Free Republic

Do Creation Scientists Publish in Mainstream Journals? by Brian Thomas, M.S. * If ICR scientists are “real” scientists, then they should publish in respected, peer-reviewed, mainstream journals, right? In fact, many have.1 But mainstream journal editors’ zeal for naturalism can keep them from fairly analyzing contrasting views on origins—leading them to say “no” to quality creation science. Science reviewers and journal editors serve as gatekeepers, closing the gate to prevent bad science from reaching the printed page. For example, they are right to reject a submitted article if its conclusions rest more on speculation than on results.2 But they can...

Global warming alarmists resist any science that doesn’t toe their line, and one physicist in the UK is speaking out about how her research on global cooling is ruffling their feathers. Northumbria University at Newcastle Professor Valentina Zharkova has been researching what she believes are indicators of a coming period of global cooling. According to The Washington Times, her research, “Irregular heartbeat of the Sun driven by double dynamo” was presented in July at the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno, Wales and also posted to the website of The Royal Astronomical Society: Her sunspot modeling indicates a reduced solar magnetic...

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) officials knew about environmental data manipulation for years before they stopped the manipulation or notified scientists who may have used phony information, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation has found. A USGS analyst resigned while under investigation for data manipulation from 1996 to 2008, but another analyst continued that distortion until 2014. But agency officials learned data was manipulated as early as 2004 when scientists found “test results did not make sense” and “were not accurate,” according to a Department of the Interior inspector general (IG) audit published 11 years later. “Our office wasn’t aware of...

Hoo-wee, the New York Times will really have to extend itself to top the boner and mother-of-all-corrections at the American Journal of Political Science... The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed... The erroneous results represented some of the larger correlations between personality and politics ever reported; they were reported and interpreted, repeatedly,...

Science is broken. That's the thesis of a must-read article in First Things magazine, in which William A. Wilson accumulates evidence that a lot of published research is false. But that's not even the worst part. Advocates of the existing scientific research paradigm usually smugly declare that while some published conclusions are surely false, the scientific method has "self-correcting mechanisms" that ensure that, eventually, the truth will prevail. Unfortunately for all of us, Wilson makes a convincing argument that those self-correcting mechanisms are broken. For starters, there's a "replication crisis" in science. This is particularly true in the field of...

Scientific Regress by William A. Wilson May 2016 he problem with ­science is that so much of it simply isn’t. Last summer, the Open Science Collaboration announced that it had tried to replicate one hundred published psychology experiments sampled from three of the most prestigious journals in the field. Scientific claims rest on the idea that experiments repeated under nearly identical conditions ought to yield approximately the same results, but until very recently, very few had bothered to check in a systematic way whether this was actually the case. The OSC was the biggest attempt yet to check a field’s...

A Pew Research Poll released last week reports that fifty-nine percent of Americans see science and religion in conflict. But they also found that, "highly religious Americans are less likely than others to see conflict between faith and science." I'm not a scientist, and I don't play one on TV. But it's amazing to me to see how some scientists like to claim that somehow science has disproven God. Meanwhile, on Bill Maher's television program last month (10/2/15), he and guest Richard Dawkins essentially declared that science has disproved God. Bill Maher: "You talk about the wonder of science probably...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is under investigation for suspicion of fudging its data to support global warming alarmism — again. NOAA is refusing to hand over data, including e-mail communications, subpoenaed by a congressional committee that is tasked with overseeing the multi-billion dollar agency. In July, Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas; shown), chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, asked NOAA to provide his committee with the data. On October 13, because the agency had not been fully forthcoming, the committee issued a subpoena to NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan. On November 4, Chairman Smith warned...

Al Gore .. has levied his global warming activism from a net worth of $700,000 in 2000 into an estimated net worth of $172.5 million by 2015. He is not alone in his financial endeavor. Funding of science, in this particular case, climate change science, is dominated by the federal government. We assert that this will cause recipients of [government] grants to publish findings that are in-line with government policy preferences (i.e., do not bite the hand that feeds you ... Studies that receive financial support from the public sector do not have to disclose it as a conflict of...

What is your position on the climate-change debate? What would it take to change your mind? If the answer is It would take a ton of evidence to change my mind, because my understanding is that the science is settled, and we need to get going on this important issue, that’s what I thought, too. This is my story. More than thirty years ago, I became vegan because I believed it was healthier (it’s not), and I’ve stayed vegan because I believe it’s better for the environment (it is). I haven’t owned a car in ten years. I love animals;...

