Kristine N is a graduate student in the Earth and Atmospheric sciences department at Purdue University . She recieved a B.S. in Geology from Caltech and an M.S. in Geology from Penn State. Her master’s research, conducted with Kate Freeman and Chuck Fisher, focused on the sulfur stable isotope geochemistry and lipid geochemistry of sediments associated with vestimentiferan tubeworms in the Gulf of Mexico (which sounds far more pretentious than it really is). She is currently growing Sea monkeys for her PhD in an effort to reconstruct drought freqency and intensity in the Great Basin.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a new report on the physical basis of climate change on Groundhog’s Day. Already there are reports that those with a vested interest in discrediting global warming are offering to pay scientists $10,000 to “thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs.”
Clearly, some people do not understand peer review. We scientists “thoughtfully explore the limitations” of others’ work as part of our jobs. Any published article must first, pass the critical eyes of ones coauthors (which, by itself can be quite a hurdle); then, once everyone whose name appears on the paper is happy (or removes their name from the publication) it is sent off to a journal, where an editor and at least two other scientists read it, looking for holes in logic, errors, misinterpretations, and any other weaknesses in the paper. At this point the paper is either rejected, rejected with encouragement to significantly improve and resubmit, accepted with revisions (major or minor), or simply accepted for publication. Most papers spend somewhere around 6 months in the process of review, though I’ve heard of papers languishing for a couple of years because a reviewer disagrees with something in the paper.
Even when it’s short, this process can be quite painful. Our ideas are like our children. To extend the analogy perhaps past the realm of the reasonable, we clothe our ideas in beautiful dresses, and put ribbons in their hair, all made of our experiments and data. Then, before we can send them off to school to play with the other ideas, they must pass a gauntlet of three big bad meanies–our reviewers. Knowing the Three Big Bad Meanies (TBBM) are standing right outside the door we give our ideas coats of armor constructed from previously vetted ideas and data from other papers. Sometimes the coat of armor so dazzles the TBBM that they let her pass and immediately invite the scientist into their bike club. More often, though, the TBBM find some hole in the armor, which they then use to pry out our poor little idea, tear her dress, and pull out her ribbons. The idea runs back to the scientist-parent, crying, sometimes with blackened eyes, and we must fix her dress or make a new one with additional experiments, festoon her with new ribbons, and nail more steel to her armor. With any luck, this will be enough to satisfy TBBM and she will make it to school. But, it may not be. TBBM may still refuse the entrance of our idea to the real world and we will be forced to homeschool her until she’s sturdy enough to get past TBBM or she fades away from neglect. Once out in the published world, the coolest ideas attract a large group of similarly-minded followers, eventually forming a gang that we eventually call a “theory” once the gang can assimilate even the strange outcast pieces of data. Most ideas, unless they are significant are eventually forgotten.
More seriously, in science all you have is your integrity and your reputation. Jobs, funding, and students all flow to those who prove, through the quality of their ideas and the quality of their analysis that they are good, honest scientists. Most of us study things we think are cool, or might benefit people, not because we have an agenda or want to take over the world. The only way to continue doing that is to maintain the respect of our colleagues, which would certainly be lost if one were to accept a paltry $10,000 to ignore scientific method.
February 2, 2007 at 4:53 pm
Kristine, peer review isn’t a panacea — witness the cast of geneticist Hwang Woo Suk. I agree that offering scientists $10,000 to debunk global warming is pretty scurrilous behavior, but at the same time I have some reservations as to current academic processes.
February 2, 2007 at 5:07 pm
Hwang Woo Suk was motivated by a desire for renown, which caused him to take a substantial and unethical shortcut. Peer review can’t protect against that perfectly. There is an assumption inherent in the system that each scientist has a certain level of integrity when it comes to reporting data. To a large extent a reviewer has to accept the data are true, so they’re only really reviewing the thought logical underpinnings of the interpretation.
The next very necessary part of peer review is the process of replicating results in other labs (which is also what showed the cold fusion Ponds and Fleishman supposedly achieved wasn’t correct). I agree it’s not perfect, but I do think peer review, for all its warts and wrinkles, works remarkably well.
February 2, 2007 at 6:41 pm
On the other hand, Steve, if it’s experts in the field doing the reviewing, rather than a business interest putting up $10,000 to spin the results, the field itself, and the experts involved, stand responsible — and, over the long run, can establish a level of credibility. Of course, if Hwang Woo Suk and Ponds & Fleishman were the rule rather than the exception, the scientific establishment would be much less worthy of the public’s trust. However, because the peer-review philosophy is built not only into the editorial process of this or that journal but also into the scientific world as a whole, guys who get it wrong are ultimately proven wrong by their peers — as happened in both cases mentioned above.
February 2, 2007 at 6:52 pm
Results aren’t usually tested are they? Of course, the most controversial results and those with the highest stakes, like cold fusion, would be subjected to a test of replicability, but at least in biology results are only replicated by people who wish to build directly upon the work. More often than not the only people building directly upon published work are people in the lab that published the work. Replication is of course important in the broader endeavor of developing general theories, but it’s certainly not part of the peer review process for publication of papers.
February 2, 2007 at 7:10 pm
http://www.lewrockwell.com/giles/giles15.html
Fossil fuels are to blame, world scientists conclude, blare the headlines on USA Today. It’s obviously a slow news week, the Iran nukes fail to spark into flame, the Hillary/Biden candidacy is a non-starter, the plunging value of dollar on world markets is ignored (again), and oil prices are falling (again). So why not fan the flames one more time on the global warming hysteria dead horse? This strident moan from government scientists for greater funding and wider powers is deafening, and it obscures the science.
It hurts to admit that I read USA Today, even if infrequently and always for free in a hotel lobby or looking down on a pile of them while waiting in a check out line at the mini-mart, but yes I do. As a devotee of LRC, Mises Institute and a fair amount of mathematical physics, this is tantamount to admission of a paid subscription to the Weekly World News (WWN). The painful truth is that both the McPaper and the WWN reach a wider audience than any of my favorites and that is the rub: allegation, posed as science, repeated uncritically ad nauseum, will be mistaken as science, and accepted as fact when it is not.
Patrick O’Driscoll and Dan Vergano, in USA Today report the finding of the “gold standard” Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents “a real convergence happening here, a consensus that this is a total global no-brainer,” says U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, former director of the federal government’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in New Jersey.
