Judith Curry
You conclude
So, has science lost it’s way? I don’t think so, but the Science/Nature publishing model and the way that universities reward scientists are providing perverse incentives that do not serve well the societally-relevant applications of science.
As it relates specifically to climate science, one could conclude that the Climategate tapes and subsequent revelations did reveal that “science had lost its way”.
But one could also argue that this was just a small insider group of scientists who were bending (or overtly breaking) the rules, in order to stop any views or scientific findings, which dissented from their own personal beliefs and who did not hesitate from fudging, skewing or hiding data to get their message across, i.e. the “consensus” CAGW message being promoted by IPCC.
This is bad enough, but not a case of (climate) “science losing its way”.
Yet one could argue that there is more to it than just a corrupted IPCC “consensus” process, editors of scientific journals that selectively pick the articles they will publish based on whether or not they support the “consensus” message and a handful of overzealous climatologists who broke the rules and became advocates instead of scientists.
It is the system, itself, and the root cause is the IPCC.
As Michael Eisen wrote:
“The journals want the papers that make the sexiest claims. And scientists believe that the way you succeed is having splashy papers in Science or Nature — it’s not bad for them if a paper turns out to be wrong, if it’s gotten a lot of attention.”
Searching for the scientific “truth” has been replaced with searching for scientific “proof” that the IPCC “consensus” premise is correct and the more alarmist the article, the better the mainstream journals like it. Whether or not a paper “turns out to be wrong” is much less important than how well it meets the needs of the journals.
What makes this particularly egregious is that the taxpayers, who are funding this whole charade, are being misled and cheated by the very system they are financing. They are being sold exaggerated or patently untrue scare stories in order to feed the system.
When a US post-Climategate poll finds that almost 70% of the respondents believed that climate scientists fudged their data, this is a strong indication that climate science has, indeed, “lost its way”.
Honest climate scientists, like you or Roger Pielke, Sr. (or many others one could list), suffer because of this problem. Not only are you branded a “heretic” by some science journalists or members of the “consensus” crowd, but your field of science, itself, gets tarnished by the actions of this bunch.
It is sad.
And IMO as long as the IPCC exists in its present form, this problem will not get resolved.
Max
