{"id":1473,"date":"2009-11-26T15:55:22","date_gmt":"2009-11-26T20:55:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1473"},"modified":"2010-07-18T20:09:01","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T01:09:01","slug":"facts-to-fit-the-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1473","title":{"rendered":"Facts to fit the theory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On 12 Oct 2009, climatologist and &#8220;hockey-team&#8221; member Kevin Trenberth <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eastangliaemails.com\/emails.php?eid=1048&#038;filename=1255352257.txt\">wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThe fact is that we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Eyebrows have quite rightly been raised over this quote.  It is indeed a travesty that AGW theory cannot account for the lack of warming, and bears out what I and other AGW critics have been saying for years about the fallaciousness and lack of predictive power of AGW models.<\/p>\n<p>But the second sentence is actually far more damning.  &#8220;The data is surely wrong.&#8221;  This is how and where most scientific fraud begins.<\/p>\n<p>Scientific fraudsters are not, in general, people pushing theories they know to be false.  Outright charlatanism is not actually common, because it&#8217;s relatively easy to detect.  Humans are evolved for a social competitive environernt<br \/>\n and are rather good at spotting lies, <em>except when they&#8217;re fooling themselves because they want to believe.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In general, scientific fraudsters are people who are overinvested in a theory that they believe. Because they know it must be true, they interpret predictive failures as &#8220;The data is surely wrong&#8221;.  It is only a short step from  &#8220;The data is surely wrong&#8221; to fixing the pesky data until it looks right &#8212; see my previous post  for an immediate example.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s only slightly longer step after that to destroying the inconvenient data that fails to fit your theory &#8212; something one of the hockey-teamers actually <a href=\"http:\/\/www.eastangliaemails.com\/emails.php?eid=891&#038;filename=1212063122.txt\">called for<\/a> and there is strong reason to suspect they actually did.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, actually, the data <em>is<\/em> wrong.  Occasionally, experimental error will appear to falsify a theory that is actually correct.  But  research groups are entitled to the benefit of that doubt only when they meet the most rigorous standards of full disclosure about the &#8220;wrong&#8221; data.  Not when their reaction is to conceal and destroy it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On 12 Oct 2009, climatologist and &#8220;hockey-team&#8221; member Kevin Trenberth wrote: The fact is that we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=1473\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Facts to fit the theory<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1473"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2230,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1473\/revisions\/2230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}