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

 

 

The article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the Social Text spring/summer 1996 "Science Wars" issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.^[3][4] On the day of its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax, identifying it as "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense ... structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics."^[2]

STEM fields aren't immune. 

 

"More than 120 computer-generated "gibberish" research papers are being removed from the archives of scientific journal publishers Springer and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) after a French computer scientist determined the papers were fakes."

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/27/fabricated-peer-reviews-prompt-scientific-journal-to-retract-43-papers-systematic-scheme-may-affect-other-journals/

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/6217/20140301/scholarly-journals-accepted-120-fake-research-papers-generated-by-computer-program.htm

Edited April 16, 201510 yr by PrimeJunta

And there is also this one:

http://www.iflscience.com/technology/journal-accepts-paper-reading-get-me-your-****ing-mailing-list

 

so what?

 

Those are crappy journals that  nearly no one reads anyways.Even the authors didn't bother to read the articles before publication.

 

The better journals with the higher impact factor are rigorously peer reviewed so such crap almost never gets published. Even so someone with a bit of knowledge in a subject can make the difference between crap and real science.

 

BTW it is pretty good that some journals publish everything ,Einsteins' famous papers wouldn't have been published if the journal he published them in was fully Peer reviewed.

Edited April 16, 201510 yr by barakav

The IEEE is not a crappy publisher.

Again ,the fact that these things happen every once in a while does not change the fact that those sources are better than stupid government sites to see whats really going on in the scientific community.  And even if such thing is published it is usually gets hammered pretty fast by the readers if it is really bad and related to something as relevant as global warming...

 

 

And if you have any idea about what you are reading you can judge by yourself.

Edited April 16, 201510 yr by barakav

I love how this thread turned out to be about science and climate change.

 

Basicly rendered this topic 10000% more interesting. But also significantly less funny.

The science on climate change has been thoroughly peer-reviewed and published in lots and lots of journals. Search scholar.google.com and see for yourself.

The science on climate change has been thoroughly peer-reviewed and published in lots and lots of journals. Search scholar.google.com and see for yourself.

 

As I scientist, I won't deny climate change, but I'd say that the progressing polution of the oceans is actually far more severe than the climate change. After all, we know how to stop climate change already (renewable energy sources; reduction of cattle). But we haven't found an effective way to clean the oceans yet.

I love how this thread turned out to be about science and climate change.

 

Basicly rendered this topic 10000% more interesting. But also significantly less funny.

I'm so proud of the guys in this thread and how they managed to turn it this way, and that's not sarcasm.  In one night they managed to completely derail the thread and re-rail it into something actually fun to talk about.

mm just found one:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5810/368.full

science is a good journal...

 

lets look at the conclusion for a sec:

 

The linear approximation (Eq. 1) is only a simplistic first-order approximation to a number of complex processes with different time scales. The statistical error included in Fig. 4 does not include any systematic error that arises if the linear relationship breaks down during the forecast period. We can test for this systematic error using climate models, if only for the thermal expansion component of sea-level rise that these models capture. For this test, we used the CLIMBER-3α climate model (12), which uses a simplified atmosphere model coupled to a three-dimensional general circulation ocean model with free surface (i.e., that vertically adjusts). We used a model experiment initialized from an equilibrium state of the coupled system in the year 1750 and, with historic radiative forcing, forced changes until the year 2000. After 2000, the model was forced with the IPCC A1FI scenario. The global mean temperature increases by 0.8°C in the 20th century and by 5.0°C from 1990 to 2100 in this experiment.

 

Temperature and sea-level rise data from this model for the time period 1880–2000 were treated like the observational data in the analysis presented above, and graphs corresponding to Figs. 2 and 3 look similar to those derived from the observational data (figs. S1 and S2). The slope found is only 1.6 mm/year per °C (i.e., half of the observed slope) because only the thermal expansion component is modeled. Using the semi-empirical relation as fitted to the period 1880–2000, we predicted the sea level for the 21st century (fig. S3). Up to the year 2075, this predicted sea level remains within 5 cm of the actual (modeled) sea level. By the year 2100, the predicted level is 51 cm whereas the actual (modeled) level is 39 cm above that of 1990 (i.e., the semi-empirical formula overpredicts sea level by 12 cm).

 

For the continental ice component of sea-level rise, we do not have good models to test how the linear approximation performs, although the approximation is frequently used by glaciologists (“degree-days scheme”). Given the dynamical response of ice sheets observed in recent decades and their growing contribution to overall sea-level rise, this approximation may not be robust. The ice sheets may respond more strongly to temperature in the 21st century than would be suggested by a linear fit to the 20th century data, if time-lagged positive feedbacks come into play (for example, bed lubrication, loss of buttressing ice shelves, and ocean warming at the grounding line of ice streams). On the other hand, many small mountain glaciers may disappear within this century and cease to contribute to sea-level rise. It is therefore difficult to say whether the linear assumption overall leads to an over- or underestimation of future sea level. Occam's razor suggests that it is prudent to accept the linear assumption as reasonable, although it should be kept in mind that a large uncertainty exists, which is not fully captured in the range shown in Fig. 4.

