Free Republic

In December, I wrote a post about a groundbreaking new study published in Science,which had profound implications for the gay rights movement. The study’s researchers claimed that a mere 20-minute conversation about the importance of marriage equality could convince same-sex marriage opponents to support gay rights. People who spoke with straight canvassers demonstrated a slight boost in tolerance;those who spoke with gay canvassers demonstrated—and retained—an even more significant boost in support for gay rights.Does that sound too good to be true? It was. The study was co-authored by Donald Green, a professor of political science at Columbia University,and Michael J....

A study purporting to show that people’s views on gay marriage could change simply by meeting gay people has been retracted following revelations that its data was fabricated.The study was published last December in Science, and prior to publication drew a great deal of attention from the American media. Vox, for instance, described the findings in the study as “kind of miraculous.” As it turns out, that’s exactly what they were, because they were apparently made up.According to the study, people from communities hostile to gay marriage could have their opinions shift dramatically after spending just a few minutes speaking...

To Alinsky, the world and its history were all about revolution. Saul Alinsky radicals who are all about revolutionary change ("we are the ones we've been waiting for" kind of change) have now seized control of an issue that can more quickly bring about that change – "climate disruption," as expressed in community-organizer lingo. If Alinsky were alive today, he would likely fit right in with the current activist climate scientists. Alinsky would probably see that the challenge is to convince enough of the "Have-Nots" that their privation stems not just from racism, sexism, classism, and all the other social...

Will the next presidential election be won by a lie? Truth has long since been replaced by “narratives” on the American left. Rather than discuss genuine issues and objective facts, progressives prefer to make up a politically effective story. It doesn’t matter whether the story is false, as long as it sways the public’s emotions and wins the day. The ends justify the means. This “lying game” strategy often shows up in politically sensitive scientific debates. In honor of Earth Week, let’s look at one of the patron saints of environmentalism, Rachel Carson. Carson wanted to eliminate DDT, the most...

Our scientific method and traditions of free speech and open debate are under assault as never before, by intolerant inquisitors in our media, universities, government agencies, and even Congress and the Vatican. They threaten our most basic rights and freedoms, our political and scientific processes – and ultimately our continued innovation and invention, energy reliability and affordability, job creation and economic growth, and modern living standards, health and welfare. Congressman Grijalva and Senators Markey, Boxer and Whitehouse sent letters to universities, think tanks and companies, demanding detailed information on skeptics’ funding and activities – in an attempt to destroy their...

A major publisher of scholarly medical and science articles has retracted 43 papers because of “fabricated” peer reviews amid signs of a broader fake peer review racket affecting many more publications. The publisher is BioMed Central, based in the United Kingdom, which puts out 277 peer-reviewed journals. A partial list of the retracted articles suggests most of them were written by scholars at universities in China, including China Medical University, Sichuan University, Shandong University and Jiaotong University Medical School. But Jigisha Patel, associate editorial director for research integrity at BioMed Central, said it’s not “a China problem. We get a...

I grew up on the Jersey shore. (No, it wasn’t like the TV show.) Every summer morning I’d see several men combing the beach with metal detectors looking for jewelry and change lost the day before. One lost diamond earring or ring could pay for the metal detector several times over. But as useful and successful as metal detectors are, they can’t be used to find everything. Metal detectors won’t help you find wood, plastic, rubber, or other nonmetallic objects. Now, suppose metal-detector man, after just combing the beach, says to you, “I know there’s no plastic or rubber on...

For nearly thirty years, climate scientists have been the targets of character assassination by the fossil-fuel industry’s hired guns. They’ve been mugged on the streets of public discourse, pounded by the fists of demagoguery and smear. Their lives have been upended in an effort to have their research suspended. They’ve been kicked, slapped, whipped, tripped, and called every ugly name in the book. Now they’re fighting back, in a bold and innovative new campaign known as More Than Scientists. This campaign provides an inside look into the lives of the climate scientists whose extensive research led to the scientific verdict...

