Current Events, Climate change
Articles about scientific matters (especially climate change) refer to studies with “peer reviewed” papers. Most readers assume that this means that the findings have been endorsed by qualified scientists and that they can be considered reliable.
The reality is that this is actually a low standard and is not an accurate guide to the reliability of the results. Continue reading “What Does “Peer Reviewed” Mean?”
The Wikipedia entry on “Global Cooling” dismisses the idea that it was the prevailing view in the 1970’s by showing the numbers of papers on cooling versus the number on warming. Does this truly support the author’s claim?
In this post, I describe a fictitious experiment and then draw up a non-complete list of papers that could be produced from the experiment.
I then show a real-life example of this sort of “paper-churning”. Continue reading “Is the Number of Papers on a Topic a Good Indicator of its Importance?”
“Climate Change” is now synonymous with “global warming”. However, in the 1970’s, global cooling was the major topic. Wikipedia now claims that there was no consensus among climatologists about global cooling in the 70’s and that such a consensus is just an urban myth. Is this just an example of Soviet-style re-writing of history to fit current political needs?
Having lived through the 70’s, I decided to check through my sources to see if mainstream climatologists did fret about a coming ice age in the 70’s …
I found two sources: