You may have noticed (or not) that deniers have been championing the scamming of a journal as PROOF that climate science is a hoax. Some of them at any rate. And probably wishing more than championing. (Archived here).
The alleged scam was led by a scientist in Taiwan (sadly for deniers, he didn't reside in the USA, he didn't work for the EPA or NASA or the University of Virginia or Penn State or even the University of Winnipeg in Canada). The person named was Peter Chen, formerly of National Pingtung University of Education, Taiwan (NPUE).
This researcher (or researchers) allegedly faked a whole bunch of email addresses and also faked reviews of their own papers. How such a scam could have worked is anyone's guess. I'd have thought most journal editors would select at least one or two reviewers known to the editor. Anyway, work it did, for a while. Until one editor of the journal became a mite suspicious. He launched an investigation that lasted for more than a year. As a result of his detective work, the journal retracted 60 papers, stretching back to 2010.
Deniers have been lapping it up. This is the final nail in the coffin. They looked to see how many climate science papers were published.
elmer says:
July 10, 2014 at 11:37 am
I wonder if any of them were about Global Warming?
TomB says:
July 10, 2014 at 12:23 pm
I’m no expert on this, but at least two of those retracted paper do look to be climate modeling related.
Latitude says:
July 10, 2014 at 1:02 pm
as long a we’re on the subject……climate science is a very small group….just how many people are qualified to review climate science papers?
grumpyoldmanuk says:
July 10, 2014 at 11:41 am
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Didn’t the world get a good idea of what was going on in Climategate? I hope the editorial staff have got good top cover. There is every possibility that certain habitual peer reviewers will attempt to make their lives a misery for blowing the whistle on established practice.
One of them even (wrongly) thought he found the culprit from Taiwan was hiding at Carnegie Mellon University. The very same place where someone else was developing educational video games - shock horror!
Anyway, they found the following papers and shrieked "aha!". Jack says:
July 10, 2014 at 5:47 pm
- Chen CY, Chen T-H, Chen Y-H, Yu S-E and Chung P-Y (2013) Information technology system modeling an integrated C-TAM-TPB model to the validation of ocean tidal analyses Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 7 May 2013. doi: 10.1177/1077546312472924 (Go on, read the abstract!)
- Lin M-L and Chen C-W (2013) Stability analysis of fuzzy-based NN modeling for ecosystems using fuzzy Lyapunov methods Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 6 February 2013. doi: 10.1177/1077546312466687
There were also four papers on waves:
- Chen C-Y (2014) Wave vibration and simulation in dissipative media described by irregular boundary surfaces: a mathematical formulation Journal of Vibration and Control 20 (2): 191-203. Epub ahead of print 22 October 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312464258
- Chen C-Y (2013) Internal wave transport, nonlinear manifestation, and mixing in a stratified shear layer - technical briefs Journal of Vibration and Control 19 (3): 429-438. Epub ahead of print 18 January 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546311429337
- Chen C-Y (2012) A critical review of internal wave dynamics. Part 2 – Laboratory experiments and theoretical physics Journal of Vibration and Control 18 (7): 983-1008. Epub ahead of print 21 September 2011. doi: 10.1177/1077546310397561
- Chen C-Y (2012) A critical review of internal wave dynamics. Part 1 – Remote sensing and in-situ observations Journal of Vibration and Control 18 (3): 417-436. Epub ahead of print 13 July 2011. doi: 10.1177/1077546310395971
And there were two papers on clouds:
- Chen C-Y, Chang C-J and Lin C-H (2012) On dynamic access control in web 2.0 and cloud interactive information hub: technologies Journal of Vibration and Control Epub ahead of print 12 December 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312464992
- Chen C-Y, Chang C-J and Lin C-H (2014) On dynamic access control in web 2.0 and cloud interactive information hub: trends and theories Journal of Vibration and Control 20 (4): 548-560. Epub ahead of print 5 November 2012. doi: 10.1177/1077546312463762
See, climate science is a hoax and "they" are all in on it.
Actually, while a lot of the WUWT crowd are clearly waiting with bated breath for the several million papers relating to climate science to all be declared a hoax and scam, most of them were smart enough to realise that this wasn't it.
