It’ll be interesting to see how history treats this worry:
A conference in California next week says it aims to make scientific studies more reliable, but critics fear the event is a new tactic used by those who question the reality of climate change.
The event, called Fixing Science, is being run by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a non-profit organisation based in New York.
The conference’s programme focuses on the reproducibility crisis – the claim that science has an increasing problem with poorly performed or even fraudulent studies – with a portion dedicated to how that applies to both economics and climate change. …
… [Philipp Schmid at the University of Erfurt in Germany] says there may be more to the NAS’s conference than that. “They use the findings from these areas to downplay climate change, which kind of shows that they have a specific agenda when writing their reports,” says Schmid.
The NAS has published reports attacking sustainability initiatives, including campaigns seeking to persuade universities to divest their fossil fuel investments. A 2018 NAS report on reproducibility said that climate scientists seek to “demonize carbon dioxide”.
NAS president Peter Wood says the world is warming, but “whether that is caused by human activity is a matter of significant dispute”. In fact, 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that human activity is responsible.
Responding to the accusations about the conference, Wood said: “We have been critics of the sustainability movement, which is not the same thing as climate science by a long stretch. The science and politics can and should be distinguished.” [NewScientist, 1 February 2020]
While it’s appalling to think that we’re going to face another appallingly fraudulent “institution,” much like the Tobacco Institute, in the name of corporate profits, it’s not unimaginable. After all, there’s a signification proportion of the world population which, for religious reasons, cannot accept that human activity is causing global warming[1].
The conference is causing quite a stir:
Computational biologist Lenny Teytelman is CEO of protocols.io, a company that aims to make experiments more reproducible by standardising how data and methods are shared. Aware of the NAS’s history, “I tweeted a general warning against the conference and then emailed the individual speakers to alert them about the group’s background,” he says. …
“My view is that many of the speakers at this meeting are being played,” Dorothy Bishop at the University of Oxford argued on her blog. By attending, they are lending credibility to fringe views and to an essentially political group, she said.
Bishop is Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology and Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. I looked up her blog and found this:
The format of the meeting is cleverly constructed. The conference will be introduced and summed up by David J. Theroux (Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Independent Institute and Publisher of The Independent Review) and Peter Wood, (President, NatAsSchols [Bishop’s acronym for National Association of Scholars, which she uses to distinguish it from the far more prestigious National Academy of Sciences]). Neither man has any scientific background. Theroux delighted the Heartland Institute last summer when he promoted the idea, recently publicised by Donald Trump, that wind turbines are responsible for killing numerous birds (to see this lampooned, click here)
Wood was an anthropologist who has been Provost at a small religious school, The King’s College in New York City (2005-2007), before moving to NatAsSchols. He has, as far as I can tell, no peer-reviewed publications, but he has written pieces deriding climate concerns, e.g. “the fantasies of global warming catastrophe are a kind of substitute religion, replete with a salvation doctrine, rituals of expiation, and a collection of demons to be cast out.”
Another presenter is David Randall, who is Director of Research at NatAsSchols, policy advisor to the Heartland Institute and first author of the report on “The Irreproducibility of Modern Science“. He is an unusual person to be authoring an authoritative report on the state of science. Web of Science turned up seven publications by him, all in politics journals, and none with any citations. His background is in history, library studies and fiction writing.
Corruption caused by commercial interests can usually be stemmed by legal actions. Religious certainty is usually not susceptible to rationality or legal actions, but rather force. I hope it doesn’t come to that.
Take it as a warning: the National Association of Scholars will need to be treated very skeptically.
1 For Twin Cities residents, long-time meteorologist Dave Dahl made exactly that statement many moons ago. On the other end of the spectrum, my favorite meteorologist, Paul Douglas, is Republican, religious, and has no problems acknowledging anthropogenic climate change.