George Mason University Professor Jagadish Shukla is a lead author with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and winner of numerous awards including the International Meteorological Organization Prize, the Rossby Medal of the American Meteorological Society, and the Padma Shri National Award from the President of India. He is currently president of the Institute of Global Environment and Society and a professor of Climate Dynamics. For his expertise, Shukla is amply rewarded by George Mason University with a salary over $250,000 a year. Apparently, though, this isn’t a full time job. It can’t be – because on top of...

A December 18, 2009 Washington Post poll, released on the final day of the ill-fated Copenhagen climate summit, reported “four in ten Americans now saying that they place little or no trust in what scientists have to say about the environment.” This was the month the tide turned in public perceptions of climate change. Several recent polls have found “climate change” skepticism rising faster than sea levels on Planet Algore (not to be confused with Planet Earth, where sea levels remain relatively stable). Many of the doubt-inducing climate scientists and their media acolytes attribute this rising skepticism to the stupidity of...

But a closer look at these claims of independence raises serious doubts. An online search of EPA’s web site revealed that Syracuse’s Driscoll has previously involved as a principal investigator in studies that received over $3.6 million in research grants from EPA. Co-author Dallas Burtraw, a researcher at the think tank Resources for the Future, had been involved in previous EPA grants totaling almost $2 million. Harvard co-author Jonathan I. Levy had been involved in over $9.5 million worth of grants. Co-author Joel Schwartz, also of Harvard, had been previously involved in over $31 million worth of grants from EPA....

E-mails obtained from the Environmental Protection Agency show that Harvard University, Syracuse University and two of their researchers appear to have falsely claimed a study supporting EPA’s upcoming global warming rules was conducted “independent(ly)” of the agency. In early May, a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change purported to support a key EPA claim about its forthcoming global warming rules aimed at coal-fired power plants. The New York Times’ headline, “EPA Emissions Plan Will Save Thousands of Lives, Study Finds,” typified the media coverage.

A formal retraction of a highly publicized same-sex study with falsified results has been made by Science magazine on Thursday for misrepresentation of survey incentives and funding. One of the authors of the article, Columbia University political science professor Donald Green has requested the retraction on May 19, saying co-author Michael LaCour had been incapable of producing the raw data that was applied in the study. The magazine decided to go ahead and retract it after its own investigation even though LaCour did not agree with the decision.

The exposure of one of the biggest scientific frauds in recent memory... (Snip) Over and over again, throughout the scientific community and the media, LaCour’s impossible-seeming results were treated as truth, in part because of the weight Green’s name carried, and in part, frankly, because people — researchers, journalists, activists —wanted to believe them. (snip) ...Broockman was consistently told by friends and advisers to keep quiet about his concerns lest he earn a reputation as a troublemaker, or —  perhaps worse — someone who merely replicates and investigates others’ research rather than plant a flag of his own. (snip) This might...

Day after day, year after year, the hole that climate scientists have buried themselves in gets deeper and deeper. The longer that they wait to admit their overheated forecasts were wrong, the more they are going to harm all of science. The story is told in a simple graph, the same one that University of Alabama’s John Christy presented to the House Committee on Natural Resources on May 15. The picture shows the remarkable disconnect between predicted global warming and the real world. The red line is the 5-year running average temperature change forecast, beginning in 1979, predicted by the...

After you read Mark Regnerus on that fabricated gay-marriage “study,” click over to The Weekly Standard, where Andrew Ferguson makes an excellent point about the same: You can’t help but suspect that had such a questionable piece of work produced a result unflattering to the cause of “gay equality,” social scientists and journalists would have flogged each of its methodological mistakes. But this assumes that such a study could get published in the first place. Which leads us to what should have been the brightest red flag of all. The study confirms​—​perfectly, exquisitely, suspiciously​—​the picture that gay marriage advocates...

In December, Science published a paper claiming that people could change their minds about same-sex marriage after talking for just 20 minutes with a gay person. It seemed too good to be true — and it was. (snip) Most science and health reporters rely on the top journals for news leads. They tend to move in a pack, descending on a small handful of news items each week. When the papers in those journals have the fillip of a hot topic, like sex or race, the frenzy is even greater. And yet many reporters fail to do the necessary due...

The health of a democratic polity depends in no small part on the generousness of its civic discourse — that is, opposing sides ought to give one another the benefit of the doubt. If same-sex marriage proponents allowed that same-sex marriage opponents might, just might, be motivated by something other than animal hatred, we might be able to reach solutions that balance the competing interests unavoidably present in any political body. But our discourse is growing increasingly ungenerous. We ought not be surprised when the result is less debate and more dishonesty and coercion. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/418811/why-gay-marriage-study-was-faked-and-why-we-should-expect-more-it-ian-tuttle