There was a time before climate change, a time before climate “science.” The field of study was in between several academic disciplines, including geography, physics, and meteorology. At some point along the way overly pessimistic activists gained prominence and then created a separate field for themselves in which they could enforce their dogmatism. One of the apparent perks of creating your own discipline is, well, to wield power and discipline others.
This type of activity accounts for the events that became known to the world as Climategate—since no one has come up with a better suffix to connote scandal than “-gate.” The main protagonist was a self-declared climate scientist from Penn. State U. His involvement was in writing to academic journal editors behind the scenes and telling them to suppress research articles when he felt they contradicted climate change dogma. I won’t mention his name because he has had a penchant for finding deep-pocketed funders who back his civil lawsuits against critics, punishing them with costly and interminable civil court cases.
Another protagonist in the story was The Honest Broker, Roger Pielke, Jr., a public policy professor at the U. of Colorado. He wrote of his experience recently—and of his surprise upon finding that his research work, once suppressed, had actually been pilfered without citation by the other guy. It makes for an interesting read about how the sausage is made in academia, and how conflict there can play out.
As he says of his experience about a dozen years ago:
We now know that it wasn’t just bad luck — A climate scientist intervened in the peer-reviewed publication process by requesting that an editor assign hostile reviewers such that the paper “won’t stand a chance.”
His experience is a good reminder that safeguards built into the process of academic review are only as good as the intent of the people working within the system.
The evidence of academic corruption does not prove anything about the truth of the scientific theory. But for those of us who have been paying attention to this fringe affair, it does raise questions as to why the scientific theory of climate change alarmism seems incapable of standing on its own merits.
Academia has always struggled with what to do about disagreements. The easiest thing for a reviewer to do is to say they didn't cite the relevant sources (meaning the favored idea). But as an editor I've never had someone write me to get someone else's idea rejected. The only thing I need to watch is assigning it to someone who's obviously gung ho about the idea to begin with, someone who belongs to that idea's "family".
Our bigger issue today are "paper factories" where someone (I won't call them scholars) are faking data, and generating submissions on behalf of others (for a fee). They are almost always replications of existing work, and they rely heavily on mediation variables ("A" creates a relationship between 'B" and "C"). We have software looking for them. But if they sneak through, and they get selected as a reviewer, their review is less than a sentence long, and they offer an acceptance rating. That's big red flag (almost no article is ready to be published without some revision, especially at smaller journals, where it was likely rejected at a bigger journal).
We get around the idea of the orthodoxy by discussing "scope conditions" or "boundary conditions"; the limits to where an idea is more/(less) likely to work well. It's hard to argue an idea is perfectly ideal to all situations, so if you can nibble at it a bit.
In my domains there's not a lot of orthodoxy going on. We have some DEI viruses going through, but some of them are harmless. "Decolonization" is popular, but it mostly means replicating existing studies in under researched parts of the world. The problem is, if the findings are the same, and the theory was "universal", then (yawn) nothing new to report. But if they can show some difference, it's easy to publish. Pakistan is under researched. Much of Africa is as well, the Middle East.
There were at least 4 EF-1 and EF-2 tornados that went through western and central Ohio yesterday in the early morning hours. Multiple houses and buildings were leveled or damaged. Besides residential houses, a hanger at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton was damaged, and another hanger at the rural Madison County Airport west of Columbus, was destroyed.
One of the tornadoes damaged a house about a mile away from us -- too close for comfort!
I don't think any of them were close to Jay, but I'm sure he will let us know if he was.
Thankfully, there were no reports of injuries or deaths.