Global Warming And Scientific Bias

A group of scientists are accusing science journals Nature and Science of censoring scientific papers that are critical of global warming:

The controversy follows the publication by Science in December of a paper which claimed to have demonstrated complete agreement among climate experts, not only that global warming is a genuine phenomenon, but also that mankind is to blame.

The author of the research, Dr Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, analysed almost 1,000 papers on the subject published since the early 1990s, and concluded that 75 per cent of them either explicitly or implicitly backed the consensus view, while none directly dissented from it.

Dr Oreskes’s study is now routinely cited by those demanding action on climate change, including the Royal Society and Prof Sir David King, the Government’s chief scientific adviser.

However, her unequivocal conclusions immediately raised suspicions among other academics, who knew of many papers that dissented from the pro-global warming line.

Scientific peer review doesn’t gurantee good science — and in cases where the group doing the review has a pre-determined viewpoint on the subject, it’s just another way of introducing bias into research. It’s quite clear that the editors of both Science and Nature are not neutral on the issue of global warming. It’s not surprising that dissenting views on the issue are systematically suppressed. The way in which Scientific American launched into an ad hominem laced attack against skeptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg for going against the status quo then refused to allow him to respond shows how a certain viewpoint has a stranglehold on the scientific community.

It is for this precise reason that consensus science is not hard science. If 100 scientists believe something and 1 doesn’t, it does not at all mean that the 100 scientists are right and the 1 wrong. Hard science is about empirical testing and evaluation, not opinion. The problem with global warming as a scientific theory is that it isn’t double-blind like other forms of research. Scientists are getting paid by groups that have a financial incentive to make the most outlandish claims about the state of the environment. Dissenters are accused of being shills for Big Energy, yet many climate scientists are simply shills for the other side.

The “scientific consensus” on global warming is a manufactured one. Reputable and rigorous climatologists like Prof. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama and Dr. Chris Landsea of NOAA have publicly spoken out against the endemic groupthink in their field. Like phrenology and Lysenkoism, global warming is as much a political movement as it is a scientific theory — and whenever science and politics collide, hard and rigorous science is almost always the first casualty.

3 thoughts on “Global Warming And Scientific Bias

  1. Science is about the accumulation of evidence, so if 100 scientists have accumulated evidence supporting an hypothesis while 1 scientist has evidence agaisnt the hypothesis, it’s actually quite likely that the 1 scientist is wrong.

    You’re right, however, in stating that where science and politics collide the first casualty is rigorous science. A good example of this would be stem cell research 😉

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