Those models don't consider many different things and are mostly f*cking linear approximations. I haven't read everything but I will ,and I am wondering if they included the factor of the underwater ice...

 

But hey ,they published in science...

Edited April 16, 201510 yr by barakav

 

The science on climate change has been thoroughly peer-reviewed and published in lots and lots of journals. Search scholar.google.com and see for yourself.

 

As I scientist, I won't deny climate change, but I'd say that the progressing polution of the oceans is actually far more severe than the climate change. After all, we know how to stop climate change already (renewable energy sources; reduction of cattle). But we haven't found an effective way to clean the oceans yet.

 

I agree with you but I am pretty sure the life there will eventually adapt to the pollution (extinction is a natural part of evolution). But ye we might get extinct in the process.

 

I love how this thread turned out to be about science and climate change.

 

Basicly rendered this topic 10000% more interesting. But also significantly less funny.

I'm so proud of the guys in this thread and how they managed to turn it this way, and that's not sarcasm.  In one night they managed to completely derail the thread and re-rail it into something actually fun to talk about.

 

This is the best way of trolling SJW threads changing the subjects' annoys the **** out of them. It is just like the sausage thread.

Edited April 16, 201510 yr by barakav

For example right now China is dumping tons of waste into the oceans  and this process makes the plankton finish all of the air supply in the shallow waters and die. This by itself changes the amount of photosynthesis worldwide and might as well influence the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere in the coming years. Tell me now ,how do you factor something like that into a rigid physical model? the answer is you can't ,at least not without getting enough data for a few years...

 

Typically what you will try to do in such a situation is build in this sort of thing into your physical simulator, with a parameter or collection of parameters governing the magnitude of changes. Then you can produce a range of forecasts based on what you think these changes might be. In a simple approach you might consider just throwing in a range of plausible parameters and reporting on the resulting range of forecasts; a more elaborate approach would be to state beliefs about what you think the changes are likely to be and then come up with some sort of probabilistic statement or something similar.

 

In practice these sorts of models are too computationally expensive to run extensive simulations of this type (the simulator may have dozens of different parameters and take months to run at a single parameter setting, so you can't explore the parameter space anywhere near adequately), so what you can do is try to build a statistical approximation of the complex simulator's behaviour, called an emulator. The idea is to model the simulator's output using a relatively simple global trend, with a local correlation structure (so that the emulator's prediction at "nearby" parameter choices are "close"). This allows you to use a small number of simulator runs to build a prediction of simulator output everywhere that can be evaluated quickly. Naturally, this introduces additional uncertainty, but it's surprising how well this works in practice. This allows you to choose good parameters by matching to past data, and to make forecasts in scenarios where conditions change.

 

Of course, once you've done this you've still only got a prediction for what the simulator will say at a given choice of parameters. Even if you get the "right" parameters (if that is even physically meaningful) there's still going to be a discrepancy between simulator forecasts and actual behaviour in reality, based on the collection of modelling assumptions, numerical solvers, missing processes and so on. Often this discrepancy is going to be rather large and is almost always extremely poorly understood (and rarely formally considered). There is still a lot of work to do in this area (you will often see "probabilities" being quoted in climate change reports but exactly what these probabilities really represent is rather mysterious) but improvements are being made. I see that current state-of-play as follows; until relatively recently this question wasn't really given serious consideration; now it is given serious consideration by the scientists but it's still somewhat seen as something to give to a statistician after the model has been built and run and have them just "solve" it. Whereas of course what is really needed is for these questions about the link between models and reality to be seriously considered from the first moment the investigation begins right to the end. The resources put into building and running these models currently is far more than resources put into working out what the model output really means, which is not really good. But progress is being made.

 

Probably in my limited experience one of the big reasons scientists don't like these questions so much is that they necessarily involve subjective judgements. There are calculations you can do to assess some of the model discrepancy, but if your model is just missing a physical process and you know it's not there but you can't put it in, then necessarily you just have a make a judgement about how "wrong" this is going to make the model. There are things you can do to estimate bounds on these sorts of things, but ultimately you've got to make a judgement. Scientists often don't like that (and the public often don't like that either) but as long as you're open and honest about it, and you try to show how people with different judgements might reach different/similar conclusions, then you're not doing anything unethical.

Edited April 16, 201510 yr by NathanH

 

 

The science on climate change has been thoroughly peer-reviewed and published in lots and lots of journals. Search scholar.google.com and see for yourself.

 

As I scientist, I won't deny climate change, but I'd say that the progressing polution of the oceans is actually far more severe than the climate change. After all, we know how to stop climate change already (renewable energy sources; reduction of cattle). But we haven't found an effective way to clean the oceans yet.

 

 

I agree with you but I am pretty sure the life there will adapt to the pollution eventually (extinction is a natural part of evolution). But we might get extinct in the process.

 

I highly doubt that the required amount of evolution will happen as fast as the progression of pollution.

