XPost: alt.tv.pol-incorrect, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.usa

Where can one turn for science reporting that has not become politicized?
It’s a difficult question to answer when examining establishment academic journals. But a few events this week have this column wondering if a
resurgence of rigor might just be underway. On Tuesday Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker tweeted:

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of
Science magazine, asked me for money to improve acceptance of science
by policymakers & the public & to spur action on climate change, causes
I support. Here’s why I turned them down.

Mr. Pinker linked to a webpage featuring the text of his rejection of the donation request. The professor explained:

Science magazine appears to have adopted wokeism as its official
editorial policy and the only kind of opinion that may be expressed in
the magazine. An example is the recent special section on the
underrepresentation of African Americans among physics majors, graduate
students, and faculty members. This situation is lamentable and worthy
of understanding. But the six articles in the issue assume as dogma
that the underrepresentation is caused by “white privilege”: that “the
dominant culture has discouraged diversity,” and “white people use their
membership in a dominant group to assert political, cultural, and
economic power over those outside that group.” Though Science is
ordinarily committed to open debate on scientific controversies, no
disagreements with this conspiracy theory were expressed. And though
the journal is supposedly committed to empirical tests, no data were
presented that might speak to alternative explanations, such as that
the cause of the under-representation lies in the pipeline of prepared
and interested students. If we want to increase the number of African
Americans in physics, it matters a great deal whether we should try to
fix the nation’s high schools or accuse physics professors of white
supremacy. Yet Science magazine has decided, without debate or data,
to advocate the latter...

SciLine, the AAAS resource for journalists touted in your fundraising
message, includes a webpage with primers on climate change. This
includes the following articles on energy:

“Wind energy in the United States”

“Biomass energy in the United States”

“Hydropower in the United States”

“Renewable energy in the United States”

“Geothermal energy in the United States”

“Solar energy in the United States”

Notice anything missing? There is nothing on nuclear energy in the
United States. This is despite the fact that nuclear energy is currently
the carbon-free source that exceeds every one of these alternatives in
US energy consumption...

For the AAAS to omit any mention of nuclear power in its resource for
journalists on climate change is deeply irresponsible and can only be
explained by the fact that nuclear power fell out of fashion among
left-wing and Green political factions more than 40 years ago.

Is it possible the magazine’s editors are beginning to take the professor’s critique to heart?

Today the publication is acknowledging something that passionate global warmists on the left would prefer that it didn’t. “Use of ‘too hot’ climate models exaggerates impacts of global warming,” is the headline on a new story in Science from Paul Voosen, who writes:

One study suggests Arctic rainfall will become dominant in the 2060s,
decades earlier than expected. Another claims air pollution from forest
fires in the western United States could triple by 2100. A third says
a mass ocean extinction could arrive in just a few centuries.

All three studies, published in the past year, rely on projections of
the future produced by some of the world’s next-generation climate
models. But even the modelmakers acknowledge that many of these models
have a glaring problem: predicting a future that gets too hot too fast.
Although modelmakers are adapting to this reality, researchers who use
the model projections to gauge the impacts of climate change have yet
to follow suit. That has resulted in a parade of “faster than expected”
results that threatens to undermine the credibility of climate science,
some researchers fear.

Scientists need to get much choosier in how they use model results, a
group of climate scientists argues in a commentary published today in
Nature. Researchers should no longer simply use the average of all the
climate model projections, which can result in global temperatures by
2100 up to 0.7°C warmer than an estimate from the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Commenting in Nature, Zeke Hausfather, Kate Marvel, Gavin Schmidt, John Nielsen-Gammon and Mark Zelinka warn:

Users beware: a subset of the newest generation of models are ‘too hot’
and project climate warming in response to carbon dioxide emissions
that might be larger than that supported by other evidence.

Earth is a complicated system of interconnected oceans, land, ice and
atmosphere, and no computer model could ever simulate every aspect of
it exactly.

You can say that again. Today’s acknowledgment is additional vindication for Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie, who wrote last year in Issues in Science and Technology:

The integrity of science depends on its capacity to provide an ever
more reliable picture of how the world works. Over the past decade or
so, serious threats to this integrity have come to light. The
expectation that science is inherently self-correcting, and that it
moves cumulatively and progressively away from false beliefs and toward
truth, has been challenged in numerous fields—including cancer research,
neuroscience, hydrology, cosmology, and economics—as observers discover
that many published findings are of poor quality, subject to systemic
biases, or irreproducible.

In a particularly troubling example from the biomedical sciences, a
2015 literature review found that almost 900 peer-reviewed publications
reporting studies of a supposed breast cancer cell line were in fact
based on a misidentified skin cancer line. Worse still, nearly 250 of
these studies were published even after the mistaken cell line was
conclusively identified in 2007. Our cursory search of Google Scholar
indicates that researchers are still using the skin cancer cell line in
breast cancer studies published in 2021. All of these erroneous studies
remain in the literature and will continue to be a source of
misinformation for scientists working on breast cancer.

In 2021, climate research finds itself in a situation similar to breast
cancer research in 2007. Our research (and that of several colleagues)
indicates that the scenarios of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through
the end of the twenty-first century are grounded in outdated portrayals
of the recent past. Because climate models depend on these scenarios to
project the future behavior of the climate, the outdated scenarios
provide a misleading basis both for developing a scientific evidence
base and for informing climate policy discussions. The continuing misuse
of scenarios in climate research has become pervasive and consequential
—so much so that we view it as one of the most significant failures of
scientific integrity in the twenty-first century thus far. We need a
course correction.

Hear, hear. Perhaps Messrs. Pielke, Pinker and Ritchie can also persuade science journalists to chart a course that is 180 degrees from “wokeism.”

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Let's go Brandon!

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