They go on with another bold quotation from this statist shill, I mean impartial scientist:
Mahlman, who crafted the IPCC language used to define levels of scientific certainty, says the new report will lay the blame at the feet of fossil fuels with “virtual certainty,” meaning 99% sure. That’s a significant jump from “likely,” or 66% sure, in the group’s last report in 2001, Mahlman says. His role in this year’s effort involved spending two months reviewing the more than 1,600 pages of research that went into the new assessment.
Among the findings, Tebaldi says, is that even if people stopped burning the fossil fuels that release carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping gas blamed most for the warm-up, the effects of higher temperatures, including deadlier heat waves, coastal floods, longer droughts, worse wildfires and higher energy bills would not go away in our lifetime.
“Most of the carbon dioxide still would just be sitting there, staring at us for the next century,” Mahlman says.
Where is the science in this report? The claim that 66% has gone to 99% and is thus certain? The 1,600 pages are all government-funded research with funding allocated to those that already believe in the conclusion else there would have been no funding to begin with. This is a club after all and divergent opinions are not welcome and definitely not funded. The smacks of statistical legerdemain: questionable data followed by a foregone conclusion.
Let’s look at some secondary school science. Carbon Dioxide is a basic food for the plant kingdom. The process of photosynthesis converts carbon dioxide into complex carbohydrates using sunlight as the free energy input on which the entire animal kingdom ultimately depends for food. The increase in carbon dioxide is measured in a few parts per million, whereas the oxygen content is almost 20%, a massive differential. Anybody think having more oxygen is a bad idea? Oxygen is the waste product of plant respiration.
We learned (should have anyway) in junior high science that a system which is disturbed from equilibrium will tend to oppose the disturbance over time. This might occur through higher crop yields which will mean more food produced at a lower cost for the world’s hungry. Anybody think this is a bad idea?
The earth is near (in astronomical terms) a large fusion reactor we call the sun. One half of the surface of the earth subtends a very small solid angle of the solar sphere absorbing the life giving energy flux (we call this daytime). The amount of energy produced by the sun is immense and what the earth can absorb is tiny. The amount absorbed is proportional to the solid angle subtended of the solar flux. A reasonable estimate is 6 ten-billionths, a very tiny fraction overall. A miniscule variation in solar output would thus have a dramatic change on the earth and its ecosystems.
Solar models are notoriously poor, just like weather models. Why? The models are incomplete, inaccurate, with poor quality input data, with initial and boundary values conditions that are primarily designed to allow model convergence rather than to properly represent physical reality. To get a feel for the true dynamism of the sun you might check the Space Weather site, a quick perusal of its data and links will rapidly convince the skeptical that it is inherently a dynamo and little understood except in the crudest term. The sun actually has no physical boundary but is a gas polytrope so any boundary value condition is a figment of the user’s imagination.
Global warming models fundamentally depend upon the rate with which earth radiates waste heat into space with the problem being that the heat is trapped by the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thus warming it. The problem with this is that the carbon dioxide molecules have no directionality with respect heat flow, and just as they will keep ground radiation in, they will also keep incident solar radiation out (cooler on cloudy days), that old equilibrium thing again. In the long run, these effects may cancel.
I will spare readers any further diatribe about the bad math, bad modeling, and erroneous conclusions resulting from same. I covered those in a previous LRC article. They are true for these assertions as well. Serious climatologists can send me their models and I will critique and publish my comments on the LRC blog for this article.
I do agree with the data that lately things have been warming up, it’s the weather after all and even most children know how unpredictable the weather is. I was raised in Michigan during the sixties and seventies when a return to a little ice age was feared by the scientific community. However, the same people that cannot get weather right for next week, or next year, should not be given free reign as omniscient experts for the future weather indefinitely, that is an obvious paradox.
It does not take a great deal of technical expertise to raise viable and serious objections to the unproven and unprovable assertions of statist scientist and environmentalists alike. The problem is that the unscientific and uncritical mass media accept this tripe as fact. This repetitious braying at the national level condition the populace to accept these assertions as fact which then rapidly turns into legislation which is quickly accompanied by the inevitable legions of bureaucrats, regulators, monitors, and agencies (real threats). These are all funded from the productive economy impoverishing the rest of us, all to save us from the peril of warm weather, and cheaper food.
Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
However, in climatology and environmental science we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:
1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Saying things like “This is the way we always have ridden this horse.”
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.
5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
6. Increasing the standards to qualify as a dead horse rider.
7. Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
8. Pass legislation declaring that “This horse is not dead.”
9. Unilaterally declaring, “No horse is too dead to beat.”
10. Blaming the horse’s parents.
11. Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
12. Do a Cost Analysis Study to see if government labs can ride the horse cheaper.
13. Declare the horse is “better, faster and cheaper” dead.
14. Revise the performance requirements for horses.
February 2, 2007 at 7:23 pm
More often than not the only people building directly upon published work are people in the lab that published the work.
Maybe it depends on what area of biology, but I would think that most labs have at least one competitor. True, every little datum will not be repeated, nor will every falsehood be exposed. But I think worrying about that is missing the forest for the trees.
February 2, 2007 at 7:44 pm
anon, are you really trying to win that $10,000? Good on ya. Godspeed.
February 2, 2007 at 7:49 pm
Question: How much were the scientists paid who worked on the IPCC report?
Is this any different from grant money, which is handed out in expectation of specific results? Try to get a grant for a project that (say) questions the validity of the HIV theory of AIDS, and see how far you get.
Kristine N, I think it’s pretty disgusting how you’re trying to flaunt your credentials to bolster what amounts to nothing more than a flimsy political position.
Reminds me of all the scientists who staked their reputation on the heterosexual AIDS epidemic or the utter impossibility of Strategic Missile Defense. Grow up and go do something scientific for a change, will you?
February 2, 2007 at 7:57 pm
Lol, anon, that’s such a pile of misstatements that I don’t even know where to begin. It’s Friday night and I don’t feel up to a long discussion of all the points, but just to take a couple:
We learned (should have anyway) in junior high science that a system which is disturbed from equilibrium will tend to oppose the disturbance over time.
Actually this totally depends on the system in question. Some systems tend to return when disturbed and some don’t. For example, a pencil lying on its side tends to stay on its side when disturbed, but one balanced on its point will tend to fall over at the slightest disturbance. There is no indication that climate is of the former type, in fact there is every indication (a history of large fluctuations) that it is of the latter type.
Global warming models fundamentally depend upon the rate with which earth radiates waste heat into space with the problem being that the heat is trapped by the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thus warming it. The problem with this is that the carbon dioxide molecules have no directionality with respect heat flow, and just as they will keep ground radiation in, they will also keep incident solar radiation out (cooler on cloudy days), that old equilibrium thing again. In the long run, these effects may cancel.
