The Crisis of Scientific Credibility

Last year we had ten-part series on the problem of science fraud, and we return to the subject now because pop culture is catching up, which is usually a sign of larger public trouble. The Puffington Host is on the story, reporting on the widespread practice of selective use of data and statistical techniques to produce “meaningful” results that are essentially bogus. Dan Sarewitz has a good column on this subject in Nature magazine right now, “The Pressure to Publish Pushes Down Quality.” Money quote: “Mainstream scientific leaders increasingly accept that large bodies of published research are unreliable.”

Well at least we can rest assured that this never happens in climate science.

John Oliver of HBO’s Last Week Tonight made this the subject of his long-form monologue a couple weeks ago, and its pretty good, albeit with the necessary caveats that his left-wing bias shows up here and there, and the language is unnecessarily crude. But other than that. . .

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