One of them, Frank Clemente, is emeritus. He retired in 2010, and gets whatever pension or such PSU offers. I wonder what their disciplinary options are. This is clearly a case of an end-of-career cash-out of social/political capital.
Hm, I feel like this is way less sinister than it sounds. From what I know of his prior reputation, Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear, so it's not like he changed his mind when people offered him a big pile of money.
If you already believe something and someone is going to give you money to promote your views, why on earth would you say no?
Hiding the source of funding doesn't seem like the worst of issues, although it certainly makes some research look suspect for its partiality. The worst part is avoiding a good journal. For some professions, just publishing in a sham journal can be pretty harmful for one's reputation...hence the reluctance many have for publishing in open access journals.
How is deliberately lying about your incentives and hiding your source of funding under oath testifying to Congress even remotely ok? How are you rationalizing this? What kind of message does it send if we let people lie under oath about what could potentially be so catastrophic? What if they did the same thing about nukes, what's the difference right?
I can't comment on the other parts of it really (and I don't know the whole story so I reserve judgement), I'm just skeptical of the claim that he was "bought off" - which would imply that he changed his views because of the money. If the headline were, "Professors agree to hide source of funding and run a climate change journal with lax peer review standards", then I might hold off, but then again, that probably wouldn't look as sexy in a headline.
This sounds like standard operating procedure in politics. The only surprise here (if there's any surprise at all) is that academics aren't at all immune to the same corruption.
My thoughts exactly. If someone were to phonily offer Hawking a cartoonish sack of money to write a report about black holes, should we be shocked when he shows interest in the offer?
If you claim to be a scientist, you leave your personal beliefs at the lab door and abide to the experimental results. If you cannot do that, you pick a different subject of study and let some other unbiased scientist pick on the thorny (for you) subject.
How would you feel if Hawkings were a Christian, and he would take money from the Pope and then wrote a report on how he saw Jesus in the black hole?
There is no such thing as an unbiased scientist. They are human, after all. Whenever you read about scientists reporting on X or discovering Y, you should absolutely consider their motives, especially in contentious subjects such as this one.
And your analogy is only comparable if Hawking already had a history of reporting about seeing Jesus in black holes.
> How would you feel if Hawkings were a Christian, and he would take money from the Pope and then wrote a report on how he saw Jesus in the black hole?
The same way I feel about all such claims: if they can't be independently reproduced, they're garbage. The more bizarre the claim, the easier it should be to disprove it. Authors who publish outlandish claims that cannot be substantiated by others will be first disgraced and then, worse, ignored.
Hawking and the pope aren't relevant to your example. All that matters is that someone claims he saw Jesus in a black hole. It's not even clear that such a thing is a falsifiable claim, and if it weren't, it wouldn't be accepted for publication anyway. But even if it took the form of one, it would be immediately disproved and that would be the end of it. It's the claim that's important, not who made it or who paid him to do so.
Let me clarify, I did not ask how do you feel about reports of metaphysical/paranormal events.
My question was, how would you feel about:
1. A scientist with strong political/religious views.
2. That works in a scientific problem that have strong implicationis for his strong views.
3. Then he does accept funding from established political players that allign with his strong views. He fails to report his funding sources.
4. And finally - surprise, surprise - goes on to write articles that "reach" to the "conclusion" that validate his political/religious views.
The reason is that the GP claimed that there is nothing morally wrong with said scientist because of #2. (the scientist sincerily believes in those biased views). And that the former example has no difference with:
a) Scientist picks one field of study.
b) Scientist accepts funding from a third party that is interested in such field of study.
c) Scientist produces results in his field of study.
I see your point, but I guess I don't feel that strongly about it. We all have biases, and the way to ensure good results is to document them thoroughly and make sure they're reproduced. After all, some of the people with biases are right. Another good way to make this better has been suggested many times, perhaps most famously by Feynman: require that everyone publish their results, even if they're negative or inconclusive. That way you can't just publish a steady stream of things you agree with, and everyone gets to learn whatever you learned (or ought to have learned) from whatever experiments you did.
There's also your point in:
> He fails to report his funding sources.
Which to me is inherently dishonest, especially in a world where you can decide not to publish your results.
So I guess I still don't think what you're suggesting is ok, but my solution is different and more complex than I think you're suggesting. Mainly because I don't think unanimity is healthy and I don't think lack of bias is achievable or even necessarily desirable. But I still agree that what you've suggested is a problem given how science is done right now.
The problem is not that Will Happer's positions, nor is it even that he accepted industry funding for his papers laying out those positions.
> In Happer’s case, investigators said they were part of a “Middle East oil and gas company” and asked to ensure that their commissioning of the report could not be traced. Happer reached out to a friendly Exxon lobbyist who suggested channeling it through Donors Trust, the shady donor anonymity organization that has been called the “dark-money ATM” of North American conservatives.