In fact, what CO2 blocks so well is radiation in the infrared region, the same way greenhouse glass does. That’s why it’s called the greenhouse effect. Sunlight at visible wavelengths enters the atmosphere easily, because CO2 is transparent at those frequencies. It hits the ground and warms things here. Then the warm things re-radiate the energy at infrared frequencies, which are blocked by the CO2. This works in exactly the same way that greenhouses work, and we’ve all observed that it is a lot hotter in a greenhouse on a sunny day than it is outside.
It really astonishes me that you speak with such seeming authority on a subject about which you are so patently ignorant. I only selected two of your points, but they all are pretty much equally misinformed. I ask you to please read and study more so that you will understand the subject better, and be able to make more informed and intelligent choices. Thanks! =)
February 2, 2007 at 8:05 pm
DKL,
Kristine’s several posts and comments on the issue have been models of even-handedness and restraint, everything lacking into your boorish, dilletante snipings.
Grow up and do some homework before spouting off your talking points next time.
February 2, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Dave, that’s out of line.
February 2, 2007 at 8:19 pm
DKL’s comments may be out of line — but they were kinda funny!
February 2, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Anyone interested in a lengthy (and rather humorous) meditation on the phenomenon of peer review (not in the science context) should check out Dan Peterson’s editor’s introduction to the FARMS Review 18/2 (2007), which is hot off the press (my copy just arrived).
February 2, 2007 at 8:41 pm
Kristine, I agree with the assumption that peer review helps to weed out bad research and sloppy thinking, but I think you are overstating your case. Peer reviewed research gets overturned all the time.
All academic fields have journals that publish agenda-driven research that has been through the peer review process. Do you really think scientists are better than anybody else? I don’t.
February 2, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Wisdom surrenders as politics wrings the life out of yet one more subject best left to people who actually know what they are talking about.
The lefties are wrong, and so are the righties. When your position is staked out and defended by attacking those that are “other” with ad hominem, you only impeach your own credibility, if you ever had any. Kristine vs. DKL deathmatch, just get it over with quickly will you? And clean up the mess afterwards, please.
Reality check: the planet has been heating up since the Late Wisconsonian Era, like for the last +10 thousand years. And humans selfishly alter their environments, frequently to their detriment. So there you have it, some indisputable facts. What? No giant sloths or mastodons in your back yard because you put in a three car garage and paved over the rest. QED. Everything else is up for debate by a bunch of people with more dollars than sense. Yippee! Quick, write a grant proposal.
February 2, 2007 at 9:23 pm
Jared*: Maybe it depends on what area of biology, but I would think that most labs have at least one competitor.
I’m sure that from field to field there are differences in how much different labs repeat each other’s work in the course of pushing forward. I have semi-unintentionally replicated published results. Sometimes published results become controls. And so on. But I’ve never heard of anyone trying to re-do other people’s work just to check it out unless it was something controversial within the field.
True, every little datum will not be repeated, nor will every falsehood be exposed. But I think worrying about that is missing the forest for the trees.
I agree. It’s just that a lot of the time people talk about replicability as if it were actually part of the formal peer review process, which it definitely is not, at least not in biology.
February 2, 2007 at 10:04 pm
Tom,
I take your point. In fact I’ll throw some fuel on your fire. When replication or building on a result fails, the failure may never be published. Sometimes it’s not worth it to invest the time and money into nailing someone to the wall.
I think replicability (in biology) is used as short-hand for saying that if something isn’t right, over time someone will either challenge it or it will be forgotten and of little ultimate consequence. Successful and important paradigms are not built exclusively on the results of a single lab.
February 2, 2007 at 11:32 pm
Both sides of the global warming debate are greatly influenced by personal politics and vector
funding – this is one of the reasons it’s hard to sort through the ‘science.’ Anyone who thinks ‘their’ side is pure is merely caught up in the dogma. Here are some reasons why I’m skeptical about global warming:
1. As an economics major, I got just a taste of mathematical modeling. Output is only as good as the assumptions and the input. It seems to me that weather is about as complex a subject one could attempt to model.
2. Much of the science has been directed toward finding the effect of CO2, rather than simply finding a model that works.
3. The global warming believers are so shrill it gets in the way of their message.
4. The ‘end of the earth as we know it’ horizon is conveniently beyond the lifetime any person alive now.
5. Rhetoric is used by the global warming believers, rather than science.
6. Consensus is not science, it’s dogma. Real science allows dissent, and is certainly not afraid of those who disagree. The global warming believers exhibit fear of disagreement. In fact, they want to stiffle disagreement with name-calling and threats of withdrawal of meteorlogical certifications. Such heavy handed tactics are fine if we are discussing something like flat earth vs. round earth. But global warming models support nothing close to that type of certainty.
7. The heavy burden on the shrill believers who preach the environmental apocolypse is to prove it with proof sufficient to support a shrill tone. For me this has not been done.
8. Environmentalists rely on the ‘precautionary principle.’ If something bad might happen, even if the chance is low, we should try to avoid that problem. Fine, but at what economic cost?
Based on what I know, I believe anthroprogenic warming probably has occured, but I don’t know whether it has been significant.
February 2, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Bill: Grow up and do some homework before spouting off your talking points next time.
Clever turn of phrase, Bill. Where’d you pick that one up?
It’s not even-handed to approach a political issue as though it were a scientific one or a scholarly one in order to make one’s credentials relevant. If you’re going to talk politics, then by all means, talk politics. But don’t pretend that you’re talking science or scholarship.
Get with the program, Bill. This ain’t talking points material, it’s common sense.
You’ve got some catching up to do on the homework front. In the meantime, you’ll look like a lot less of an ass if you don’t go off half cocked about the people who disagree with you being dilettantes.
February 2, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Being familiar with the material released by AEI for several years, in allowing AEI to speak for itself on this issue, please see below some highlights from AEI director Chris DeMuth’s note to AEI scholars, fellows, and staff, Feb 2, 2007:
The [Guardian] article uses several garden-variety journalistic tricks to create the impression of a story where none exists. Thus, AEI is described as a “lobby group†(we are a research group that does no lobbying and takes no institutional positions on policy issues); ExxonMobil’s donations to AEI are either bulked up by adding donations over many years, or simply made up (the firm’s annual AEI support is generous and valued but is a fraction of the amount reported—no corporation accounts for more than 1 percent of our annual budget); and AEI is characterized as the Bush administration’s “intellectual Cosa Nostra†and “White House surrogates†(AEI scholars criticize or praise Bush administration policies—every day, on the merits). All of this could have been gleaned from a brief visit to the AEI website.
