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The National Science Foundation, or NSF (not to be confused with the politically motivated and notorious NCSE), has defined three specific forms of scientific misconduct: fabrication, falsification and plagiarism.
One may do a simple search on the Internet and read about many documented examples of research misconduct in recent history. This information is not trumpeted on the streets or force fed to you as a media consumer, but it has been readily available to the public as of the 21st century. A person on the street would not think to look for this kind of information because the general public has a deeply developed trust of anything classified as scientific. But now that you know about this phenomenon, how do you feel about it? It would be unreasonable to distrust all of science due to some researchers' deceptive practices. However, now that this reality has reared its inconvenient head, just which researchers do you trust? More importantly, how can we, the non-science-degreed laymen, effectively discern which findings are to be trusted? The human propensity to further one's own agenda by fudging data (facts) is a longstanding behavior that permeates all of society; to have faith that scientists are above this kind of behavior would be foolish. Foolish because scientists are humans first and foremost, and as such are not above the moral failings of us all. Why does this merit a blog post? Because an entire scientific, industrial and societal edifice arose from the institutional doom sayers of global warming (cleverly recharacterized as "climate change"). This politically enforced edifice continues even into today, despite strong evidence to the contrary, such as: 1. Carbon Dioxide (the star player of Human-Caused Climate Change, or HCCC) has been rising steadily for around a century, yet for about an entire third of the 20th century, from the 1940's to the 1970's, the global temperatures were level or dropping. During this time, the scientists holding sway predicted another Ice Age! Look it up if you think I'm exaggerating. 2. Global temperatures have not continued to rise, as was predicted by scientists when global warming was introduced to the public. In fact, by simply looking at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations global temperature graph from 1990 to 2014, anyone can clearly see the world is going through another cooling trend, much like the 30-or-so year period mentioned earlier. 3. All the HCCC jabber in recent years is centered around the Arctic ice (official term is "sea ice extent") melting away more each year. But what about the Antarctic ice which is increasing despite warmer temperatures there? Get this: scientists are saying that the Antarctic ice is increasing because of the warmer temperatures. 4. Not only are the temperatures in Antarctica warming, but they're warming even faster than the global trend. This completely flies in the face of all common sense, scientific or not. A major premise of HCCC is that the greenhouse gases that humans are responsible for are accelerating the warming of the planet, thus melting the Arctic ice. Number three in the above list is a classic example of scientists manipulating data in order to support a hypothesis. Some may oddly argue, "What's wrong with that?" Here's what's wrong: if some scientists themselves aren't properly following the rules of the scientific method, then why do we automatically exercise so much faith in whatever they say? |