The problem is the deliberate process of hiding conflicts of interest and of especially hiding funding from foreign organizations.
> Clemente referenced past articles and even testimony in front of state legislatures and said, “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is publised as an independent scholar.”
At the very least, it should be illegal to not disclose such conflicts on interest when testifying under oath.
Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear, so it's not like he changed his mind when people offered him a big pile of money.
You're missing the point.
It's not that this guy was paid off and therefore changed his views.
It's that he published research that he claimed was independent that was not, and in the process neglected to disclose his sources of revenue and conflicts of interest.
Those very conflicts of interest would, under normal circumstances, force folks to question the nature of the research and the quality of the results. IMO that's getting awfully close to academic misconduct. It's certainly extremely unethical.
Edit:
BTW, "Merchants of Doubt" has covered this territory extensively, so to be honest, I'm not sure Greenpeace has added much to the dialog, here, aside from flat out catching folks in the act.
"BTW, "Merchants of Doubt" has covered this territory extensively, so to be honest, I'm not sure Greenpeace has added much to the dialog, here, aside from flat out catching folks in the act."
Yeah flat out catching highly placed, non-anonymous culprits is very significant. I'll bet a lot more people would be paying attention to this article compared to those who read or watch Merchants of Doubt.
While I agree that this conduct is improper and should lead to the loss of their chairs (and retractions, if any paid "research" ended up in scholarly journals), you're also missing something important about science when you say:
> Those very conflicts of interest would, under normal circumstances, force folks to question the nature of the research and the quality of the results.
The fact that someone has a conflict of interest should be stated, certainly. But we should always question the nature of research and the quality of results. In one of these cases, it doesn't even seem that a research paper was being purchased but simply an essay, which presumably would not be cited by anyone or even considered a presentation of facts by other scholars. But in any case, we shouldn't assume someone's research is honest and valuable just because he doesn't seem to have an economic conflict of interest. There's a lot of bad science done with deliberate intent to deceive that involved no such conflict of interest at all.
The bottom line is that science is not being nearly tough enough on itself, and the results are what you'd expect: a lot of bad papers that are either useless and irrelevant or full of lies, errors, and fabrications. Reporting conflicts of interest might help a little, but it shouldn't be used as a cover for gullibility.
You are being overly pedantic when it comes to _science_ and I say this as a trained scientist. These guys are testifying before congress as experts when they are pedaling their credentials for money and burying their briber's identities. They should at minimum lose their jobs, have any research redacted from journals and possibly face jail time.
We can't hold science to a higher standard than the rest of the world. You and I would both like this to be a more principled place, but one thing can't be the pin. It has to be across the board.
Most of everything is crap, the good stuff survives mostly. The bad stuff survives as crap mythos and some good stuff goes under.
It's hard to say what he believes, but there seems to be evidence of what is normally considered misconduct, specifically, in using a sham peer review process and misrepresenting the funding sources. I don't think he has to say "no" to the funding, but representing it as "peer reviewed research" that "received no financial compensation" would seem intentionally deceptive. This press release seems to have more detail:
> Will Happer has long made his position on climate change clear
We cannot know what his original view on climate change might have been. Even if he was on the conservative side to begin with, there's a large spectrum from "Earth might be getting warmer, but I don't think it's anthropogenic" to "CO2 is actually good for us!"
Perhaps some of his previous papers were paid for by others with similar interests as well. Judging from the way he tried expertly to hide the source of funding and avoid proper peer review, it certainly doesn't sound like this is the first time he's done it.
Moreover, humans are remarkably good at changing their beliefs in the face of cognitive dissonance. Someone who is repeatedly paid to advocate a certain point of view might honestly come to believe that the bullshit he's been spewing is true, and gradually move to a part of the spectrum that is much more radical than where he started out.
> We cannot know what his original view on climate change might have been.
Does it matter? You don't have the right to demand that everyone agree with you, even if you're right. We don't burn people at the stake or try to silence them for disagreement. Please stop trying to create unanimity; it's not healthy.
What we should punish people for: lying to Congress, taking or offering bribes, doing dishonest work while in the public employ. All of those apply, and any should be sufficient, at a bare minimum, to justify firing these professors. However, thinking that climate change doesn't exist or isn't anthropogenic is not a crime. Saying so is not a crime, either. And I'm damned glad of it!
I don't think you disagree with me. Of course people have every right to deny climate change or whatever else they want to deny.
His original view, if there ever was such a thing, still matters because many of us would like to know whether he changed his views after accepting the bribe. It doesn't matter if he changed his views from right to wrong or the other way around, what matters is that a scientist might have changed his public views based on something other than evidence.