But the article’s specific charge (announced in the headline) is a very serious one. Although most of you will appreciate the truth on your own, I thought it would be useful to provide a few details.
First, AEI has published a large volume of books and papers on climate change issues over the past decade and has held numerous conferences on the subject. A wide range of views on the scientific and policy issues have been presented in these publications and conferences. All of them are posted on our website. It would be easy to find policy arguments in our publications and conferences that people at ExxonMobil (or other corporations that support AEI) disagree with—as well as those they agree with and, I hope, some they hadn’t thought of until we presented them. Our latest book on the subject, Lee Lane’s Strategic Options for Bush Administration Climate Policy, advocates a carbon tax, which I’m pretty sure ExxonMobil opposes (the book also dares to criticize some of the Bush administration’s climate-change policies!).
Second, attempting to disentangle science from politics on the question of climate change causation, and to fashion policies that take account of the uncertainties concerning causation, are longstanding AEI interests. Several recent issues of our “Environmental Policy Outlook†address these issues, as does Ken Green’s “Q & A†article in the November-December issue of The American. The new research project that Ken and Steve Hayward have been organizing is a continuation of these interests. I am attaching the two letters that Steve and Ken have sent out to climate change scientists and policy experts (the first one emphasizing the scientific and climate-modeling issues addressed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the second, more recent one covering broader policy issues as well)—and invite you to read them and compare them with the characterization in the Guardian article. The first letter, sent last summer to Professor Steve Schroeder of Texas A&M (and also to his colleague Gerald North), is the one quoted by the Guardian. Ken and Steve canvassed scholars with a range of views on the scientific and policy issues, with an eye to the intrinsic quality and interest of their work rather than to whether partisans might characterize them as climate change “skeptics†or “advocates.†They certainly did not avoid those with a favorable view of the IPCC reports—such as Professor Schroeder himself.
Third, what the Guardian essentially characterizes as a bribe is the conventional practice of AEI—and Brookings, Harvard, and the University of Manchester—to pay individuals at other research institutions for commissioned work, and to cover their travel expenses when they come to the sponsoring institution to present their papers. The levels of authors’ honoraria vary from case to case, but a $10,000 fee for a research project involving the review of a large amount of dense scientific material, and the synthesis of that material into an original, footnoted and rigorous article is hardly exorbitant or unusual; many academics would call it modest.
We should all be aware that political attacks such as the Guardian‘s are more than sloppy or sensation-seeking journalism: they are efforts to throttle debate, and therefore aim at the heart of AEI’s purposes and methods. The successive IPCC climate change reports contain a wealth of valuable information, but there has been a longstanding effort to characterize them as representing more of a “scientific consensus†than they probably are, and to gloss over uncertainties and disagreements within the IPCC documents themselves. Consensus plays an important role in science and scientific progress, but so does disputation—reasoned argument is essential to good science, and competition of ideas is essential to scientific progress. AEI is strongly opposed to the politicization of science, just as it is to the politicization of economics and other disciplines. On climate change as on other issues, we try to sort out the areas of genuine consensus from the areas of reasonable debate and uncertainty. Ken and Steve’s letter to Professor Schroeder was clear about this: “we are looking for . . . a well-supported but accessible discussion of which elements of climate modeling have demonstrated predictive value that might make them policy-relevant and which elements of climate modeling have less levels of predictive utility, and hence, less utility in developing climate policy.â€
The effort to anathematize opposing views is the standard recourse of the ideologue; one of AEI’s highest purposes, here as in many other contentious areas, is to ensure that such efforts do not succeed.
Chris DeMuth
February 2, 2007 at 11:43 pm
Nicely put, Chris.
February 3, 2007 at 12:01 am
Wow, I missed a deathmatch between me and DKL. Shucks.
Tom–you make a good point about validation not really being part of the peer review publication process. But while including validation in the peer review process would make it very difficult to get falsified or bad data into publication, it would also make publication and review unwieldy. Think of peer review as a coarse filter–it keeps out the worst of the bad science, but things that are subtly wrong or falsified can still get through the process. Subsequent validation by ones peers (and I would say most ideas that are good and are relevant and exciting are tested by someone) acts as a much finer filter. Each test, obviously, goes through the peer review process too. I know a lot of climate skeptics poo-poo the idea of scientific consensus, but really, that’s what all of this testing produces. We keep testing certain theories, and the implications of these theories. As a theory survives more and more tests, it becomes more believable, and more widely accepted.
Yes, sometimes incorrect ideas are accepted for a long time by a lot of good, intelligent scientists. Generally that’s because we don’t have enough data and we come up with ideas that may be wrong to answer our questions. Science is a bit messy–we don’t know everything and the best we can do is try to figure it out iteratively.
ugh, it’s late, and I’m going to have to continue this discussion tomorrow.
February 3, 2007 at 12:18 am
Um. Mr. DeMuth says in his fifth paragraph that he is “attaching” a couple of letters he referred to. But he didn’t — attach them, that is. Indeed, in a blog like this, it’s not readily apparent how he could have, though I suppose he could have linked to them with a bit of html. But he didn’t do that, either. Nor does aei.org’s website confirm his statements about exxonmobil’s donation level, so far as I could tell.
This isn’t exactly peer review, since I’m hardly of his peerage, but seems pretty clear that the note, above, is just a cut-and-paste from something else that actually might have attached the referenced letters. Curiously, it appears that Mr. DeMuth didn’t trouble to actually read through what he posted before he hit “add my comment.” Makes one wonder, doesn’t it, whether it wasn’t Mr. DeMuth, at all, who hit “add my comment.” Might it have been some minion on line with instructions to post the same, not-quite-tailored-to-the-discussion-at-hand piece here as elsewhere — note that he opted for a different avatar name than the Chris DeMuth at the end of the post.
Peer review isn’t the end-all it’s sometimest cracked up to be, but at least in this instance, a lowly non-peer of the realm actually read his note all the way through, missing attachment references, unsupported donor information, and all. It might have been more persuasive if he’d troubled to do the same.
