Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 7 October 2024 — 1300 words/7 minutes
If you don’t read Roger Pielke Jr.’s substack, The Honest Broker, you should. I do and I am a paid subscriber – not because I always agree with him on the topic of climate change (which I sometimes do) but because he is a honest hard working scientist on the policy front and one of the most effective public voices for climate skepticism and climate realism (even though I doubt that he would consider himself so.)
Here’s a quote from his recent effort “Weaponizing Peer Review”:
“The idealization of peer review as the arbiter of good science is problematic for many reasons, but one is that it downplays the possibility that bad science can appear in the peer reviewed literature and good science outside of those outlets.“
[ most quotes following are from Pielke Jr. there]
He comes to this following on Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, quoting them on the definition of Bad Science: [this quote not Pielke Jr.]
“It’s science that is obviously fraudulent — when data have been invented, fudged, or manipulated. Bad science is where data is have been cherry-picked— when some data have been deliberately left out—or it’s impossible for the reader to understand the steps that were taken to produce or analyze the data. It is a set of claims that can’t be tested, claims that are based on samples that are too small, and claims that don’t follow from the evidence provided. And science is bad—or at least weak—when proponents of a position jump to conclusions on insufficient or inconsistent data.” ….. “But while these scientific criteria may be clear in principle, knowing when they apply in practice is a judgment call. For this scientists rely on peer review. Peer review is a topic that is impossible to make sexy, but it’s crucial to understand, because it is what makes science science—and not just a form of opinion.” [ note again: that’s Oreskes and Conway, not Pielke Jr.]
This “idealization of peer review as the arbiter of good science is problematic for many reasons, but one is that it downplays the possibility that bad science can appear in the peer reviewed literature and good science outside of those outlets.” says Pielke Jr.
And, of course he is absolutely right.
In the featured substack piece, Pielke Jr. focuses on the
“…use and abuse of the peer reviewed literature to produce tactical science which I define as:
“Publications — often targeted for the peer reviewed literature — designed and constructed to serve extra-scientific ends, typically efforts to shape public opinion, influence politics, or serve legal action.”
Have we ever seen anything that fits that description in the field of climate science? Yes, we have, lots of it. Note that ALL Tactical Science is Bad Science – pretend science, sciencey papers with predetermined findings, propaganda disguised as science, political maneuvering and not science at all – papers that look like science but are actually intended to fulfill other purposes than those of real science:
“Science as a collective institution aims to produce more and more accurate natural explanations of how the natural world works, what its components are, and how the world got to be the way it is now.” [ source ]
I could give a very long list of papers I consider bad science (poorly done, cherry-picking, misused statistical methods, faulty selection of data sets, conclusions don’t follow from evidence presented, etc.) in another long list of fields. But Dr. Pielke offers the following as example of Tactical Science in the field that interests most readers here – Climate Science:
[ Money quote from Abstract: “Even considered on the time frame of 100 years after emission (GWP100), which severely understates the climatic damage of methane, the LNG footprint equals or exceeds that of coal.” — kh ]
[ Money quote from Abstract: “Although the probability of 8.5 watt per square meters scenarios is low, our results support their continued utility for calibrating damage functions, characterizing climate in the 22nd century (the probability of exceeding 8.5 watt per square meters increases to about 7% by 2150), and assessing low-probability/high-impact futures.” — kh ]
- Schwalm et al. 2020. From the Woodwell Climate Research Center, which is funded by McKinsey — a heavy user of RCP8.5, the paper also justifies the continued prioritization of RCP8.5. The paper relies on fanciful assumptions of massive increases in land use carbon dioxide emissions completely at odds with observations and the IPCC.
[ Money quote from Abstract: “Not only are the emissions consistent with RCP8.5 in close agreement with historical total cumulative CO2 emissions (within 1%), but RCP8.5 is also the best match out to midcentury under current and stated policies with still highly plausible levels of CO2 emissions in 2100.” – kh ]
Pielke Jr. suggests that telltale signs of Tactical Science include, but are not limited to:
1. Failure to disclose the interests of direct funders
2. The findings are outliers in their fields but offer plausible counters as to why they are correct despite the findings of the broader field.
Such papers allow others to make political claims based on these outlier findings – using language such as “the most recent science in a peer-reviewed paper by Slinger and Smuts shows we must ….”.
In regards to the three examples above, Pielke Jr. says clearly:
“The three climate papers above are bad science not simply because they are tactical science, but because they are bad science — the demonstration of which requires employing good science.”
In his substack piece, Pielke Jr. offers some suggestions on what to do about Tactical Science.
The first one is to understand that “peer-review provides a minimal standard of review. It certainly does not provide a demarcation between good and bad science.”
It is my view, as readers here may already know, is that peer-review is often the culprit that encourages Bad Science and not a cure. Scientific fields, all of them, are prone to forming prevailing biases in favor of (or antagonistic to) various scientific views through the offices of publication bias [see para 8.5], scientific fads, pal review, band-wagoning peer-reviewers supporting popular ideas and societal pressures.
All too often, a paper is approved for publication in a peer-reviewed journal because it has catchy title, “seems to agree” with the general field, will generate a lot of “clicks” and will attract favorable attention to the authors, their institution (university, college, corporation, research group, etc.) and the publishing journal itself.
Not only have there been Tactical Science journal articles, there are entire Tactical Climate Crisis Research Groups which produce nothing but Tactical Science in support of the so-called Climate Crisis.
Readers are encouraged to list them in the comments.
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Author’s Comment:
Do not misunderstand me, I am not saying the Bad Science and Tactical Science producers, the scientists themselves, are bad people. They are just people: mothers and fathers, Dads and Moms, neighbors, members of bowling leagues, youth baseball and soccer coaches and volunteers at your local food bank. What sets them apart is that they participate in the production of Tactical Science or produce sloppy, poorly done and/or fallacious work.
Why? You’d have to ask them each personally but my guess is Nobel Cause justification: the misguided belief that some normally bad action is justified by the Nobel Cause it forwards. Others are caught up in the professional requirement to believe or face loss of position or reputation.
Many just plain have-to-go-along-to-get-along, like they did when teenagers to remain in the In Crowd.
Bad Science makes me what to (need to…) try to correct it. Tactical Science makes me sick to my stomach.
Thanks for reading.
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