Free Republic

What is it with the modern left and the mainstream media that makes them so enamored with predictions of the coming apocalypse? Perhaps it is thanks to the old rule of journalism that bad news sells newspapers. The media has broadcast far and wide the latest primal scream by the federal government and hundreds of scientists that all life on earth by the end of the century could be severely threatened due to climate change. Chicago could turn into Phoenix and its desert conditions. Economic losses will eventually total trillions of dollars. Early death, food shortages, and pestilence will become...

FULL TITLE: 'We Really Muffed The Error Margins': Global Warming Report Rendered Worthless After Scientists Point Out Flaw In Ocean-Warming Survey A major climate change report has been corrected, as two scientists found a glaring error in an ocean-warming report. The original report was alarming; oceans are warming at a rate 60 percent higher than what was first reported by a United Nations panel. The world is ending, folks. It’s The Day After Tomorrow, except that it’s not. The oceans aren’t warning at that rate. In fact, the range is so great that experts can no longer stand by their...

You’ve heard of the “margin of error” in polling. Just about every article on a new poll dutifully notes that the margin of error due to sampling is plus or minus three or four percentage points. But in truth, the “margin of sampling error” – basically, the chance that polling different people would have produced a different result – doesn't even come close to capturing the potential for error in surveys. Polling results rely as much on the judgments of pollsters as on the science of survey methodology. Two good pollsters, both looking at the same underlying data, could come...

Much of the recent transgender news has revolved around anticipated changes to Title IX language intended to restore a scientific basis to interpretations of the words sex and gender. But there’s been another disturbing trend in the education community which bears keeping an eye on. At Redstate, Brandon Morse has a troubling report about the suppression of research work into the frequency of patients experiencing regret over having transitional surgery, seeking to have it undone and other emotional or psychological challenges they have encountered. And it’s an increasingly common phenomenon. Sex change surgeries for people who suffer from gender dysphoria...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change climate forecasts were wrong from their earliest reports in 1990. They were so inaccurate that they stopped calling them forecasts and made three “projections”: low, medium, and high. Since then, even their “low” scenario projections were wrong. Writing in 2002 about the SPM of Working Group I of the IPCC Third Assessment Report, IPCC Reviewer and independent analyst David Wojick explained the sort of problems typical of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summary reports: What is systematically omitted from the Summary for Policymakers are precisely the uncertainties and positive counter evidence that might negate...

A trio of writers with credentials who managed to place dubious articles in academic journals are already being dismissed by academics attempting to downplay the prank. "Last week three scholars published an article reporting on how they had submitted over twenty fraudulent and purportedly ridiculous nonsense papers to various journals in gender and diversity studies," Hank Reichman writes on the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). "Seven were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when the authors 'had to take the project public prematurely and thus stop the study, before it...

Wednesday I wrote about a trio of academics who wrote bogus papers and submitted them to supposedly serious journals to see if nonsense could be passed off as insight given enough earnest social justice framing of the ideas. What they found was that seven of the 20 bogus papers they wrote were accepted for publication. Apparently, the line between serious feminist scholarship and complete sophistry is pretty thin. Dubbed “Sokal Squared” after a similar stunt by Alan Sokal in the late 90s, the hoax has generated a lot of feedback among academics. One of the most positive take came from...

You have GOT to read this, from Quillette! It starts with this editor’s note: Editor’s note: For the past year scholars James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian have sent fake papers to various academic journals which they describe as specialising in activism or “grievance studies.” Their stated mission has been to expose how easy it is to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.” To date, their project has been successful: seven papers have passed through peer review and have been published, including a 3000 word excerpt of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, rewritten in...

If you rewrote a chapter from Hitler’s Mein Kampf using current feminist jargon and submitted it to a respected feminist journal, would they agree to publish it? How about a paper suggesting dog parks are rampant sites for canine rape culture? Or one that explores the threat of “metasexual violence” from (private) masturbation? You can probably guess the answer but read on for the details. A trio of academics decided to explore the current state of peer-reviewed publishing in the humanities by writing bogus papers to see if there were any limits to what was acceptable. Helen Pluckrose, James A....

Dr. Brian Wansink recently resigned from his position as Columbia University professor, eating behavior researcher and director of the Cornell “food lab.” A faculty investigation found that he had misreported research data, failed to preserve data and results properly, and employed dubious statistical techniques.A fellow faculty member accused him of “serious research misconduct: either outright fraud by people in the lab, or such monumental sloppiness that data are entirely disconnected from context.” Among other things, Wansink had used cherry-picked data and multiple statistical analyses to get results that confirmed his hypotheses. His papers were published in peer-reviewed journals and used...

