Davin News Server

On 9/20/2024 4:15 PM, AlleyCat wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 13:45:16 -0700,  Alan says...
> 
>>
>> On 2024-09-20 13:38, citizen winston smith wrote:
>>> On 9/20/2024 2:26 PM, Alan wrote:
>>>> I know about the publishing process.
>>>
>>> Publish or perish - the reason we have so many delusional, grant-herded,
>>> per-slaved globull-worming acolytes.
>>
>> Look up what "non sequitur" means.
> 
> LOL... agreed.

Peer-chastening is a real and ongoing corruption of atmospheric science.


https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/sep/05/publish-perish-peer-review-science

Peer review is the process that decides whether your work gets published 
in an academic journal. It doesn't work very well any more, mainly as a 
result of the enormous number of papers that are being published (an 
estimated 1.3 million papers in 23,750 journals in 2006). There simply 
aren't enough competent people to do the job. The overwhelming effect of 
the huge (and unpaid) effort that is put into reviewing papers is to 
maintain a status hierarchy of journals. Any paper, however bad, can now 
get published in a journal that claims to be peer-reviewed.

The blame for this sad situation lies with the people who have imposed a 
publish-or-perish culture, namely research funders and senior people in 
universities. To have "written" 800 papers is regarded as something to 
boast about rather than being rather shameful. University PR departments 
encourage exaggerated claims, and hard-pressed authors go along with them.

Not long ago, Imperial College's medicine department were told that 
their "productivity" target for publications was to "publish three 
papers per annum including one in a prestigious journal with an impact 
factor of at least five.″ The effect of instructions like that is to 
reduce the quality of science and to demoralise the victims of this sort 
of mismanagement.

https://fair.org/home/journalistic-balance-as-global-warming-bias/

A new study has found that when it comes to U.S. media coverage of 
global warming, superficial balance—telling “both” sides of the 
story—can actually be a form of informational bias. Despite the 
consistent assertions of the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental 
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that human activities have had a 
“discernible” influence on the global climate and that global warming is 
a serious problem that must be addressed immediately, “he said/she said” 
reporting has allowed a small group of global warming skeptics to have 
their views greatly amplified.

The current best climate research predicts that the Earth’s temperature 
could rise by as much as 10.4° F by 2100. Studies show that this 
temperature increase could contribute to a sea-level rise of up to 35 
inches by 2100—threatening to flood tens of millions of inhabitants of 
coastal communities. Warming on this scale would extend the range and 
activity of pests and diseases, and force land and marine life to 
migrate northward, thereby endangering ecosystems, reproductive habits 
and biodiversity.

Moreover, climate forecasts include more and higher-intensity rainfall 
in some regions, leading to greater flood and landslide damage. In other 
regions, forecasts call for increased droughts, resulting in smaller 
crop yields, more forest fires and diminished water resources. These 
climate shifts threaten the lives and livelihoods of people around the 
globe, with a greater impact on the most vulnerable.

These gloomy findings and dire predictions are not the offerings of a 
gaggle of fringe scientists with an addiction to the film Apocalypse 
Now. Rather, these forecasts are put forth by the IPCC, the largest, 
most reputable peer-reviewed body of climate-change scientists in 
history. Formed by the United Nations in 1990 and composed of the top 
scientists from around the globe, the IPCC employs a 
decision-by-consensus approach. In fact, D. James Baker, administrator 
of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and 
undersecretary for oceans and atmosphere at the Department of Commerce 
under the Clinton administration, has said about human contributions to 
global warming (Washington Post , 11/12/97) that “there’s no better 
scientific consensus on this on any issue I know—except maybe Newton’s 
second law of dynamics.”

The idea of balance

In 1996, the Society of Professional Journalists removed the term 
“objectivity” from its ethics code (Columbia Journalism Review , 
7–8/03). This reflects the fact that many contemporary journalists find 
the concept to be an unrealistic description of what journalists aspire 
to, preferring instead words like “fairness,” “balance,” “accuracy,” 
“comprehensiveness” and “truth.” In terms of viewpoints presented, 
journalists are taught to abide by the norm of balance: identifying the 
most dominant, widespread positions and then telling “both” sides of the 
story.

