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The curious double standards of Simon Singh - Telegraph Blogs - 0 views

blogs.telegraph.co.uk/...ouble-standards-of-simon-singh Skepticism Journalism Science Global Warming AGW Chiropractic
shared by Weiye Loh on 29 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Simon Singh as in the popular mathematician and bestselling author of Fermat’s Last Theorem. And also, more germanely to this story, the recent victim of an expensive libel action brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA). The BCA eventually dropped its action – but not before Singh had run up £200,000 in legal costs. Though some it his lawyers will be able to claim back, he’s still likely to lose £60,000 of his own money as a result of his brave, principled decision to fight the case rather than cave in earlier. I hugely respected him for what he did. He won a victory (albeit a financially Pyrrhic one) not just for himself but for all those of us who trade in robust opinion and who believe that English libel laws are outrageously biased in favour of vexatious complainants, which is why we have unfortunately become a haven for libel tourists, some of them representing unspeakable causes.
  • Among those “serious matters of public interest”, you might imagine, would be Climate Change.
  • Yet in the opinion of Singh, the worldwide Climate Change industry is the one area where the robust scepticism and empiricism he professes to believe in just doesn’t apply. Apparently, the job of a journalist is just to accept the word of “the scientists” and take it as read that being as they are “scientists” their word is God and it brooks no questioning or dissent. That’s it. Finished.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • I have no doubt whatsoever that Sir Paul Nurse knows more about genetics than I do. It is, after all, where the field in which he won his Nobel prize. As for science, sure, Nurse has the advantage over me there, too. He has a PhD. He’s a science graduate and I’m an arts graduate. But then I’ve never pretended otherwise. My case is not that I “James Delingpole have taken a long hard look at the science of global warming and discovered through careful sifting of countless peer-reviewed papers that the experts have got it all wrong.”
  • What I am saying, and I say almost every day, is that the evidence is not as robust as the “consensus” scientists claim; that there are many distinguished scientists all round the world who dispute this alleged “consensus”; that true science doesn’t advance through “consensus” and never has; that the Climategate emails threw the peer-review process into serious doubt by demonstrating how eminently corruptable it is; that there are many vested interests out there determined and able to spend a great deal of money by making out that the case for catastrophic, man-made global warming is much stronger than it is. And on these specific issues I can reasonably claim to be better informed than Sir Paul Nurse, regardless of how many PhDs he has, because I’ve spent much more time than he has researching them and because they are not issues which require an exclusively scientific knowledge to understand. They just require the basic journalistic skill of being able to read and analyse.
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Real Climate faces libel suit | Environment | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...real-climate-libel-threat Libel Climate Science Academic Journal Academic Research Social Social Media
shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller and Real Climate member based at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, has claimed that Energy & Environment (E&E) has "effectively dispensed with substantive peer review for any papers that follow the editor's political line." The journal denies the claim, and, according to Schmidt, has threatened to take further action unless he retracts it.
  • Every paper that is submitted to the journal is vetted by a number of experts, she said. But she did not deny that she allows her political agenda to influence which papers are published in the journal. "I'm not ashamed to say that I deliberately encourage the publication of papers that are sceptical of climate change," said Boehmer-Christiansen, who does not believe in man-made climate change.
  • Simon Singh, a science writer who last year won a major libel battle with the British Chiropractic Association (BCA), said: "A libel threat is potentially catastrophic. It can lead to a journalist going bankrupt or a blogger losing his house. A lot of journalists and scientists will understandably react to the threat of libel by retracting their articles, even if they are confident they are correct. So I'm delighted that Gavin Schmidt is going to stand up for what he has written." During the case with the BCA, Singh also received a libel threat in response to an article he had written about climate change, but Singh stood by what he had written and threat was not carried through.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Schmidt has refused to retract his comments and maintains that the majority of papers published in the journal are "dross"."I would personally not credit any article that was published there with any useful contribution to the science," he told the Guardian. "Saying a paper was published in E&E has become akin to immediately discrediting it." He also describes the journal as a "backwater" of poorly presented and incoherent contributions that "anyone who has done any science can see are fundamentally flawed from the get-go."
  • Schmidt points to an E&E paper that claimed that the Sun is made of iron. "The editor sent it out for review, where it got trashed (as it should have been), and [Boehmer-Christiansen] published it anyway," he says.
  • The journal also published a much-maligned analysis suggesting that levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide could go up and down by 100 parts per million in a year or two, prompting marine biologist Ralph Keeling at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California to write a response to the journal, in which he asked: "Is it really the intent of E&E to provide a forum for laundering pseudo-science?"
  • Schmidt and Keeling are not alone in their criticisms. Roger Pielke Jr, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, said he regrets publishing a paper in the journal in 2000 – one year after it was established and before he had time to realise that it was about to become a fringe platform for climate sceptics. "[E&E] has published a number of low-quality papers, and the editor's political agenda has clearly undermined the legitimacy of the outlet," Pielke says. "If I had a time machine I'd go back and submit our paper elsewhere."
  • Any paper published in E&E is now ignored by the broader scientific community, according to Pielke. "In some cases perhaps that is justified, but I would argue that it provided a convenient excuse to ignore our paper on that basis alone, and not on the merits of its analysis," he said. In the long run, Pielke is confident that good ideas will win out over bad ideas. "But without care to the legitimacy of our science institutions – including journals and peer review – that long run will be a little longer," he says.
  • she has no intention of changing the way she runs E&E – which is not listed on the ISI Journal Master list, an official list of academic journals – in response to his latest criticisms.
  • Schmidt is unsurprised. "You would need a new editor, new board of advisors, and a scrupulous adherence to real peer review, perhaps ... using an open review process," he said. "But this is very unlikely to happen since their entire raison d'être is political, not scientific."
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