Three prominent US scientists have been pushed to resign over the past 10 days after damning revelations about their methods... (Skip) "The good news is that we are finally starting to see a lot of these cases become public," said Ivan Oransky co-founder of the site Retraction Watch, a project of the Center for Scientific Integrity that keeps tabs on retractions of research articles in thousands of journals. Oransky told AFP that what has emerged so far is only the tip of the iceberg. The problem, he said, is that scientists, and supporters of science, have often been unwilling to...

A former professor at the University of Georgia claims that a math journal deleted a statistic study he did on the achievement gap between men and women at similar levels of intelligence after a backlash from board members who found the study too controversial for their politically correct values. The results of Professor Theodore Hill’s research is not exactly a positive one for men. According to his research, there are more men at the top and the bottom of the intelligence distribution. This phenomenon was first studied by Charles Darwin, who called it the Great Male Variability Hypothesis. While there...

After a long, hot summer beset by record temperatures, drought and deadly fires, imagine my shock, on returning to the European parliament, to be confronted with a report that denies the reality of climate change. Some of the claims made by the report’s author, the Ukip MEP Stuart Agnew, are pretty hair-raising. For instance, he claims that the effect of CO2 levels on our climate is “negligible”, and that it is “one of agriculture’s greatest friends”. Agnew claims there is a lack of concentration of CO2 and as a result there is no problem for the EU to solve. So...

“If you won’t play my way, I’m going to take my ball and go home!” One expects such behavior from 7-year-olds. Not from grownups. But that’s the behavior of 60 scientists, journalists, politicians, activists, and others who signed an open letter published in the (dependably sympathetic) Guardian Sunday saying, “we will no longer debate those who deny that human-caused climate change is real.” Why didn’t they just come right out and say, “Nya-nya-nya-nya-nya!” But they offer some reasons, or at least excuses, for taking their ball and going home. Let’s consider them. “We are no longer willing to lend our...

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) internal watchdog is auditing how the agency deals with issues of scientific integrity. In a notice released Friday, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) said it would launch research into how the EPA implements and adheres to its scientific integrity policy. The audit was launched voluntarily by the office, so it is not connected to a specific request from a lawmaker or complaint. But critics of the Trump administration have nonetheless criticized the agency for what they see as attempts to undermine science at the EPA, including downplaying the harms from climate change and...

Limited access to research details and a culture that emphasizes breakthroughs are undermining the credibility of science It’s hard to argue against the power of science. From studies that evaluate the latest dietary trend to experiments that illuminate predictors of happiness, people have come to increasingly look at scientific results as concrete, reliable facts that can govern how we think and act. But over the past several years, a growing contingent of scientists has begun to question the accepted veracity of published research—even after it’s cleared the hurdles of peer review and appears in widely respected journals. The problem is...

University of Delaware students, faculty, administrators and trustees must truthfully answer a simple, but important question: Would this conduct have been ignored or excused if the targets had been Muslim?A recent article by the editor-in-chief of the school’s student newspaper proclaimed “Green Dragon slayer for hire, in a geography department near you: To members of the Cornwall Alliance, environmentalists are satanic ‘Green Dragons,’ sent from the bowels of hell to threaten world order and harm the needy.”  Caleb Owens’ article links tenured UDel geography and climatology professor David Legates and his Christian faith to “far-right American evangelicals,” fossil fuel funding...

The blatant use of science for political gain is not new, but it's clearly getting worse. All kinds of "science" is being used to justify policies that fit a particular political agenda. Case in point: Some Harvard scientists have examined the environmental policies of the Trump administration and concluded that up to 80,000 people a decade will die as a result of political decisions that they disagree with. It used to be that such pronouncements were dismissed as "unscientific." Today, it's front page news.

Don’t believe the latest study you read in the headlines, chances are, it could be wrong, according to a new report by the National Association of Scholars that delves into what it calls the “use and abuse of statistics in the sciences.” The report broke down the issue of irreproducibility, or the problem that a lot of scientific research cannot be reproduced. The report took aim at unverifiable climate science, but also critiqued medical studies, behavioral research and other fields. The 72-page report took the matter a step further in calling the issue a politicization of science. “Not all irreproducible...

THIS FALL, the National Institutes of Health will launch a major study to determine whether regular consumption of alcohol helps prevent heart attacks. The clinical trial will comprise nearly 8,000 participants, recruited from 16 sites in North and South America, Europe, and Africa. The volunteers will be randomly assigned to one of two groups: Those in the first group will have one drink each day, while those in the other group abstain. This enormous study will come with an enormous price tag: more than $100 million.If you're like me, news of the planned NIH study may make you wonder: Does...