According to media scholar Robert Entman: “Balance aims for neutrality. 
It requires that reporters present the views of legitimate spokespersons 
of the conflicting sides in any significant dispute, and provide both 
sides with roughly equal attention.”

Balanced coverage does not, however, always mean accurate coverage. In 
terms of the global warming story, “balance” may allow skeptics—many of 
them funded by carbon-based industry interests—to be frequently 
consulted and quoted in news reports on climate change. Ross Gelbspan, 
drawing from his 31-year career as a reporter and editor, charges in his 
books The Heat Is On and Boiling Point that a failed application of the 
ethical standard of balanced reporting on issues of fact has contributed 
to inadequate U.S. press coverage of global warming:

The professional canon of journalistic fairness requires reporters who 
write about a controversy to present competing points of view. When the 
issue is of a political or social nature, fairness—presenting the most 
compelling arguments of both sides with equal weight—is a fundamental 
check on biased reporting. But this canon causes problems when it is 
applied to issues of science. It seems to demand that journalists 
present competing points of view on a scientific question as though they 
had equal scientific weight, when actually they do not.
We empirically tested Gelbspan’s hypothesis as we focused on the human 
contribution to global warming (known in science as “anthropogenic 
global warming”). In our study called “Balance as Bias: Global Warming 
and the U.S. Prestige Press”—presented at the 2002 Conference on the 
Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change in Berlin and published 
in the July 2004 issue of the journal Global Environmental Change —we 
analyzed articles about human contributions to global warming that 
appeared between 1988 and 2002 in the U.S. prestige press: the New York 
Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal.

Using the search term “global warming,” we collected articles from this 
time period and focused on what is considered “hard news,” excluding 
editorials, opinion columns, letters to the editor and book reviews. 
Approximately 41 percent of articles came from the New York Times, 29 
percent from the Washington Post, 25 percent from the Los Angeles Times, 
and 5 percent from the Wall Street Journal.

 From a total of 3,543 articles, we examined a random sample of 636 
articles. Our results showed that the majority of these stories were, in 
fact, structured on the journalistic norm of balanced reporting, giving 
the impression that the scientific community was embroiled in a 
rip-roaring debate on whether or not humans were contributing to global 
warming.

More specifically, we discovered that:

53 percent of the articles gave roughly equal attention to the views 
that humans contribute to global warming and that climate change is 
exclusively the result of natural fluctuations.
35 percent emphasized the role of humans while presenting both sides of 
the debate, which more accurately reflects scientific thinking about 
global warming.
6 percent emphasized doubts about the claim that human-caused global 
warming exists, while another 6 percent only included the predominant 
scientific view that humans are contributing to Earth’s temperature 
increases.
Through statistical analyses, we found that coverage significantly 
diverged from the IPCC consensus on human contributions to global 
warming from 1990 through 2002. In other words, through adherence to the 
norm of balance, the U.S. press systematically proliferated an 
informational bias.


https://nepsisinc.com/herding-bias/

Herding Bias “also known as the ‘bandwagon effect’, is a psychological 
phenomenon in which people rationalize that a course of action is the 
right one because ‘everybody else’ is doing it. In the world of 
investment, this can take the form of panic buying or selling. Herd 
behavior is part of human nature and is often discussed as a cause of 
investment bubbles. A good example would be the dotcom boom of the late 
1990s, when people continued feverishly investing in internet companies, 
despite the fact that many of these start-ups were not financially sound.”

The folks at Investopedia take it to the next level and describe the 
Herding Bias as: “A behavior wherein people tend to react to the actions 
of others and follow their lead. This is similar to the way animals 
react in groups when they stampede in unison out of the way of 
danger—perceived or otherwise. Herd instinct or herd behavior is 
distinguished by a lack of individual decision-making or introspection, 
causing those involved to think and behave in a similar fashion to 
everyone else around them.”

https://phys.org/news/2018-02-sampling-bias-distorting-view-upheaval.html

The team combed through over 100 papers published from 1990 to 2017 
meant to offer insights into the link between global warming and warfare 
and report finding substantial bias. They found, for example, that much 
of the research was focused on headline-making conflicts rather than 
small-scale affairs. They also noted that most of the conflicts occurred 
in areas where people spoke English, making it easier for the 
researchers, but leaving out many areas that likely should have studied 
but did not. They also found that many of the studies focused on areas 
that were already experiencing conflict, such as Syria and Sudan. But, 
perhaps most strikingly, they found that areas of study were often not 
even those that have been deemed more likely to be geographically 
impacted by a warming planet.

