Science Magazine Waffling On Global Warming?

[adamprez2003]

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Seems the good fight being fought by skeptics of global warming is starting to gain traction

Greenhouse gas changes are well known, they note, but not so the counteracting cooling of pollutant hazes, called aerosols. Aerosols cool the planet by reflecting away sunlight and increasing the reflectivity of clouds. Somehow, the three researchers say, modelers failed to draw on all the uncertainty inherent in aerosols so that the 20th-century simulations look more certain than they should." [Italics added]

[ckb2001]

What a piece of bull**** propaganda.

First of all, this quote:
QUOTE:
"SCIENCE magazine reflects at least as much politics as honest science."
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??

First of all, it's the "reports" section of Science Magazine that contains the important stuff. That's where most of the scientific papers that are accepted for publication end up. And there is NO discernable political slant there!

Nature and Science are unquestionably the two most reputable journals in science, and the reason is because of the papers they publish. Those papers aren't chosen because of some "overt political leaning". The reviewers, who are usually leading researchers in their fields, are the ones that mostly make the decision whether to publish or not with the editor having a relatively minor role in the process.

So, let's distinguish between the process that leads up to publication of the actual research papers and everything else in that magazine. It's simply baseless accusation to talk about politics seriously infiltrating that process.


So what about the rest of the stuff that's published in there? I don't see where the "political" stuff comes in with "technical comments" or "reviews" sections, and the "perspectives" section usually gives you an idea how certain scientists view developments in their fields. There's no overt political leaning I see there.

Really, the only place you could fathom this would be where they summarize the news in the "news of the week" or "news focus" sections. But, the "news focus" part is primarily educational - science education mostly, so that really leaves the "news of the week" part.

And most of the "news of the week" parts read like summaries. Seriously, this James Lewis is counting on the fact no one reads Science Magazine to make such an asinine comment as it reflecting as much politics as science!!


As far as the specifics in that blog by Lewis on the global warming thing, that has mostly to do with the relative large number of researchers that need to use statistical analysis in their research, but aren't as well versed in statistics to know whether they made an error or not. It has nothing to do with the journal Science's position on global warming (the journal itself is neutral in this), nor in what the majority of scientists in that field would agree with.

No, it simply has to do with corrections in statistical analysis, and there's way too many errors of that sort in science because of lack of knowledge on the part of the researchers and reviewers sometimes. Either way, these types of errors are usually corrected over time (science is an activity of a group of people, not just one), so it's not a reason to discount what say the IPCC says.

Anyway, here's one article on the problems in using statistics I spoke of:

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"Two of the world's top scientific journals, Nature and the British Medical Journal, have been found guilty of routinely publishing figures that do not add up.

The evidence comes from Spanish researchers who found a surprisingly large number of statistical errors in the two journals. They warn that the same may well be true of other mainstream journals.

"It's a warning to be more careful," says Emili García-Berthou of the University of Girona, who discovered the discrepancies. "Our concern is that these kinds of errors are probably present in all numerical results and all steps of scientific research - with potentially important consequences."

The analysis revealed that at least one error appeared in 38 per cent of the Nature papers and 25 per cent of the BMJ papers looked at. Furthermore, the study estimates that four per cent of results reported to be statistically "significant" may not be significant after all."
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But, that doesn't change the fact that this James Lewis writes a piece of propaganda crap.