February 3, 2007 at 12:33 am
I am not Chris DeMuth and I am not acting under orders as a “minion”. Yes it was a cut and paste job from something that was passed on to me as one who has an interest in the subject. Naturally there is no attachment because, as I said, the intent was to highlight the AEI director’s chief points. I’m sure if you check the press in the next couple days, the contents of the attachments will show up. Really, this is not part of some organized campaign to defend AEI. As I said, I’m just giving the group a fair voice to speak on its own behalf. I don’t have any further interest in discussing the various viewpoints and merits of this post.
February 3, 2007 at 12:35 am
As for AEI (and I really am going to bed after this) they state on their website:
They have an agenda and that agenda is not scientific truth.
February 3, 2007 at 1:17 am
When one can watch an informational video on dinosaurs which includes such astonishing “facts” as the mating rituals of Triceratops, it becomes evident that peer review, inspite of the good it may do, certainly has a way of fueling the dogmatic fires of superstitious sympathizers.
February 3, 2007 at 7:36 am
From what I’ve seen in the scandal over the award winning gun control books and the like, a good deal of “peer review” isn’t very good.
Got my first dose of that sort of problem reading refutations of relativity written in in the 1940s and 50s.
February 3, 2007 at 9:32 am
Jack–an informational video is not peer reviewed. Journals like Science and Nature are because the material printed in them must go through the process I’ve somewhat parodied above. Likewise, popular science magazines (like Discover and Scientific American are not peer reviewed.
I’d like to know why so many of you are under the impression science should “get the answer right” perfectly and immediately every time. The structure of the atom gives a great example of the process that we go through to come to “the right” answer. When electrons were first discovered, J.J. Thompson proposed what became known as the Plum Pudding model of the atom. It fit the data that was available at the time and it worked, until Ernest Rutherford showed the nucleus was very, very tiny. With the additional information that the nucleus is small, Niel Bohr suggested his own model for the structure of the atom. The Bohr model fit the additional data, and explained other observations that hadn’t really fit the plum pudding model all that well. There were implications of the Bohr model that people could (and did) test, and the results of those tests offered refinements of the Bohr model. Ultimately, the Bohr model isn’t consistent with all the observations of atoms made since the model was propsed, which encouraged the synthesis of a new model for the atom based on quantum mechanics. Quantum fits the experimental evidence and it works (even if it is weird). Without all of those previous, not quite correct theories we would not have gotten to Quantum.
The suggestion from a few decades ago that we’re heading into an ice age is another example of peer review working correctly. Milutin Milankovic proposed variations in the oribital parameters eccentricity, precession, and tilt of the Earth’s rotational axis were responsible for the ice ages. It wasn’t until the 1960′s and 1970′s when we had good glaciation reconstructions from deep sea cores that this theory was really accepted. If you look at temperature records of the last 450,000 years you can see the interglacials (warm periods) are rather short and descend back into glacial periods fairly quickly. We are currently in an interglacial and, if Earth’s climate were following a similar path to the one it’s taken previously we would expect to head into an ice age soon. From about the ’40′s to the ’70′s we observed a small amout of cooling globally (and more obvious in regional records), which is very much in line both with Milankovitch orbital theory and with the idea that we were heading back into an ice age. As it turns out, the cooling was caused by sulfur dioxide, the emissions of which we started regulating because of concerns about acid rain. Since we started controlling our sulfur dioxide emissions, we’ve seen temperatures do nothing but increase globally, in keeping with the idea that human emissions of CO2 are influencing the Earth’s climate.
This second example also shows the climate is sensitive to the addition of relatively small quantities of certain gases, which should dispel any notions that “we can’t possibly change climate with our measly output of CO2.”
February 3, 2007 at 10:14 am
Informational videos are not peer reviewed. Neither are magazines like Discover and Scientific American. On the other hand, Science and Nature are peer reviewed.
February 3, 2007 at 10:16 am
Informational videos are not peer reviewed. Neither are magazines like Discover and Scientific American. On the other hand, Science and Nature are peer reviewed.
February 3, 2007 at 11:06 am
I’m not sure why you all think science should “get it right” immediately, or why you assume peer review doesn’t work because ideas get overturned all the time. That really is part of the process of science. Scientists make observations and then come up with theories to explain those observations. Sometimes (in fact, frequently) our explanations are incomplete, or just plain wrong. That doesn’t mean it’s bad science. Science is iterative; we have ideas, we test the implications of those ideas, and we either refine or reformulate the old ideas, and then test the new implications. Sometimes we have to abandon ideas entirely because they aren’t suppored by subsequent observations, but that doesn’t mean the thought process was necessarily wrong (it probably wasn’t) or that the wrong idea wasn’t part of the path to the right one.
Let’s take, for example, the evolution of our ideas concerning the structure of the atom. Shortly after he discovered the existence of electrons, J.J. Thompson proposed the plum pudding model, which adequately explained his observations of the charge of the elementary particles. This model was disproven when Ernest Rutherford showed the nucleus is very, very small, and was replaced by the Bohr model. The Bohr model explained the additional observations and, some observations that weren’t explained by Thompson’s model. However, it too was incomplete, so other scientists offered further refinements to the model. Eventually, Bohr’s idea of fixed orbits for electrons was discarded and replaced with a structure for the atom based on quantum mechanics.
The theory of quantum mechanics, which is now accepted as our best explanation, would not have immediately fallen out of any one of the experiments that Thompson or Rutherford performed. Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, and Schrodinger all built upon the previous theories that, when they were proposed, were the best explanations for the data, and it is unlikely they would have just come up with “the right” explanation without the ideas of those who went before.
Let’s also look at the predictions from a couple of decades ago that we were going into another ice age. Multin Milankovic proposed in the 1920′s that cycles in the orbital parameters of eccentricity, obliquity, and axial tilt could explain the recurrence of ice ages. The idea didn’t gain wide acceptance until the 1960′s and 70′s, when higher resolution records from sediment cores were produced. If you look at the ice core temperature record you will notice that in the past temperatures remained low during glacial periods, spiked quickly at the beginning of an interglacial, decreasing slowly for the remainder of the interglacials, and then droped precipitously as the climate system went back into a glaciated state. Based on these observations of the past behavior of Earth’s climate, we should expect to go into a glacial period soon. The instrumental temperature record shows a slight cooling from the 40′s to the 70′s, which many did interpret as a return to ice age conditions. As it turns out, this cooling was caused by sulfur dioxide. When we started limiting SO2 emissions because of concerns about acid rain, we also stopped cooling. Since the 70′s global temperatures have pretty much just increased, as we expect from our understanding of the relationship between CO2 and global temperature.
