal Science?that considered the abstracts of 928 refereed scientific articles in the ISI citation database identified with the keywords "global climate change". This study concluded that 75% of the 928 articles either explicitly or implicitly accepted the consensus view ? the remainder of the articles covered methods or paleoclimate and did not take any stance on recent climate change.

[KBCraig]

And your response seems to translate as, "Every time I get questioned, I appeal to authority!"

Well, that's terrifically glib

Why, thank you. I do try.

Mr. Luddite, why you have electricity in your house, and why you believe idiots like Senator Inhofe?

And apparently when appealing to authority doesn't impress anyone, you resort to ad hominem comments.

I'm still waiting for you to tell us exactly which of the scientific journals in that bibliography you consider untrustworthy, by the way.

I haven't looked at your bibliography, nor do I care to. I haven't even argued in this thread for or against the reality of any warming/cooling trend, whether humans created it, or whether humans could do anything to stop it.

All I've done is poke fun at your terribly pretentious Real Scientists^TM and the idea that just because something appears in a "peer-reviewed journal" makes it written in stone.

In the end, a peer review process is little different than an internet discussion forum, except the process moves at a glacial speed. Anyone may publish anything, whereupon others may discuss, concur, or refute. Consensus does not prove anything other than that the original could not be disproved, and refutations are always subject to being disproved themselves.

The journal system amounts to a geeky, stuffy version of a flamewar.

[Spencer]

Here's some interesting information on the religion of peer review:

Despite a lack of evidence that peer review works, most scientists (by nature a skeptical lot) appear to believe in peer review. It's something that's held "absolutely sacred" in a field where people rarely accept anything with "blind faith," says Richard Smith, former editor of the BMJ and now CEO of UnitedHealth Europe and board member of PLoS. "It's very unscientific, really."

Indeed, an abundance of data from a range of journals suggests peer review does little to improve papers. In one 1998 experiment designed to test what peer review uncovers, researchers intentionally introduced eight errors into a research paper. More than 200 reviewers identified an average of only two errors. That same year, a paper in the Annals of Emergency Medicine showed that reviewers couldn't spot two-thirds of the major errors in a fake manuscript. In July 2005, an article in JAMA showed that among recent clinical research articles published in major journals, 16% of the reports showing an intervention was effective were contradicted by later findings, suggesting reviewers may have missed major flaws.

Some critics argue that peer review is inherently biased, because reviewers favor studies with statistically significant results. Research also suggests that statistical results published in many top journals aren't even correct, again highlighting what reviewers often miss. "There's a lot of evidence to (peer review's) downside," says Smith. "Even the very best journals have published rubbish they wish they'd never published at all. Peer review doesn't stop that." Moreover, peer review can also err in the other direction, passing on promising work: Some of the most highly cited papers were rejected by the first journals to see them.

The literature is also full of reports highlighting reviewers' potential limitations and biases. An abstract presented at the 2005 Peer Review Congress, held in Chicago in September, suggested that reviewers were less likely to reject a paper if it cited their work, although the trend was not statistically significant. Another paper at the same meeting showed that many journals lack policies on reviewer conflicts of interest; less than half of 91 biomedical journals say they have a policy at all, and only three percent say they publish conflict disclosures from peer reviewers. Still another study demonstrated that only 37% of reviewers agreed on the manuscripts that should be published. Peer review is a "lottery to some extent," says Smith.

http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/23061/

[Ear]

And apparently when appealing to authority doesn't impress anyone, you resort to ad hominem comments.

So how about answering at least some of my questions, instead of dodging all of them?  If you think that peer-reviewed journals are so untrustworthy, what is it about the popular media and government reports that inspires such confidence in you?

[Pat McCotter]

Black and white. Never any gray in the world, huh?

[Ear]

Here's some interesting information on the religion of peer review:

If we were talking about a single peer-reviewed article on global warming here, or even a small handful of articles, then you might have a valid point.  We are not, we are talking about thousands of articles.

Furthermore, the article you link to is hardly a compelling condemnation of the entire peer review process, and makes several statements that are outrageously misleading, among which is this one:

  "Some critics argue that peer review is inherently biased, because reviewers favor studies with statistically significant results."

I'm sure some critics do argue this, but the article presents it as though it is some kind of condemnation of peer review.  Are we to believe that insisting on statistically significant data is a flaw, and that we should be allowing anecdotal evidence to be presented as professional scientific data?  Ridiculous.

[Pat McCotter]

So. Now that this has been hashed out - I'm sure it's not done, but - what is the goal of the discussion?


How about:

I pledge I will try not to create release more carbon than I consume.

[FrankChodorov]

what is the goal of the discussion?

How about:

I pledge I will try not to create release more carbon than I consume.

how exactly does one consume CO2?

[KBCraig]

Black and white. Never any gray in the world, huh?

Apparently not:

If you think that peer-reviewed journals are so untrustworthy, what is it about the popular media and government reports that inspires such confidence in you?

Do you also demand that I believe either ST-911, or the 9/11 Commission report?

For a Twue Scientist, you sure make lots of assumptions that are not founded in what people actually write.

Kevin

[Ear]

Do you also demand that I believe either ST-911, or the 9/11 Commission report?

For a Twue Scientist, you sure make lots of assumptions that are not founded in what people actually write.

No, actually I just got a little confused and mistook you for the person who posted a .pdf article of bogus bullshit written by Senatore Inhofe.  My bad, my apologies.

And by the way, I'm not a scientist, I'm a trucker.