 

Only a few very unpleasant species will survive on the long run.

In fact, this "unnatural selection" across the oceans has already started:

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-01/14/jellyfish-blooms

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120405-blooming-jellyfish-problems

Edited April 16, 201510 yr by Zwiebelchen

I really want to open this discussion with you two a bit further as it is really interesting subject to talk about but I must go for a while so I'll post my answers later...

What we need is a seven-striped flag 2km tall and 3km wide. On the moon.

Edited April 16, 201510 yr by scrotiemcb

 

 

The science on climate change has been thoroughly peer-reviewed and published in lots and lots of journals. Search scholar.google.com and see for yourself.

 

As I scientist, I won't deny climate change, but I'd say that the progressing polution of the oceans is actually far more severe than the climate change. After all, we know how to stop climate change already (renewable energy sources; reduction of cattle). But we haven't found an effective way to clean the oceans yet.

 

I agree with you but I am pretty sure the life there will eventually adapt to the pollution (extinction is a natural part of evolution). But ye we might get extinct in the process.

 

I love how this thread turned out to be about science and climate change.

 

Basicly rendered this topic 10000% more interesting. But also significantly less funny.

I'm so proud of the guys in this thread and how they managed to turn it this way, and that's not sarcasm.  In one night they managed to completely derail the thread and re-rail it into something actually fun to talk about.

 

This is the best way of trolling SJW threads changing the subjects' annoys the **** out of them. It is just like the sausage thread.

 

 

I'm a proud SJW and did my best to change the subject. Take that, you SIJW you!

 

Edit: also, 540 posts and still no locked-for-length. I wonder if we're participating in a bizarre and twisted social experiment?

Edited April 16, 201510 yr by PrimeJunta

 

 

Edit: also, 540 posts and still no locked-for-length. I wonder if we're participating in a bizarre and twisted social experiment?

 

Shush! Don't jinx it.

Edited April 16, 201510 yr by Namutree

 

Edit: also, 540 posts and still no locked-for-length. I wonder if we're participating in a bizarre and twisted social experiment?

 

 

They usually close it after 30 pages. We're still on page 28.

I love how this thread turned out to be about science and climate change.

 

Basicly rendered this topic 10000% more interesting. But also significantly less funny.

 

Its the new PoE (Pillars of Eternity) Law of the internet - discussion of limerick removals will be transformed to be about scientific dishonesty, scientific theory and conspiracy theory in 24-26 pages.

 

EDIT: About Climate Change - I think part of the reason people are reluctant to accept it is because those of us alive in the 1970s remember how the earth was due for an Ice Age that would destroy civilization as we know it.  Then 30 years on we're told that the world is heating up and it'll destroy civilization as we know it.  Since most people wouldn't be able to parse a scientific journal (reputable or not) all they hear is talking heads going "You're going to freeze to death...no wait, you're going to drown due to rising tides because the world is heating up...or if not in coastal areas starve because food production will cease to exist because everything will become arid desert".

Edited April 16, 201510 yr by Amentep

Or it could be plain ol' resistance to accepting unpleasant facts.

It is true, people do resist new ideas (because people resist change).

 

Personally, I like to imagine that the Ice Age came out to much applause, but Global Warming came out of the back locker room, and they're now having a best 3 out of 5 falls, no holds barred wrestling match over which will destroy life as we know it.

Id prefer global warming. Glaciers would really screw up the commute on I-90.

About Climate Change - I think part of the reason people are reluctant to accept it is because those of us alive in the 1970s remember how the earth was due for an Ice Age that would destroy civilization as we know it.  Then 30 years on we're told that the world is heating up and it'll destroy civilization as we know it.  Since most people wouldn't be able to parse a scientific journal (reputable or not) all they hear is talking heads going "You're going to freeze to death...no wait, you're going to drown due to rising tides because the world is heating up...or if not in coastal areas starve because food production will cease to exist because everything will become arid desert".

 

Well, that's because it's a little bit of all of the above, really. "Climate change" is really much more accurate than "global warming." The average temperature is rising, but weather in general is getting more extreme along the way. Or, in simpler terms: it sure was nice when we had four seasons, instead of just "too hot," and "too cold."

 

Or it could be plain ol' resistance to accepting unpleasant facts.

 

This one.

Climate in Finland's been getting rather nicer lately though. 

 

Until the Gulf Stream stops anyway. Brrr...

Id prefer global warming. Glaciers would really screw up the commute on I-90.

 

See I'd like the glaciers.  Be nice to get a cut in my air conditioning energy usage before I get killed by a wayward ice floe

 

Well, that's because it's a little bit of all of the above, really. "Climate change" is really much more accurate than "global warming." The average temperature is rising, but weather in general is getting more extreme along the way. Or, in simpler terms: it sure was nice when we had four seasons, instead of just "too hot," and "too cold."

Weirdly the last couple of years we've been better on seasons than, say, the 1990s.

 

Also I miss the theory that Earth's Magnetic field was going to invert and kill us all. Is that still a thing?