February 3, 2007 at 11:07 am
I’m not sure why you all think science should “get it right” immediately, or why you assume peer review doesn’t work because ideas get overturned all the time. That really is part of the process of science. Scientists make observations and then come up with theories to explain those observations. Sometimes (in fact, frequently) our explanations are incomplete, or just plain wrong. That doesn’t mean it’s bad science. Science is iterative; we have ideas, we test the implications of those ideas, and we either refine or reformulate the old ideas, and then test the new implications. Sometimes we have to abandon ideas entirely because they aren’t suppored by subsequent observations, but that doesn’t mean the thought process was necessarily wrong (it probably wasn’t) or that the wrong idea wasn’t part of the path to the right one.
Let’s take, for example, the evolution of our ideas concerning the structure of the atom. Shortly after he discovered the existence of electrons, J.J. Thompson proposed the plum pudding model, which adequately explained his observations of the charge of the elementary particles. This model was disproven when Ernest Rutherford showed the nucleus is very, very small, and was replaced by the Bohr model. The Bohr model explained the additional observations and, some observations that weren’t explained by Thompson’s model. However, it too was incomplete, so other scientists offered further refinements to the model. Eventually, Bohr’s idea of fixed orbits for electrons was discarded and replaced with a structure for the atom based on quantum mechanics.
The theory of quantum mechanics, which is now accepted as our best explanation, would not have immediately fallen out of any one of the experiments that Thompson or Rutherford performed. Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac, and Schrodinger all built upon the previous theories that, when they were proposed, were the best explanations for the data, and it is unlikely they would have just come up with “the right” explanation without the ideas of those who went before.
February 3, 2007 at 11:08 am
Let’s also look at the predictions from a couple of decades ago that we were going into another ice age. Multin Milankovic proposed in the 1920′s that cycles in the orbital parameters of eccentricity, obliquity, and axial tilt could explain the recurrence of ice ages. The idea didn’t gain wide acceptance until the 1960′s and 70′s, when higher resolution records from sediment cores were produced. If you look at the ice core temperature record you will notice that in the past temperatures remained low during glacial periods, spiked quickly at the beginning of an interglacial, decreasing slowly for the remainder of the interglacials, and then droped precipitously as the climate system went back into a glaciated state. Based on these observations of the past behavior of Earth’s climate, we should expect to go into a glacial period soon. The instrumental temperature record shows a slight cooling from the 40′s to the 70′s, which many did interpret as a return to ice age conditions. As it turns out, this cooling was caused by sulfur dioxide. When we started limiting SO2 emissions because of concerns about acid rain, we also stopped cooling. Since the 70′s global temperatures have pretty much just increased, as we expect from our understanding of the relationship between CO2 and global temperature.
February 3, 2007 at 11:09 am
sorry I had to break up those last few comments. for some reason I couldn’t post everything at once.
February 3, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Kristine,
The problem isn’t whether or not informational videos (and what-not) are peer reviewed. The problem is that PR has a tendency to (remember I said inspite of the good it does) fuel dogma.
You speak of a tentative consensus on the part of the scientific community regarding a movement into an ice age of sorts during the early to mid-1900′s. My question is: to what extent was the public influenced by such scientific assertions to respond in a way that would seem irrational to the current consensus?
February 3, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Jack, your previous post made it sound like you were calling scientists dogmatic and superstitious. Was I wrong in that interpretation?
Your more recent question about the influence of scientific assertions on the general public is not one I can answer. I am a child of the 80′s and 90′s and so grew up scientifically with the idea of global warming, not global ice age. Most people I know who talk about the switch are at least a decade older than me (usually more like two or three), which suggests to me there is a generational influence. Honestly, I don’t get the impression from most people I talk to that they care one way or the other about climate change.
(and sorry about the multiple similar–nay, nearly identical–posts. I guess using many links like I did delays the appearance of a comment, obviously long enough I was able to re-type my entire comment a couple of times.)
February 3, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Kristine,
Yes you were wrong in that interpretation, but by no fault of your own. I am the king of vagueness.
In my first comment I was pointing at the influence that “established” science may have on those (less informed folks) who sympathize with the general scientific consensus, suggesting that peer review, while it may foil some of the more dubious scientific claims, has never provided a clear (or clear enough) check threshold in the socio-political realm with regard to that which it affirms.
My (lame) attempt at rolling out the logic in my second comment would suggest, for instance, that if Al Gore were making his movie back in the fifties, then we would see a silly alarmist call warm up the planet.
February 3, 2007 at 6:47 pm
OK…
So people can poke holes in the argument that global warming exists.
And people can poke holes in the arguments that it’s pretty much non-existant.
And people can attack or defend the American Enterprise Institute.
Likewise, people can attack or defend Al Gore’s movie and similar media hype.
All of this has almost zero relevance to the issue at hand: the IPCC.
I’ve heard both sides argue their positions. Balancing it carefully, I conclude that global warming exists, that it will alter the world’s climate, that it is a man-made phenomenon, and that it will have harmful consequences for the world environment.
And most scientists would agree with me, on those limited grounds.
Equating the limited conclusions of the vast majority of the world scientific community with scare campaigns like Gore’s is simply an attempt to muddy the water for ideological reasons. That kind of appeal to the power of ridicule belongs on Rush Limbaugh or AM talk radio. Ridicule is not argument and contempt doesn’t prove anything.
February 3, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Jack–then I’m glad I asked :)
Scientists are continually advocating for better science education specifically to combat the acceptance of dubious science by those who are not scientists. We try to explain in simple, easy to understand terms, but there is a basic amount of scientific knowledge that has to be there for anyone to understand what’s being said.
I was actually struck earlier in this discussion with how similar understanding scientific language is to understanding humor. I have a nephew (he’s eight) who tells the following joke:
Knock Knock
Who’s there
Orange
Orange who?
Orange banana chicken-butt!
It’s hilarious. Not because it’s a funny joke, but because HE thinks it’s funny.
Similarly, the anti-global warming people yesterday (and the anti’s over at mormonmentality) used scientific language, frequently in the proper places and in ways that mimic fairly well the way scientists really communicate with each other. I’m sure it sounds perfectly reasonable and believable if you’re not familiar with the actual science. I’m sure they even think they’re talking like scientists. The differences between the pseudo-science I’ve see poured out to “disprove” global warming and the real science must be subtle, or I doubt so many would wonder who is right.
There probably were movies made in the 70′s about the coming glaciation. I have no idea how to find them, but there’s probably some bad, B-grade sci-fi flick out there. If you find one, let me know.
