Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Peer Review Problem in Nature

November 3, 2006
Global Warming, Intelligent Design
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The following was brought to my attention as an example of how a lot of bad science passes the so-called peer review process at well respected publications like Nature. It’s specifically about pencil-whipped temperature data in global warming but is more broadly about a flawed peer review process in general. Especially flawed when the paper under review is supportive of consensus science like Global Warming or Neo-Darwinian Evolution. Can you say “rubber stamp”?

FLAWED NATURE PAPER ON GLOBAL WARMING
Douglas J. Keenan, November 2006

Comments
Keenan paper claim than Chuine paper is wrong and should have been never published. Unfortunatly is demonstration is totally wrong. he says that assertion on the fact that 2003 is the hottest year in Europe is wrong, however it is clearly the hottest summer never record in burgundy! But the more amazing is that all is demonstration is to explain that the three following hottest years after 2003 (1945,1947,1952) are in the reconstructed temperature "nearly average" but, as it shows in is table, they are all at 1 standard deviation from the mean. As he claim itself he is certainly a very famous statistician giving a new theory of statistics: 0+0.89(the estimated temperature anomaly for 1947)=0 ! in fact the temperature reconstructed from grape harvest for the 3 years (1945,1947,1952) are all in the 10% hottest years of the period he considered! So this is right there is a clear peer review problem on global warming papers but on the Keenan paper !!!karl
June 4, 2007
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My Father in law is a neurophysicist and he told me before I read this story that he would love to be able to publish in a journal like Nature. He should just link his findings to Global Warming or Darwinism! Tenure! Ca-ching!Collin
November 4, 2006
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Moreover—and crucially—this lack of checking is not the result of some fluke failures in the publication process. Rather, it is common for researchers to submit papers without supporting data
This is easy to explain: as long as your paper suports the paradigm, there is no need to verify the data.
The systemic nature of the problems indicates that there might be many other scientific papers that, like the paper of Chuine et al., were inappropriately published.
This is hilarious but at the same time tragic. Can you imagine the amount of wonderfully written scientific papers that were denied just bkz they did not fit the paradigm? Can you imagine the amount of nonsense that those big magz have published just bkz they fit the paradigm?
Finally, it is worth noting that Chuine et al. had the data; so they must have known that their conclusions were unfounded. In other words, there is prima facie evidence of scientific fraud.
Oh Heackel, Heackel, where art thou?!! No doubt, Darwinists will respond and say that it's unfair for us to bring Darwinism into the arena, since the paper's main goal was not that. Well, that might be a legit arguement, however what is important to notice is that over zealous belief in the paradigm caused a respected scientific magazine to do a sloppy job. Generically quoting Phil Johnson's words, "something like this must be true, so don't bother checking the evidence. If this is not true, what is your alternative?!!"Mats
November 3, 2006
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So.... Keenan makes the rather underwhelming discovery that a correlation coefficient of .75 isn't incredibly precise when predicting individual data points, admits (in his peer-reviewed comments) that "the model might give reasonable results on average", and finishes up (in his non-peer-reviewed comments) claiming "prima facie evidence of scientific fraud". Peer Review 2, Keenan 0rountree
November 3, 2006
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I've made the correction -- some stray characters got inserted, which I've eliminated. The link works now.William Dembski
November 3, 2006
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Am I the only one having trouble with the link in the article? This one works better: FLAWED NATURE PAPER ON GLOBAL WARMINGJoey Campana
November 3, 2006
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