"The emails and recordings also outline how Happer ran a sham peer-review process through the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a prominent U.K.-based climate skepticist think thank. Happer admits that his papers would not likely be published through typical the academic peer review process. “I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.""
If you're good at stats and scientific writing, there is money to be made in ghost writing research papers for pharma. They give you the raw trials data, you work it up and write the analysis.
I have some questions about this "sting" that were unanswered in the article. It would be one thing if the academic were paid to have a certain opinion, its is another thing entirely to pay an academic to falsify research supporting a viewpoint they already hold. It reads as if the academics were paid to support a thesis with evidence. Once you are at a high enough academic level you should be able to write a paper arguing for and supporting a thesis whether or not you believe in that thesis on a personal level. It's important to sustain debate on all sides of an issue regardless of whether or not all of those sides are politically popular.
The great thing about publishing is that it gives other educated people a chance to rebut and question the argument.
I also believe funding sources should be kept secret in some cases so that the paper or research can be judged on its own merit rather than judged based on the motivations of the entity funded it.
Given how cleverly the authors tried to evade peer review, the evidence might have been quite flimsy to begin with.
Peer review is the primary mechanism by which modern science verifies evidence, especially in fields like climate change where it's often very difficult to replicate another scientist's data.
Evasion of peer review is like including an obfuscated blob in a critical part of some security software. It is highly suspicious by definition, and the community has every right to assume that it is malicious unless the author can demonstrate otherwise.
Thats why you don't use that blob. I'm not saying that I trust the study, only that I don't see anything wrong with the author accepting money in exchange for writing it. Continuing the analogy, I don't see anything wrong with using or producing an obfuscated blob (in certain situations) but it wouldn't necessarily be wise to blindly trust it.
But the issue is the author effectively saying "this project's source code undergoes independent security audits prior to each release" and then being paid to include an un-audited blob.
In both cases person is being paid to deceitfully and deliberately abuse the trust placed in him.
Your first paragraph is dead wrong. Science is not supposed to be about which side can pay more to "support their thesis with evidence". That would clearly lead to a blatant bias toward collecting evidence that favors the desired outcome. Also, it's not important to sustain every side of every debate in perpetuity. If that was the case, nothing would ever get done. Once there is enough evidence, collected in an unbiased fashion, that one side becomes untenable, the correct action is to put that debate to bed.
Your second paragraph is irrelevant. The problem is not publishing this research, the problem is the intentional deceptions about both conflicts of interest and the lack of peer review.
Your third paragraph is also dead wrong. Disclosure of all conflicts of interest is critical, not to mention required in order to publish in any respectable scientific journal.
1. I said nothing about "what science is supposed to be about" Research costs money. If I chose to fund a study about the positive effects of a coal industry on the lower class it is within my right to do so and in no way excludes someone else from funding a study on the negative effects.
2. Sure, but this is tangential to my comment at best.
3. my belief is not "also dead wrong" Disclosure of conflicts of interest is not the same as disclosure of funding sources in all cases.
I'd also like to point out that your comment is an example of what I consider to be the type of poorly thought out middle brow discourse that perfectly characterizes the worst form of discussion on the internet. Unilateral statements like "your wrong" contribute nothing at all.
> I'd also like to point out that your comment is an example of what I consider to be the type of poorly thought out middle brow discourse that perfectly characterizes the worst form of discussion on the internet.
Ok, let us look at what you wrote:
> I have some questions about this "sting" that were unanswered in the article.
You don't ever ask any questions, and thus this is a rhetorical device to cast doubt on the article.
> It would be one thing if the academic were paid to have a certain opinion, its is another thing entirely to pay an academic to falsify research supporting a viewpoint they already hold. It reads as if the academics were paid to support a thesis with evidence. Once you are at a high enough academic level you should be able to write a paper arguing for and supporting a thesis whether or not you believe in that thesis on a personal level. It's important to sustain debate on all sides of an issue regardless of whether or not all of those sides are politically popular.
Straw man argument. Nobody is arguing against commercial funding for research or papers. The issue is deliberately concealing funding/independence and deliberately evading peer review.
> The great thing about publishing is that it gives other educated people a chance to rebut and question the argument.
Not when you deliberately avoid peer review.
> I also believe funding sources should be kept secret in some cases so that the paper or research can be judged on its own merit rather than judged based on the motivations of the entity funded it.
Ok, what are those cases? Oh right, you were just making a rhetorical point and don't have any actual examples.
This seems a bit like the Planned Parenthood tapes: approach someone with false pretenses, and then report the things they say in the worst possible way.
I would find it much more damning if they found a professor that would change their position for money, rather than finding people that will accept money to forward a position they think is correct.
