There is an ongoing crisis in science – and almost no one wants to talk about it. Certainly not the media (who probably can’t even grasp what the problem is, anyway), and certainly not the “I f-ing love science” crowd. Even scientists are reluctant to talk about it openly, like a dysfunctional family who don’t want to set the neighbours talking.
In fact, the crisis in science is a cluster of related problems. Chief among them is a growing awareness that the system of peer review is in deep, deep trouble. Thanks to overly bureaucratic university administrations and their “KPIs”, journals are being flooded with a tsunami of second-rate, make-work papers. Reviewers are overtaxed; too many garbage (sometimes outright fraudulent) papers are slipping through.
Worse, in some fields, peer-review has been supplanted by “pal review”, where a small clique of reviewers act as ideological gatekeepers. Climate science can be one of the worst offenders, such as when a tiny circle of “climate enforcers” ganged up to remove an editor who they felt was insufficiently wedded to the “cause”.
Another disturbing problem is the “reproducibility crisis”. Reproducibility is a foundational tenet of science: if one researcher’s results can’t be reproduced independently, it’s almost certain that they’re wrong, or fraudulent.
Take another bow, climate “science”.
The paper by Timothy Clark, Graham Raby, Dominique Roche, Sandra Binning, Ben Speers-Roesch, Frederik Jutfelt and Josefin Sundin (Clark et al., 2020) is a magnificent example of a comprehensive and very brave scientific replication study. The 7 scientists repeated experiments documented in eight previous studies on the effect of climate change on coral reef fish to see if they were correct.
Clark et al. (2020) found 100% replication failure. None of the findings of the original eight studies were found to be correct.
All the erroneous studies were done by scientists from James Cook Universities highly prestigious Coral Reef Centre. They were published in high profile journals, and attracted considerable media attention.
In case you’re thinking, “seven papers – big deal”, bear the last sentence in mind. Not all papers are the same. Some set the paradigm for an entire discipline: consider Einstein’s landmark papers of 1905. Some research centres command considerable prestige, not to mention media attention.
Media attention is the key. Time and again, climate scientists flood the gullible media with flashy press releases and outlandish claims, often before the respective papers are published. These papers also become cornerstones for much secondary “research”, and hundreds of hysterical media articles. One example is the Resplandy et al (2018) paper, which became almost the sole basis for alarmist claims about ocean heat uptake. But, when the papers are exposed as garbage (the Resplandy paper was recently retracted by Nature), the media say nothing, and the narrative goes on.
In this case, the papers concerned were the basis for hyped-up media scare stories about climate change and its effects on reef fish. This became just another plank in the “Great Barrier Reef is dying!” narrative. Once again, JCU is caught in the thick of it.
This is the second time these 7 authors have got together to reveal a major scientific scandal. They were the whistle blowers of the infamous Lonnstedt scientific fraud in 2018. Lonnstedt, originally a PhD student at JCU, is also one of the scientists involved with these latest erroneous studies. She was found guilty of fabricating data in Sweden.
JCU has failed to properly investigate possible scientific fraud by Lonnstedt.
JCU is also the university that wrongfully dismissed whistleblower Professor Peter Ridd, after he questioned alarmist claims about the GBR.
Clark et al. (2020) is exactly the type of replication study that I have been requesting for other scientific evidence regarding the Great Barrier Reef.
Such replication studies have been opposed by all the major GBR science institutions.
Such wagon-circling is not just appallingly bad science, it suggests that there is a higher institutional failing – at institutions that are using vast sums of taxpayer money.
Scientific fraud is a serious issue. The integrity of science is at stake.
Failure to investigate fraud when there is a strong prime facie case that it has occurred is a far greater crime than fraud itself. It is a failure at the highest levels of an institution.
It demonstrates that fraud will be tolerated at James Cook University.
So far, the only thing being killed by climate change is good science.
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