Monday, March 20, 2017
Deceptive headline
The headline and summary of an analysis of "climate change" "research" is deceptive. The headline says "No publication bias found", and the abstract is equally firm.
The actual article is nearly opposite to the headline. It finds that the 2009 leak was useful. Before the leak, Mann and Jones and their criminal gang were running wild, publishing all sorts of nonsense and lies and receiving plenty of money, power and glory for their crimes. After the leak exposed them as gangsters, published articles became far more cautious, emphasizing non-significant results and failures.
However, our meta-analysis did find multiple lines of evidence of biases within our sample of articles, which were perpetuated in journals of all impact factors and related largely to how science is communicated: The large, statistically significant effects were typically showcased in abstracts and summary paragraphs, whereas the lesser effects, especially those that were not statistically significant, were often buried in the main body of reports. ... We also discovered a temporal pattern to reporting biases, which appeared to be related to seminal events in the climate change community and may reflect a socio-economic driver in the publication record. First, there was a conspicuous rise in the number of climate change publications in the 2 years following IPCC 2007, which likely reflects the rise in popularity (among public and funding agencies) for this field of research and the increased appetite among journal editors to publish these articles. Concurrent with increased publication rateswas an increase in reported effect sizes in abstracts. Perhaps a coincidence, the apparent popularity of climate change articles (i.e., number of published articles and reported effect sizes) plummeted shortly after Climategate, when the world media focused its scrutiny on this field of research, and perhaps, popularity in this field waned.In other words, as I said yesterday, exposing corruption reduces the blackmail power of gangsters. Supply of information grows and demand shrinks, thus collapsing the value of blackmail. Or in other other words, the article demonstrated its own point! How to put a fashionable title on a not-so-fashionable article.
Labels: Carbon Cult
¶ 8:45 AM