I agree that the trend of using false pretenses to "catch" someone is a bad form of journalism, but I feel like your alternative is even worse. What information is gained by showing that a random professor is unscrupulous? In this case, the professors actively helped the journalists obfuscate where the funding was coming from, and ran a think tank where he knew his work would be accepted.
>The emails and recordings also outline how Happer ran a sham peer-review process through the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a prominent U.K.-based climate skepticist think thank. Happer admits that his papers would not likely be published through typical the academic peer review process. “I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.”
The headlines are actually somewhat mundane compared to the substance. This is the reverse of the Planned Parenthood tapes.
> Happer ran a sham peer-review process through the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a prominent U.K.-based climate skepticist think thank.
I really don't think submitting papers to similarly minded groups in the name of "peer review" is an uncommon occurrence on any side of the climate change debate -- or any other debate for that matter.
I couldn't disagree more. Restricting your review to "like-minded" people is not science at all. It would be like a person advocating for Intelligent Design by only getting peer-reviewed by other evolution deniers. If the claims can't stand on their own and you have to go looking for "like-minded" people than it's pretty weak sauce.
I'm sorry but you're disagreeing with a point different than the one I made. Of course it's bad science to have your idea reviewed by an echo chamber that all agree with you. I was saying that I think it is not uncommon.
"I really don't think submitting papers to similarly minded groups in the name of "peer review" is an uncommon occurrence"
Yes it is. It's not just uncommon, it's simply unacceptable in regular scientific research. Don't believe me, here's Prof. Happer's own words:
Verbatim from William Happer's email:
"For example, Golkany knew the names of the reviews he received, but for a journal, the peer reviewers would normally be anonymous.
.
.
Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review"
He knows exactly what he's doing is wrong and why. He's deliberately engaging in a a sleight of hand in order to deceive the casual reader/listener with the words "peer review".
Wonder if anyone is going to do the opposite - try to buy off pro-global-warming professor to produce exaggerated doomsday prediction - and what the outcome is going to be.
I wonder if Greenpeace is doing more to undermine confidence in all academic research, undermining confidence in climate change science much more than the denial of it.
This was my first thought. The only difference between me and the climate change skeptics I know is that they have no faith in the integrity of scientists, and I do. "See, the oil and gas industry has been buying off scientists!" won't help my argument, they'll just think that it's a countervailing force to all the scientists on the other side of the question who are being bought off by …whoever they think it is.
Edit to add: Furthermore, I don't think this is unreasonable of them! Figuring out which experts to trust is a really hard problem in a society as complex as ours has become, and this makes it harder to argue for "you should trust scientists".
I assume this happens already. It's unlikely that with so much money at stake, only one party is doing the dirty. Same applies to any issue where a lot of money is at stake.
I see people arguing that there's nothing bad in this report. The shady, underhanded and dishonest context is so clear, I'm shocked to see so many such objections.
The basic problem here is that two top academics are clearly selling the use of their credentials for clear commercial gain of a private company and using sophisticated means to hide the fact of such sale.
That part is bad enough, even worse is the eager sales pitch and readiness to suggest financial shenanigans to hide the source of the funding that these professors are engaging in. It's very clear that these are not first-timers or unwilling participants. This is their normal MO for writing and speaking on the topic.
If I write the paper alone, I don’t think there would be any problem stating that ‘The author received no financial compensation for this essay,’ - William Happer
In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar. – Frank Clemente
What confuses me is that we all seem to have more-or-less the same moral compass when it comes to fiction. "The bad guy" is often going to extremes to prevent something from going public - dumping toxic waste in a river, taking bribes, selling a vote, torturing people in secret etc.
Somehow it seems like these days, if someone gets caught doing these things in real life, nothing happens. Dumping toxic waste is pro-business. Bribery is freedom of speech. Torture? Heck, it's not torture, and they're really bad people anyway.
Sometimes I want to grab these people and ask them, seriously, if this isn't evil, then what IS?
Unfortunately, what people seem to pick up as "evil" from the fictions isn't the immoral actions, but instead the color-coding of villains as wearing ominous clothes (often dressed for a funeral) and accompanied by certain musical stings.
I mean, for God's sakes, the Nazis wore skulls and didn't notice they were the baddies!
I would love a skit on the current NSA. Have an old Russian/Nazi operative on a stakeout with a NSA guy who points out that we don't have to bug phones or do stakeouts anymore. Culminates in reading the e-mail of the operative to him. "But aren't you Americans all about freedom of speech?"; "Of course! My freedom to read your speech."
Yes, sure, but there's a slightly deeper meaning to the joke: fascism as an ideology has always been built around the glorification of death. If you want to spot capital-E Evil in real life, look for the people loudly proclaiming their devotion to death.
