Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmtulloss | Hacker News Reader

I joke about the unfortunate demise of my competitors all the time. It doesn't mean I'm actively working to destroy them.

View on HN

  If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics
  camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this,
  we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted. 
  (From Tom Wigley).

Here "one of the world's foremost experts on climate change and one of the most highly cited scientists in the discipline" is actively working to destroy his opponents' careers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wigley

And if the AGU accepts his denial of climate change as a legitimate reason to oust him there is nothing wrong with that. He didn't say "we're going to lie about data and make up stuff and get my colleague fired," he said, "We're going to present evidence of what my colleague believes is good science. If this does not meet the standard of our scientific body, we will expel him from it."

He said skeptic, not denier. That's a wide gulf.

The line between reasonable and unreasonable skepticism is razor thin.

Which makes me question the validity of his work. If he's so concerned about an adversary, IMHO it appears as though he believes his work will not stand up to scrutiny.

That assumes a high correlation between validity, acceptance and success.

Peer review itself is conservative, reactionary and political. There is a strong "confirmation" bias in what gets published. This is good, I suppose, but:

It takes a lot more than being right to get your results out there and accepted by your peers. And if your results contradict the existing consensus, god help you! You'd have to be very politically astute to be published at all, and hang on to your funding. Conversely, if your results appear to support the existing consensus, or can be doctored up to do so, then the "validity" requirement is greatly relaxed. Either way, political concerns will always play a role.

Which is rather depressing, politics has no place in science . . . except maybe political 'science'.

Valid data and good research should always be available, which is one major failing of the peer review. However, the peer review is a necessary demon to keep pure bullshit out of scientific publications.

Here's more of the same:

"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. K and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !"

While I agree that much of what I've seen quoted could be explained, I can't see any reasonable way to make this one seem benign.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com