Quote of the Day
Promote the alarming papers! Don’t even send the other ones out for review. If you wanted to advance in your career, like be at a prestigious university and get a big salary, have big laboratory space, get lots of grant funding, be director of an institute, there was clearly one path to go.
Judith Curry
August 10, 2023
Scientist admits the ‘overwhelming consensus’ on the climate change crisis is ‘manufactured’
This sort of thing happens in research about crime and guns too.
Getting government out of the funding of most research* is probably part of the solution. Biases will always exist. But at least none of the biased parties will be spending essentially unlimited public money to produce garbage.
* I can see research directed at military objectives as being constitutional and appropriate.
It wouldn’t be such a problem (other than being an unconstitutional use of the people’s money) if government research merely produced garbage. But the reality is worse: it produces propaganda, which is then pushed by the power of the government.
Government rarely funds science.
Government bureaucrats are predisposed to fund convenient Lysenkoisms. It’s an arrangement of convenient mutual backscratching: Bureaucrats give someone with a white lab coat money, and the lab-coated stooge gives the bureaucrats the kind of science-veneered cover to do what the bureaucrats wanted to do anyway.
When real science and engineering is being done, it’s almost certainly being done for weapons research. No matter how much one might Lysenko their data and conclusions, you can’t hide when the boom doesn’t happen at the forecast magnitude. Not for long, anyway, but that might be long enough to get a good payday until the program gets cancelled.
You wouldn’t trust a “study” funded by Phillip-Morris that tells you that cigarettes are good for your health.
Why would you trust a “study” funded by government that tells you about a “problem” that is best solved by more government?
That’s a really good point. There are a few more exceptions: NIST (which is actually constitutional) generally does good work. And my favorite data set to bother warmists with (GISP2) was produced by NOAA. That’s the one that shows it was warmer in Caesar’s day than now, and indeed about as warm as the “sky is falling” forecast from the global warming cultists.
Yes, and now greed has brought us to almost total distrust in both government and institutions.
Wow, nobody saw that coming.
And in order to restore a modicum of trust, examples will have to be made.
The problem will be in having trials. As anyone ignorant enough to say carbon is heating the planet to destruction, could also make an insanity defense plausible.
Till then we can breathlessly await a studies on the overall health benefit of Chinese fentanyl. And more gun control.
So…scientists are lying for money, prestige and fame. Imagine that. Color me shocked.