Maybe they cover it up with "God is great!" sometimes, but then they pop out, "We love death as you love life!"[1]. Sometimes, rarely, they do you the favor of actually printing the Chaos Star of the occult on their book-covers[2] (and I seriously thought that was a pop-culture reference until I found the link proving its truth). Or maybe they're just cheering, "Let him die! Let him die!"[3].
I suspect that many people don't read a lot of papers, maybe?
It is absolutely, always the normal behavior to disclose all sources of funding.
For example, I had the paper EpiCaster: An Integrated Web Application For Situation Assessment and Forecasting of Global Epidemics[1] open.
This paper includes section 9, Acknowledgements:
We thank our external collaborators and members of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab-
oratory (NDSSL) for their suggestions and comments. This work has been partially supported by NSF
Nets Grant CNS- 0626964, NSF HSD Grant SES-0729441, NIH MIDAS project 2U01GM070694-7, NSF
PetaApps Grant OCI-0904844, DTRA RD Grant HDTRA1-0901-0017, DTRA CNIMS Grant HDTRA1-
07-C-0113, NSF NETS CNS-0831633, DHS 4112-31805, DOE DE-SC0003957, NSF REU Supplement
CNS-0845700, US Naval Surface Warfare Center N00178-09-D-3017 DEL ORDER 13, NSF Netse CNS-
1011769 and NSF SDCI OCI-1032677.
That's just a random paper, as an example. That is simply how academic papers are done, and anyone who isn't disclosing funding isn't following normal behavior.
Maybe some people will be suspicious of this paper because it is partially funded by the US Naval Surface Warfare Center. That's their choice, and this disclosure enables them to judge it based on that.
This is clearly not being billed as a question about non-disclosure of funding, so you can understand why people might think it's not the smoking gun evidence of misconduct it is purported to be.
To me it feels like the headline and the story are that these guys have a conflict of interest because of the funding (i.e. "we paid these scientists to say climate change isn't a problem"), but in fact everything in this article is consistent with it going the other way around - they have a conflict of interest because they have strong beliefs on a scientific topic, and may be willing to do dodgy stuff in favor of that.
I never said that nothing wrong happened (I honestly don't know), just that it feels like a bait-and-switch because I get the strong implication here that the point of this story is that these guys are taking bribes to induce them to say what they are saying, which is very different from "they are hiding the source of the funding which enables them to say what they are saying".
When you get a grant, the university has academic freedom stipulations in the contract or memorandum of understanding. You cite sources for every paper. There's a yearly statement of conflict of interest on file. There is absolutely no way these researchers aren't aware of the difficulty of what they've done, even if they are saying what they believe.
I don't know if Greenpeace's claim is true but in any way they are shooting themselves in the foot. If the promise of a shaddy payment could push academics to say anything, then what about a massive political, media and peer pressure? What if the only way for research to get funding is to attempt to prove the catastrophic effects of global warming.
Demonstrating that scientists bow to pressure isn't exactly helping the global warming cause.
Oh please, there's not even a remote equivalence there.
The fossil-fuel sector has a enormously greater incentive to bribe people to affect the system, and a metric fuckton more money to do it with. It doesn't make sense to imply some kind of parity of wrongdoing.
Seems quite different than how it was being portrayed. From what I'm seeing, they asked for a white paper, not a research paper and Happer said they could send money to his 501c3 charity which only pays part of his travel expense and would only write what he believed in. Even correcting them on peer review in an academic sense vs a white paper reviewed by his peers...
Am I missing something nefarious here? Because this seems much more like a 'hit piece' on a guy who is testifying before congress.
To all the people that are somehow saying that this isn't all that bad, you seem to be missing the point. The problem isn't that these professors are taking money to support something they already support. It's that they are taking money and then going to lengths to avoid disclosing the funding OR to make it look like their papers went through a real peer review process...
I'm utterly shocked and disappointed by how many people on here are saying things along the lines of "what's the big deal?"
95 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadIf you already believe something and someone is going to give you money to promote your views, why on earth would you say no?
2) Intentionally publishing in a sham journal to avoid peer review.
These are both tolerable behavior in the free market, but ought to be firable offenses for university professors.
No, it doesn't imply that at all.
to buy somebody off:
"to bribe someone to ignore what one is doing wrong."
"To bribe someone in order to ensure cooperation"
The implications carried are that the payments were a bribe and that the actions taken as a result were improper.
I wonder if topics like education, biotech, military engagements, and torture are handled in a likewise fashion? A dime per word so to speak.
If you claim to be a scientist, you leave your personal beliefs at the lab door and abide to the experimental results. If you cannot do that, you pick a different subject of study and let some other unbiased scientist pick on the thorny (for you) subject.
