Leaving aside the social sciences, which are riddled with fraud and misrepresentation, the two "real" areas of scientific inquiry most susceptible to abuse are medical and environmental science. This has come to the attention of the BBC, no less, and was the subject of a documentary they broadcast a couple of weeks ago. Their focus was environmental hype, and they elicited some very interesting admissions from climate "scientists". They note that the scare stories that appear regularly in the media are almost always wrong or only partially correct. To solicit opinions on the matter they asked for comments on one particularly egregious report, widely disseminated in the idiot press, to the effect that "scientists" were predicting an 11 degree rise in world temperatures.
Dr Myles Allen, principal investigator at Climateprediction.net, blames the media.
"If journalists decide to embroider on a press release without referring to the paper which the press release is about, then that's really the journalists' problem. We can't as scientists guard against that."
But is the media solely to blame? We asked several climate scientists to read the paper and the press release publicising it. All were critical of the prominence given to the prediction that the world could heat up by 11C.
"I agree the 11C figure was unreasonably hyped. It's a difficult line for all scientists to tread, as we need something 'exciting' to have any chance of publishing... to justify our funding," one scientist wrote us. [emphasis mine]
Read it here.
Now that's a striking admission. "Scientists" claim to be dispensers of objective, reliable, information -- but deep down, many of them are just grubbers after funding and are willing to say or do anything to get it. Yes, the idiot journalists are somewhat to blame, but the "scientists" who feed them extravagant quotes to gain attention and money are the real culprits here.
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