Dean's World

of Hell, that is. Dante reserved it for heretics and apostates. I saw this article on scientists who've converted from global warming advocacy to skepticism, a uniquely modern form of apostasy, and thought it might be of interest to several of the associate bloggers here.

The Real Climate folks had a good post a while back about the limits of peer review.

They note that peer review forces science to be slow and incremental, and that new "bombshell" ideas are usually less reliable and robust than ideas that take their time, wind through the system, and gradually attract support. After all, as they rightly note, "It is extremely unlikely that any new study will immediately overthrow all the past knowledge", and then comment,

Scientists would find the apparent contradiction interesting and worthy of further investigation, and would devote further study to isolating the source of the contradiction. They would not suddenly throw out all previous results. Yet, one often gets the impression that scientific progress consists of a series of revolutions where scientists discard all their past thinking each time a new result gets published. This is often because only a small handful of high-profile studies in a given field are known by the wider public and media, and thus unrealistic weight is attached to those studies. New results are often over-emphasised (sometimes by the authors, sometimes by lobby groups) to make them sound important enough to have news value. Thus "bombshells" usually end up being duds. ... even when it initially breaks down, the process of peer-review does usually work in the end. But sometimes it can take a while. Observers would thus be well advised to be extremely skeptical of any claims in the media or elsewhere of some new "bombshell" or "revolution" that has not yet been fully vetted by the scientific community.

Der Spiegal has a fascinating look at the IPCC and alarmism in the climate change debate. Note the quotes from scientists who say the emotionalism and alarmism are probably good things.

Why is it that I am 100% certain that the new IPCC report(s) will call for increased funding to study the problem, even though supposedly the problem is already so obviously bad, and the alarmism so obviously correct, that the skeptics need to be compared to Nazis and flat-Earthers?

It's also fascinating to read about Pachauri. At least Der Spiegel notes honestly that he and his fellow scientists on the IPCC derive their entire incomes from their activism, even if they don't say that openly and even if they complain about how little they have to get by on. It's fascinating how Pachauri gets to be treated like a rock star as he jets all over the world telling powerful politicians what to do and what to think, holding press conferences and showing up on talk shows.

No conflict of interest there, eh? Just good old fashioned dispassionate science, utterly free of any hint of corruption or lack of objectivity or self-interest. [snort]

Despite Der Spiegel's glossing over it, one essential fact is manifest in their story, and it is in no way an "attack" on climatologists who study global warming to say so: these people's income and their entire professional prestige is dependent on governments and the general populace continuing to believe that Man Made Global Warming is a serious problem and that more funding for research into it is desperately needed.

And, oh yeah, how do they dole out that government funding? By the same peercrony-review system that has been shown to routinely crush scientific dissenters from orthodoxy in multiple fields. What a shock. So virtually all the funding for climatology now is related to Global Warming, and there's more and more of it all the time, and the scientists who get together at regular conferences and in their anonymous "peer review" funding chambers are completely dispassionate and in no way compromised by self-interest when they decide which projects get funded and which do not, eh?

Der Spiegel also misses the obvious: this community of researchers could fix their undeniable conflict of interest by having greater independent review by mathematicians, meteorologists, and climatologists who can be shown to be utterly free of conflict of interest on this issue.

Otherwise, their objectivity being nonexistent, there is no reason to be anything other than skeptical of these folks. Especially since all of the most important charges of the Wegman Report remain unanswered by this community of researchers so far as I've been able to determine.

By the way, watch for the paint-by-numbers responses: the bashers and defenders of orthodoxy love to trot out phrases like "conspiracy theory" and "politics" and "pseudo science." Because that lets them not only smear the skeptics, but also lets them completely evade the real issue: inherent conflict of interest and lack of objectivity.

(Link via Instapundit.)

Only 35 years and hundreds of billions of dollars later, we're barely able to treat most forms of cancer better than we were in the 1970s.

George Miklos and Philip Baird have a bruising editorial, and some suggestions.

Researchers at The University of Warwick and Leicester University have used an artificial snot (nasal mucus) to significantly enhance the performance of electronic noses.

The researchers have coated the sensors used by odour-sensing "electronic noses” with a mix of polymers that mimics the action of the mucus in the natural nose. This greatly improves the performance of the electronic devices allowing them to pick out a more diverse range of smells.