How would you feel if Hawkings were a Christian, and he would take money from the Pope and then wrote a report on how he saw Jesus in the black hole?
And your analogy is only comparable if Hawking already had a history of reporting about seeing Jesus in black holes.
Which is why deliberately concealing and lying about funding sources in the manner described is SO BAD
The same way I feel about all such claims: if they can't be independently reproduced, they're garbage. The more bizarre the claim, the easier it should be to disprove it. Authors who publish outlandish claims that cannot be substantiated by others will be first disgraced and then, worse, ignored.
Hawking and the pope aren't relevant to your example. All that matters is that someone claims he saw Jesus in a black hole. It's not even clear that such a thing is a falsifiable claim, and if it weren't, it wouldn't be accepted for publication anyway. But even if it took the form of one, it would be immediately disproved and that would be the end of it. It's the claim that's important, not who made it or who paid him to do so.
My question was, how would you feel about:
1. A scientist with strong political/religious views.
2. That works in a scientific problem that have strong implicationis for his strong views.
3. Then he does accept funding from established political players that allign with his strong views. He fails to report his funding sources.
4. And finally - surprise, surprise - goes on to write articles that "reach" to the "conclusion" that validate his political/religious views.
The reason is that the GP claimed that there is nothing morally wrong with said scientist because of #2. (the scientist sincerily believes in those biased views). And that the former example has no difference with:
a) Scientist picks one field of study.
b) Scientist accepts funding from a third party that is interested in such field of study.
c) Scientist produces results in his field of study.
There's also your point in:
> He fails to report his funding sources.
Which to me is inherently dishonest, especially in a world where you can decide not to publish your results.
So I guess I still don't think what you're suggesting is ok, but my solution is different and more complex than I think you're suggesting. Mainly because I don't think unanimity is healthy and I don't think lack of bias is achievable or even necessarily desirable. But I still agree that what you've suggested is a problem given how science is done right now.
> In Happer’s case, investigators said they were part of a “Middle East oil and gas company” and asked to ensure that their commissioning of the report could not be traced. Happer reached out to a friendly Exxon lobbyist who suggested channeling it through Donors Trust, the shady donor anonymity organization that has been called the “dark-money ATM” of North American conservatives.
The problem is the deliberate process of hiding conflicts of interest and of especially hiding funding from foreign organizations.
> Clemente referenced past articles and even testimony in front of state legislatures and said, “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is publised as an independent scholar.”
At the very least, it should be illegal to not disclose such conflicts on interest when testifying under oath.
Would this qualify ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contempt_of_Congress
or
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1001
You're missing the point.
It's not that this guy was paid off and therefore changed his views.
It's that he published research that he claimed was independent that was not, and in the process neglected to disclose his sources of revenue and conflicts of interest.
Those very conflicts of interest would, under normal circumstances, force folks to question the nature of the research and the quality of the results. IMO that's getting awfully close to academic misconduct. It's certainly extremely unethical.
Edit:
BTW, "Merchants of Doubt" has covered this territory extensively, so to be honest, I'm not sure Greenpeace has added much to the dialog, here, aside from flat out catching folks in the act.
Yeah flat out catching highly placed, non-anonymous culprits is very significant. I'll bet a lot more people would be paying attention to this article compared to those who read or watch Merchants of Doubt.
> Those very conflicts of interest would, under normal circumstances, force folks to question the nature of the research and the quality of the results.
The fact that someone has a conflict of interest should be stated, certainly. But we should always question the nature of research and the quality of results. In one of these cases, it doesn't even seem that a research paper was being purchased but simply an essay, which presumably would not be cited by anyone or even considered a presentation of facts by other scholars. But in any case, we shouldn't assume someone's research is honest and valuable just because he doesn't seem to have an economic conflict of interest. There's a lot of bad science done with deliberate intent to deceive that involved no such conflict of interest at all.
The bottom line is that science is not being nearly tough enough on itself, and the results are what you'd expect: a lot of bad papers that are either useless and irrelevant or full of lies, errors, and fabrications. Reporting conflicts of interest might help a little, but it shouldn't be used as a cover for gullibility.
Reckon you're part of the problem, then. Appeal to authority and a refusal to hold research to a high standard.
> They should at minimum lose their jobs, have any research redacted from journals and possibly face jail time.
We agree on this. I don't even see how it's controversial. I'd just like to see the other 99% of crap science handled the same way.
Most of everything is crap, the good stuff survives mostly. The bad stuff survives as crap mythos and some good stuff goes under.
https://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2015/12/08/exposed-academi...