They conclude by suggesting biased research in such a context could lead 
to "reproduction of colonial stereotypes"—a reference to 
English-speaking countries that were once part of the British empire.


https://www.climatedepot.com/2020/08/26/two-new-studies-offer-new-confirmation-that-climate-models-overstate-atmospheric-warming-climate-models-for-entertainment-purposes-only/

Two new peer-reviewed papers from independent teams confirm that climate 
models overstate atmospheric warming and the problem has gotten worse 
over time, not better.

https://judithcurry.com/2020/08/25/new-confirmation-that-climate-models-overstate-atmospheric-warming/

Two new peer-reviewed papers from independent teams confirm that climate 
models overstate atmospheric warming and the problem has gotten worse 
over time, not better.


The papers are Mitchell et al. (2020) “The vertical profile of recent 
tropical temperature trends: Persistent model biases in the context of 
internal variability” Environmental Research Letters, and McKitrick and 
Christy (2020) “Pervasive warming bias in CMIP6 tropospheric layers” 
Earth and Space Science. John and I didn’t know about the Mitchell 
team’s work until after their paper came out, and they likewise didn’t 
know about ours.

Mitchell et al. look at the surface, troposphere and stratosphere over 
the tropics (20N to 20S). John and I look at the tropical and global 
lower- and mid- troposphere. Both papers test large samples of the 
latest generation (“Coupled Model Intercomparison Project version 6” or 
CMIP6) climate models, i.e. the ones being used for the next IPCC 
report, and compare model outputs to post-1979 observations. John and I 
were able to examine 38 models while Mitchell et al. looked at 48 
models. The sheer number makes one wonder why so many are needed, if the 
science is settled. Both papers looked at “hindcasts,” which are 
reconstructions of recent historical temperatures in response to 
observed greenhouse gas emissions and other changes (e.g. aerosols and 
solar forcing). Across the two papers it emerges that the models 
overshoot historical warming from the near-surface through the upper 
troposphere, in the tropics and globally.

Mitchell et al. 2020

Mitchell et al. had, in an earlier study, examined whether the problem 
is that the models amplify surface warming too much as you go up in 
altitude, or whether they get the vertical amplification right but start 
with too much surface warming. The short answer is both.



In this Figure the box/whiskers are model-predicted warming trends in 
the tropics (20S to 20N) (horizontal axis) versus altitude (vertical 
axis). Where the trend magnitudes cross the zero line is about where the 
stratosphere begins. Red= models that internally simulate both ocean and 
atmosphere. Blue: models that take observed sea surface warming as given 
and only simulate the air temperature trends. Black lines: observed 
trends. The blue boxes are still high compared to the observations, 
especially in the 100-200hPa level (upper-mid troposphere).

Overall their findings are:

“we find considerable warming biases in the CMIP6 modeled trends, and we 
show that these biases are linked to biases in surface temperature 
(these models simulate an unrealistically large global warming).”
“we note here for the record that from 1998 to 2014, the CMIP5 models 
warm, on average 4 to 5 times faster than the observations, and in one 
model the warming is 10 times larger than the observations.”
“Throughout the depth of the troposphere, not a single model realization 
overlaps all the observational estimates. However, there is some overlap 
between the RICH observations and the lowermost modelled trend, which 
corresponds to the NorCPM1 model.”
“Focusing on the CMIP6 models, we have confirmed the original findings 
of Mitchell et al. (2013): first, the modeled tropospheric trends are 
biased warm throughout the troposphere (and notably in the upper 
troposphere, around 200 hPa) and, second, that these biases can be 
linked to biases in surface warming. As such, we see no improvement 
between the CMIP5 and the CMIP6 models.” (Mitchell et al. 2020)