Dr Megan Head in her evolutionary biology lab at the Research School of Biology. A new study has found some scientists are unknowingly tweaking experiments and analysis methods to increase their chances of getting results that are easily published. The study conducted by ANU scientists is the most comprehensive investigation into a type of publication bias called p-hacking.P-hacking happens when researchers either consciously or unconsciously analyse their data multiple times or in multiple ways until they get a desired result. If p-hacking is common, the exaggerated results could lead to misleading conclusions, even when evidence comes from multiple studies."We found...

Wei-Hock Soon’s “crime” is being a scientist who sincerely believes that the global warming of the 1900s was caused by a rise in solar output, whereas most scientists believe that you and I are to blame because we use fossil fuels. What is particularly appalling about his crime is that he has actually substantiated his views in scientific journals and argued for them in public. His accusers have clothed their accusations in terms of funding sources, but have no doubt: his real crime is his ongoing scientific work within a theory of global warming that blames the sun, not us,...

Unafraid of his critics, whose baseless charges were systematically and comprehensively eviscerated by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley on Breitbart.com last week, Soon wrote, “I am willing to debate the substance of my research and competing views of climate change with anyone, anytime, anywhere. It is a shame that those who disagree with me resolutely decline all public debate and stoop instead to underhanded and unscientific ad hominem tactics.”

"I am under 'investigation,'" professor Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado Boulder posted on his blog Wednesday. The top Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, sent a letter to university President Bruce Benson that asked the school to provide its financial disclosure policies and information on how they apply to Pielke, as well as any drafts and communications involving Pielke's testimony before Congress between Jan. 1, 2007, and Jan. 31, 2015. In 2013, Grijalva explained, Pielke told the Senate that it is "incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with...

ISIL and other Islamist jihad movements continue to round up and silence all who oppose them or refuse to convert to their extreme religious tenets. They are inspiring thousands to join them. Their intolerance, vicious tactics and growing power seem to have inspired others, as well.After years of claiming the science is settled and unprecedented manmade catastrophes are occurring right now, Climate Crisis, Inc. has gotten desperate. Repeated polls put climate change at the bottom of every list of public concerns. China and India refuse to cut energy production or emissions. Real-world weather and climate totally contradict their dire models...

When a researcher gets proved wrong, that means the scientific method is working. Scientists make progress by re-doing each other’s experiments—replicating them to see if they can get the same result. More often than not, they can’t. “Failure to reproduce is a good thing,” says Ivan Oransky, co-founder of Retraction Watch. “It happens a lot more than we know about.” That could be because the research was outright fraudulent, like Wakefield’s. But there are plenty of other ways to get a bum result—as the Public Libary of Science’s new collection of negative results, launched this week, will highlight in excruciating...

When future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically “adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified. Two weeks ago, under the headline “How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming”, I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been...

How can we believe in ‘global warming’ when the temperature records providing the ‘evidence’ for that warming cannot be trusted? It’s a big question – and one which many people, even on the sceptical side of the argument, are reluctant to ask.

OR: Why I Should Have Been an Engineer Rather than a Climate Scientist I’ve been inundated with requests this past week to comment on the NOAA and NASA reports that 2014 was the “hottest” year on record. Since I was busy with a Japan space agency meeting in Tokyo, it has been difficult for me to formulate a quick response. Of course, I’ve addressed the “hottest year” claim before it ever came out, both here on October 21, and here on Dec. 4. In the three decades I’ve been in the climate research business, it’s been clear that politics have...

This is a video of Tim Ball, PhD speaking at the Skagit Education Outreach in Mount Vernon, Wa. on May 30th, 2014. It was apparently just uploaded to YouTube where I happened upon it. It's a two hour presentation, but well worth listening to.

While much of the debate over climate change surrounds whether or not it is occurring, one glaciologist and retired professor says the real issue is that the topic is being used as a political pawn to siphon money and votes. Dr. Terry Hughes, in an interview with The College Fix, said researchers want to keep federal funding for climate change alive, and politicians want to earn environmentalist votes, and both predict global pandemonium to that end. Hughes, a professor emeritus of earth sciences and climate change at the University of Maine, said for years his colleagues urged him to be...