February 4, 2007 at 12:56 am
So if a scientist comes along and accepts the $10,000, does some solid science, and writes a journal article that passes peer review- thats bad? I agree that it is unscholarly for a scientist to accept the money and then go write some anti-global warming rhetoric for the local newspaper, but what if she does real, peer reviewed science with that money and legitimately comes up with evidence that counters global warming theory?
Unfortunately, quick newspaper articles doubting global warming written by scientists is probably all they’re after, but accepting the money to do real research is not inherently bad.
February 4, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Seth,
You haven’t understood me at all. And, unlike Kristine, you don’t have my vagueness as an excuse.
I am one of those frustrated non-scientists who is ever learning and never able to get to the bottom of politicized science. My involking Al Gore’s movie has nothing to do with equating a scientific consensus with such silliness. It has everything to do with the problem of scientific *dogma* creeping onto the socio-political stage. Hence my example of Gore’s movie as produced in the fifties–the emphasis being on warming up the planet rather than cooling it down. Gore’s sensationalistic approach to the problem is an obvious inflation of what appears to be the scientific majority view on the issue. But what is even more obvious (or ought to be) is the huge shift in the views of the scientific community on the subject over the last little while.
My own pattern is to ride just behind the crest of the wave of scientific majority–close enough to the top that I don’t distance myself too much from what seems to be the result of research done by reasonable people, and not so close to the top that I’ll be pulled over the crest and slammed into the sand when those results are replaced by something even more reasonable.
This is the fear that many blue-collar types like myself have: a majority view becomes consensus which, in turn, becomes dogma as said view is proliferated down stream from the head waters of the scientific intelligentsia. The simple folk do their little tribal dance at the induction of the (say) new food pyramid. We swear by it for a generation or so only to learn that a new majority view demonstrates serious flaws in the old view. We tire of doing our little gig. We become cynical. We don’t know what the hell to believe anymore.
February 4, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Nick–if the publication they are soliciting articles for were peer reviewed, there would be no issue. Because there is no actual peer review of the work that AEI is requesting this represents an end-run around the peer review system. From my admittedly idealistic viewpoint it also seems sketchy to ask scientists to produce a pre-determined opinion on a topic. We’re supposed to critically review work that we come across, and work that we perform. Simply looking for faults in a work isn’t critical analysis; you must also be willing to accept that the ideas and interpretations in a work are correct. If AEI were looking for individuals to critically review the IPCC report and were willing to accept a favorable opinion of the work, that would be one thing. Since they are looking for a specific answer it’s not an objective analysis and it’s not scientific.
Jack–you’ve said a couple of times that Gore’s movie is sensational. It’s actually quite accurate. You may not like the delivery (Gore does play up some of the information) but the information he’s presenting is very accurate. From what I heard about the movie before I saw it I was actually expecting much more doom and gloom/the world as we know it is coming to an end stuff. He’s actually rather fair. We as scientists are usually rather dry in presenting the information; I thought Gore made the topic much more accesible and interesting than a scientist would.
That said, I am really encouraged to hear you are trying to continue learning about this subject (and other aspects of “politicized science”). Ideally science shouldn’t be political. As long as people have to rely on second hand parties to learn the science and innterpret its accuracy we’re going to be subject to distortion. I truly hope that discussions like this one will help in clearing up misconceptions.
February 4, 2007 at 11:14 pm
Kristine, you’ve got a pretty Naive take on the peer review process.
Let me go on record as vehemently opposing what is currently known as the peer review process. It’s a sham. Reputable scientists should find other venues to push work to the educated public. It’s a detriment to the advancement of knowledge and to the scientific process.
Somewhere during the history of science, the notion that theories should be replicable and critically examined morphed into the silly notion that theories should be replicable and critically examined only in academically approved forums. And scholarly journals that started out as a convenient media for disseminating sometimes obscure, trade-specific information transformed into the only acceptable place to really discuss science. This serves two basic purposes: (a) it serves the self-satisfied vanity of academic “scientists,” and (b) it acts as a job-security program that transforms scientists into bureaucrats.
For the most productive periods of the history of science, there was no peer review at all.
So there you have it: Science: good. Learning: good. Critical discussion: good. The current peer review process: boot it poste haste, because is sucks.
(Does Maddox still edit Nature? He’s an asshole with an agenda a mile long. I can’t believe the reputation of that rag survived his editorship. The fact that it has is yet more evidence what a con job “peer review” is.)
Anymore, the term scientist is meaningless. Einstein did not consider himself a scientists. He looked down on scientists. They were mere test-tube pushers. Nowadays, scientists have brought Einstein down to their own level, and everyone who completes enough lab credits can call themselves scientists and write blogs about peer review.
February 4, 2007 at 11:15 pm
In the preceding comment, the phrase in the 3rd paragraph “theories should be replicable and critically examined…” should read, “experiments and their results should be replicable and theories should be critically examined…”
February 5, 2007 at 12:19 am
Kristine-
I guess I haven’t read the AEI’s offer closely enough- I didn’t realize they were looking for articles to publish in their own non-peer reviewed journal.
As for simply accepting money from an institution (not necessarily the AEI) that wants a predetermined result, I can’t say that I’m as idealistically opposed to it as you. I would think it would be fine to take the money and do real science with it in pursuit of the desired outcome as long as you don’t let the guys with the purse predetermine the results of the science.
Did that make sense? An example- the army has decided that technology X will be instrumental in the design of one of their vehicles. I have accepted money to do research on technology X. Even though I highly doubt that this technology will be very useful in said vehicle, I work my tail off trying to do the science to make it work. I am honest with my results and don’t make irresponsible claims just to please my funders, but their predetermined outcome is really what sets the direction of my research.
I realize this is not what is happening with the AEI, but I got the impression that you feel it is always wrong to accept money to prove a predetermined result when you said “From my admittedly idealistic viewpoint it also seems sketchy to ask scientists to produce a pre-determined opinion on a topic.”
DKL-
I’m curious- what would you replace peer-review with? I agree that peer review is not perfect, but we need some system that filters out the hogwash- I’ve seen enough of it in the articles I’ve reviewed. Whenever I submit articles, I find the peer review process invaluable in helping me fine-tune my ideas.
Also, which “most productive periods in the history of science” are you referring to that did not have some form of peer review?
February 5, 2007 at 5:10 am
Mobilizing the public will always involve a degree of oversimplification and rabble-rousing.
Most people aren’t scientists and will automatically tune out the kind of nuances Jack is talking about.