We cannot know what his original view on climate change might have been. Even if he was on the conservative side to begin with, there's a large spectrum from "Earth might be getting warmer, but I don't think it's anthropogenic" to "CO2 is actually good for us!"
Perhaps some of his previous papers were paid for by others with similar interests as well. Judging from the way he tried expertly to hide the source of funding and avoid proper peer review, it certainly doesn't sound like this is the first time he's done it.
Moreover, humans are remarkably good at changing their beliefs in the face of cognitive dissonance. Someone who is repeatedly paid to advocate a certain point of view might honestly come to believe that the bullshit he's been spewing is true, and gradually move to a part of the spectrum that is much more radical than where he started out.
Does it matter? You don't have the right to demand that everyone agree with you, even if you're right. We don't burn people at the stake or try to silence them for disagreement. Please stop trying to create unanimity; it's not healthy.
What we should punish people for: lying to Congress, taking or offering bribes, doing dishonest work while in the public employ. All of those apply, and any should be sufficient, at a bare minimum, to justify firing these professors. However, thinking that climate change doesn't exist or isn't anthropogenic is not a crime. Saying so is not a crime, either. And I'm damned glad of it!
His original view, if there ever was such a thing, still matters because many of us would like to know whether he changed his views after accepting the bribe. It doesn't matter if he changed his views from right to wrong or the other way around, what matters is that a scientist might have changed his public views based on something other than evidence.
Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation by Charles Barber
The great thing about publishing is that it gives other educated people a chance to rebut and question the argument.
I also believe funding sources should be kept secret in some cases so that the paper or research can be judged on its own merit rather than judged based on the motivations of the entity funded it.
Peer review is the primary mechanism by which modern science verifies evidence, especially in fields like climate change where it's often very difficult to replicate another scientist's data.
Evasion of peer review is like including an obfuscated blob in a critical part of some security software. It is highly suspicious by definition, and the community has every right to assume that it is malicious unless the author can demonstrate otherwise.
But the issue is the author effectively saying "this project's source code undergoes independent security audits prior to each release" and then being paid to include an un-audited blob.
In both cases person is being paid to deceitfully and deliberately abuse the trust placed in him.
Your second paragraph is irrelevant. The problem is not publishing this research, the problem is the intentional deceptions about both conflicts of interest and the lack of peer review.
Your third paragraph is also dead wrong. Disclosure of all conflicts of interest is critical, not to mention required in order to publish in any respectable scientific journal.
2. Sure, but this is tangential to my comment at best.
3. my belief is not "also dead wrong" Disclosure of conflicts of interest is not the same as disclosure of funding sources in all cases.
I'd also like to point out that your comment is an example of what I consider to be the type of poorly thought out middle brow discourse that perfectly characterizes the worst form of discussion on the internet. Unilateral statements like "your wrong" contribute nothing at all.
Ok, let us look at what you wrote:
> I have some questions about this "sting" that were unanswered in the article.
You don't ever ask any questions, and thus this is a rhetorical device to cast doubt on the article.
> It would be one thing if the academic were paid to have a certain opinion, its is another thing entirely to pay an academic to falsify research supporting a viewpoint they already hold. It reads as if the academics were paid to support a thesis with evidence. Once you are at a high enough academic level you should be able to write a paper arguing for and supporting a thesis whether or not you believe in that thesis on a personal level. It's important to sustain debate on all sides of an issue regardless of whether or not all of those sides are politically popular.
Straw man argument. Nobody is arguing against commercial funding for research or papers. The issue is deliberately concealing funding/independence and deliberately evading peer review.
> The great thing about publishing is that it gives other educated people a chance to rebut and question the argument.
Not when you deliberately avoid peer review.
> I also believe funding sources should be kept secret in some cases so that the paper or research can be judged on its own merit rather than judged based on the motivations of the entity funded it.
Ok, what are those cases? Oh right, you were just making a rhetorical point and don't have any actual examples.
I would find it much more damning if they found a professor that would change their position for money, rather than finding people that will accept money to forward a position they think is correct.
>The emails and recordings also outline how Happer ran a sham peer-review process through the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a prominent U.K.-based climate skepticist think thank. Happer admits that his papers would not likely be published through typical the academic peer review process. “I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.”
The headlines are actually somewhat mundane compared to the substance. This is the reverse of the Planned Parenthood tapes.
I really don't think submitting papers to similarly minded groups in the name of "peer review" is an uncommon occurrence on any side of the climate change debate -- or any other debate for that matter.
Yes it is. It's not just uncommon, it's simply unacceptable in regular scientific research. Don't believe me, here's Prof. Happer's own words:
Verbatim from William Happer's email:
"For example, Golkany knew the names of the reviews he received, but for a journal, the peer reviewers would normally be anonymous.
.
.
Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review"
He knows exactly what he's doing is wrong and why. He's deliberately engaging in a a sleight of hand in order to deceive the casual reader/listener with the words "peer review".
Edit to add: Furthermore, I don't think this is unreasonable of them! Figuring out which experts to trust is a really hard problem in a society as complex as ours has become, and this makes it harder to argue for "you should trust scientists".
The basic problem here is that two top academics are clearly selling the use of their credentials for clear commercial gain of a private company and using sophisticated means to hide the fact of such sale.
That part is bad enough, even worse is the eager sales pitch and readiness to suggest financial shenanigans to hide the source of the funding that these professors are engaging in. It's very clear that these are not first-timers or unwilling participants. This is their normal MO for writing and speaking on the topic.
In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar. – Frank Clemente
Somehow it seems like these days, if someone gets caught doing these things in real life, nothing happens. Dumping toxic waste is pro-business. Bribery is freedom of speech. Torture? Heck, it's not torture, and they're really bad people anyway.
Sometimes I want to grab these people and ask them, seriously, if this isn't evil, then what IS?
> Torture? Heck, it's not torture, and they're really bad people anyway.
The use of torture 'by the good guys' is actually pretty ubiquitous in modern TV.
I mean, for God's sakes, the Nazis wore skulls and didn't notice they were the baddies!
You mean like the Queen's Royal Lancers [1] (17th/21st Lancers in WW2) maybe?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen%27s_Royal_Lancers
Maybe they cover it up with "God is great!" sometimes, but then they pop out, "We love death as you love life!"[1]. Sometimes, rarely, they do you the favor of actually printing the Chaos Star of the occult on their book-covers[2] (and I seriously thought that was a pop-culture reference until I found the link proving its truth). Or maybe they're just cheering, "Let him die! Let him die!"[3].
[1] -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlfagPS6490
[2] -- http://crookedtimber.org/2015/03/10/who-is-aleksandr-dugin/
[3] -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PepQF7G-It0
It is absolutely, always the normal behavior to disclose all sources of funding.
For example, I had the paper EpiCaster: An Integrated Web Application For Situation Assessment and Forecasting of Global Epidemics[1] open.
This paper includes section 9, Acknowledgements:
We thank our external collaborators and members of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab- oratory (NDSSL) for their suggestions and comments. This work has been partially supported by NSF Nets Grant CNS- 0626964, NSF HSD Grant SES-0729441, NIH MIDAS project 2U01GM070694-7, NSF PetaApps Grant OCI-0904844, DTRA RD Grant HDTRA1-0901-0017, DTRA CNIMS Grant HDTRA1- 07-C-0113, NSF NETS CNS-0831633, DHS 4112-31805, DOE DE-SC0003957, NSF REU Supplement CNS-0845700, US Naval Surface Warfare Center N00178-09-D-3017 DEL ORDER 13, NSF Netse CNS- 1011769 and NSF SDCI OCI-1032677.
That's just a random paper, as an example. That is simply how academic papers are done, and anyone who isn't disclosing funding isn't following normal behavior.
Maybe some people will be suspicious of this paper because it is partially funded by the US Naval Surface Warfare Center. That's their choice, and this disclosure enables them to judge it based on that.
[1] http://staff.vbi.vt.edu/chenj/pub/NDSSL-TR-15-090.pdf
To me it feels like the headline and the story are that these guys have a conflict of interest because of the funding (i.e. "we paid these scientists to say climate change isn't a problem"), but in fact everything in this article is consistent with it going the other way around - they have a conflict of interest because they have strong beliefs on a scientific topic, and may be willing to do dodgy stuff in favor of that.
I never said that nothing wrong happened (I honestly don't know), just that it feels like a bait-and-switch because I get the strong implication here that the point of this story is that these guys are taking bribes to induce them to say what they are saying, which is very different from "they are hiding the source of the funding which enables them to say what they are saying".
Demonstrating that scientists bow to pressure isn't exactly helping the global warming cause.
The fossil-fuel sector has a enormously greater incentive to bribe people to affect the system, and a metric fuckton more money to do it with. It doesn't make sense to imply some kind of parity of wrongdoing.
Seems like there is some info being left out. Both sources seem to be hiding things, why not publish the entire e-mail exchanges?
Seems quite different than how it was being portrayed. From what I'm seeing, they asked for a white paper, not a research paper and Happer said they could send money to his 501c3 charity which only pays part of his travel expense and would only write what he believed in. Even correcting them on peer review in an academic sense vs a white paper reviewed by his peers...
Am I missing something nefarious here? Because this seems much more like a 'hit piece' on a guy who is testifying before congress.
I'm utterly shocked and disappointed by how many people on here are saying things along the lines of "what's the big deal?"