That may be why Anthony Watts took another shot, this time via his mate, sky-dragon slayer (ie greenhouse effect denier) and paranoid conspiracy theorist, Tim Ball (archived here). Tim is a poor specimen at the best of times and I have no desire to wallow in his muck. So you'll only get to see a smidgen of his awfulness:
Recent revelation of extensive corruption of the peer review process, by a group of academics, is another blow to academic credibility. Commendable in the tawdry story was the reaction of the publisher of the Journal of Vibration and Control (JVC); they immediately withdrew 60 articles. But what happens when the publisher is part of the schemes to pervert the proper scientific checks and balances? How many other corrupted publishing stories are there? How many with or without knowledge of the publisher? Probably many, as the iceberg analogy almost always applies.
This "blow to academic credibility" is from someone who misrepresents his own academic background, claiming he was a "former climatology professor", when he was a geography lecturer who published very little in peer-reviewed literature. (From his bio, I only counted four papers in a scientific journal. Three were published in the early 1980s and the most recent one in 1992. He also cited his unpublished PhD thesis, various conference papers, book chapters and contributions to teaching publications mixed up with a lot of unpublishable denier tripe.)
Tim then goes on to insinuate that not only is the journal Nature totally corrupt, but so is Nature Climate Change, Scientific American and the BBC. The stalwarts in Tim's weird upside-down world are:
- plagiarist Wegman, ironically, one of Wegman's key papers was retracted by the journal and he is treated very unfavourably in a feature in Retraction Watch.
- Fox News, which is known for getting climate topics about right 28% of the time,
- Sonia [sic] Boehmer-Christiansen, who edits Energy and Environment and who is reported to have said: "I'm following my political agenda -- a bit, anyway," ... "But isn't that the right of the editor?" and elsewhere admits that people who do shonky work have little choice: "It’s only we climate skeptics who have to look for little journals and little publishers like mine to even get published"
From the WUWT comments
The WUWT comments were predictable in an "all the world is queer..." sense.
Michael 2 says:
July 12, 2014 at 8:36 pm
The hard left turn of Scientific American makes me sad. It had been one of my favorites.
inMAGICn says:
July 12, 2014 at 8:54 pm
Michael 2
Total agreement. For light scientific info and timely articles, it was very good. But even before the stand they made in the 1980′s against anything in America’s strategic interests (as Max H observed, above), they were devolving into psycho-babble and PC science.
Sad. But it took them decades. Pop-science “Discover” collapsed into nonsense in just a few years.
ntesdorf says:
July 12, 2014 at 8:51 pm
The continual bias of the Media in favour of CAGW Alarmist pronouncements explains why the public is only so slowly accepting that the whole theory is a farce and a scam. If there was miore genuine investigation by the Media the slow change would become an avalanche and the whole sorry story would be at an end.
The standout exception is Leo Geiger, who gently rocks the boat and says:
July 12, 2014 at 8:52 pm
If peer reviewed journals have problems, just think of how shoddy the material appearing in things like blogs can be.
Note: The proportion of retractions of papers by academic journals is tiny compared to the number of published papers. In 2011, for example, there were 400 retractions compared with 700,000 papers published - less than 0.06% or 57 in every 100,000 papers. The proportion of retractions is growing and various reasons have been suggested including the use of plagiarism detection software, the internet (and wider exposure of papers) and other reasons. Some believe it's a good sign - that scientific integrity is increasing, not decreasing.
You better let Zeke know that the cloud papers are not about sky clouds, but about internet clouds.
ReplyDeleteOh, don't be a spoilsport :)
DeleteSo computer science is a hoax and Google is really a big room full of people who can type in responses to my searches very very quickly. The things we learn from climate change deniers :)
DeleteLol. I'll point out that I didn't see anything in the retraction notice to indicate whether the retracted papers had merit or not. They might be perfectly good papers. It was the review process that was scammed and that was why the papers got withdrawn.
DeleteI read Timmah's article. Boy does he live in an alternate universe.
ReplyDeleteYou'd never guess it by reading WUWT, but there has been the odd sign from Anthony that he craves some sort of respectability. (Eg his yearning to be recognised at the AGU Fall Meeting and his dismay when he wasn't.)
DeleteI've never been able to figure out why he is willing to be associated with low-lifes like Tim Ball and cranks like Christopher Monckton and David Archibald. He doesn't get "guest articles" from the higher ups in septicemia - the best he can manage is copies and pastes from Washington Post and similar. I wouldn't be surprised if it's not just his car salesman image, it's also because of the nutters he associates himself with.