If the people trying to combat global warming try to play the reasoned and nuanced voice that Jack’s advocating, while the GOP cranks on the opposing side continue to fire back with demagogery, the result is quite predictable:
The voices in favor of change will lose and the pro-status quo crowd will win. Period.
February 5, 2007 at 9:28 am
Nick–You’re right that most funding awards are given to produce a certain set of results (although I think of it more as testing a set of hypetheses with the proposed experiments). It’s fine for a group (any group) to ask for scientists to examine a problem as long as they are willing to accept whatever results from that research.
February 5, 2007 at 11:00 am
I’m curious about this, too, as well as about how such a quality (productivity) is to be measured.
February 5, 2007 at 11:36 am
I was watching a very interesting show last night on the Discovery Channel about the flood and Noahs ark. Apparently beaches have been found hundres of feet below the surface of the Dead Sea. Many top Geologists are turning to the theory that Global Warming caused massive melting of polar ice caps that caused massive localized flooding in certain parts of the world. I think they did carbon dating on fossils in the sea bed and dated the flood to 7 thousand years ago. Seems like there weren’t any SUVs back then. I’m not trying to be a smart ***, but I really believe Global warming is a natural event that happens in regular time intervals regardless of mankind’s actions. I also don’t think we could stop it if we buried all SUVs in the dirt. After all, this has all happened before.
February 5, 2007 at 11:38 am
“It is a cold fact: the Global Cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species,” wrote Lowell Ponte in 1976.
Notice he said Global Cooling!
February 5, 2007 at 11:40 am
I apologize for not referencing my source on the above quote. It is actually used by Dr. Tim Ball, Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, in an article published by Canadafreepress.com.
February 5, 2007 at 12:41 pm
Wes–we have a good idea what’s caused the variation in climate over the last few million years thanks to proxy reconstructions from ice cores, sediment cores, speleothems, and a host of other gelogic recors. Yes, there are natural fluctuations in climate. What we’re doing will probably not plunge us into either the most extreme warm climate or the most extreme cool climate the Earth has ever seen. That said, most natural climate change is much slower than the climate change we are inducing. Anthropogenic global warming is substantially different from more natural modes of climate change because it’s fast. The closest analogy we have to what we are doing today is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). This particular extreme climate event marks the boundary between two epochs in geologic history. Just so you’re aware, geologists who defined all of the different subdivisions of geologic time did so on the basis of faunal turnover–aka–massive extinctions. Even slow climate change upsets ecosystems and causes extinction (for example, this pdf talks about the extinction between the Eocene and Oligocene, which they estimate took 6 million years), and anthropogenic climate change won’t be slow. What we are doing is unusual in the geologic record and it’s likely to upset the ecosystems that are now extant across much of the world.
February 5, 2007 at 5:00 pm
Nick, peer review as it is conceived nowadays involves the assumption (that we see in Kristine N’s writing here) that nothing can pass for critical thinking unless it appears in certain academically controlled venues. This assumption is feeble and a bit contemptible, and we must lose no opportunity to say so.
As far as genuine review of findings by peers and others, this occurs quite naturally without the current environment of academic journals. It can, in principle, occur anywhere. And it should, in practice, occur in as many venues as possible: books, blogs, television, magazines, etc. The idea that genuine peer review only occurs in academic venues that are officially labeled “peer review journals” should be offensive to all scientifically minded individuals. Yet this is what I hear again and again from liberals who talk about comparing the merit of global warming findings — many of them didn’t even know what a peer-reviewed journal was 3 years ago.
As far as productivity in science, the two most productive periods in science were the 80 or so years preceding England’s industrial revolution (including Newton’s breakthrough), and the 80 or so years from 1870 to 1850, when the relativity accepted and initially refined to useful state and the secrets of the atom were unlocked.
There’s a tendency to view science as being on the march today, because most people don’t know the difference between science and technology. The Greeks had science, but little technology. The Egyptians had lots of technology, but little science.
Nowadays, you’ve got a lot of technologists pushing test-tubes around doing scientific-like stuff that depends on some body of scientific knowledge, but there is not a lot of science in the classical sense. (In the computer industry, you even have engineers calling themselves scientists.) When these technologists pull themselves away from their test tubes to try their hand at real science, the results are typically quite embarrassing, the global warming debacle being a perfect example.
February 5, 2007 at 5:07 pm
the last sentence in the 3rd paragraph of the preceding paragraph should read:
…when the theories of relativity were accepted and initially refined to useful state and when the secrets of the atom were unlocked.
February 6, 2007 at 10:44 am
DKL–I’m actually going to agree with you that those were two of the most influential periods of time in science, particularly for physics. I will quibble with the idea that they were the most productive, but you would be right in naming them influential. Calculus (which, it should be pointed out was invented by both Newton and Leibniz independently, and everyone except physicists uses Leibniz notation) has had a profound impact on basically every field that attempts to quantify results, including economics and social sciences. That period also marks the transition from a very superstitiious, alchemical approach to the world to one based on the scientific method.
The second period you reference was also a period of great forward strides in our understanding of the world, culminating in quantum mechanics, which marks the transition from a deterministic mindset (i.e.–the idea the everything can be determined if you know the starting conditions) to a probabalistic approach, where we understand the world as a chaotic system with probabilities associated with events instead of certainties.
I would point out that all of the science produced in that period went through at least a type of peer review. It was certainly less formal (especially for Newton), but all of these ideas were presented to a group of peers for critical review before publication. Newton was part of the Royal Society of London, which met regularly to discuss the ideas of its’ members. Everyone from the 1870′s to the 1950′s published letters in journals, and I believe those were typically refereed, especially towared the end of that period.
As much a anything else, peer review is a last bit of quality control on publications. Not only is the logic of the science under scrutiny (and believe me, if your ideas are at all reasonable, you can get them through peer review, just not necessarily in the most prestigious journals) but the writing and the presentation are under review. Many scientists are not great communicators. We also tend to look at problems for so long that we forget other people don’t know what we know. Peer review forces us to expalin our ideas to a subset of scientists before it is presented to the rest of the scientific community. There are problems in this, and I’ve seen research held up for stupid reasons because one of the reviewers is convinced the research isn’t rigorous enough. It happens, but not all that often.
Would it be better if we all just talked about our research and knew one another personally and could just publish whatever we wanted? maybe. Unfortunately, the scientific community is too large to do that in journals. We do have conferences regularly, where you can present whatever you like. They tend to be very exciting, and frequently the best research gets a lot of attetion. The barrier to attendance is pretty low as well, which allows the more fringe ideas to still be presented at them.