Hi sense; Well, this is how science has almost always been done. Big physics projects nowadays avoid the problem by hiding the data from the researchers. That is, they have to operate blind on the data. For example, if they're measuring the mass of the electron, all the data that they work with has been slightly modified by a person who keeps secret what he did to it (or doesn't look at what a random number generator did to it). Then the team analyzes the data without actually knowing what the result is. When they're done and are sure they did the analysis right, then they "unmask" the data and they find out if they screwed up completely.
This is frequently called "blind analysis". It's to prevent the knowledge of the expected answer screwing up the data analysis. It's pretty common in big physics nowadays. Some examples:
In gravitational wave astronomy, they "blind injected" a discovery that would have won Nobel prizes if it had been real. The people working on the data knew that there might be faked data but had to analyze it anyway as if it were real. They go all the way to writing up the paper and getting ready to submit it for publication. But then at the end, they unblind the data and discover that it was fake data (and just a test of the system):
The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration completed an end-to-end system test of their detection capabilities at their recent joint collaboration meeting in Arcadia, CA. Analysis of data from LIGO and Virgo's most recent observation run revealed evidence of the elusive signal from a neutron star spiraling into a black hole. The collaboration knew that the "detection" could be a "blind injection" -- a fake signal added to the data without telling the analysts, to test the detector and analysis. Nonetheless, the collaboration proceeded under the assumption that the signal was real, and wrote and approved a scientific paper reporting the ground-breaking discovery. A few moments later, according to plan, it was revealed that the signal was indeed a blind injection. - See more at: ligo.org
ligo.org
It's common in elementary particles too:
arxiv.org
Once the collaboration settles on these outstanding issues, we can unblind the hidden offset that had been applied to our clock frequency during the measurement periods to prevent any analysis bias.
arxiv.org
And particle physicists have learned, through hard experience, to ignore signals until they are really significant. See section 6.3 of this paper:
arxiv.org
The global warming community is still very young and they have not learned these lessons. They will and eventually they'll begin doing real science. But until then, I think it's fair to blame their crap on their incompetence instead of fraud or intent.
Physics used to be done the same way. A famous example is the 1919 verification of the bending of light by the sun. A lot of physicists looked at the data recently and concluded that it was insufficient quality to verify Einstein. The claim is that Eddington had a bias in favor of Einstein. Part of that was political; Einstein was German and Eddington British and liberals at the time thought that having a British scientist verify a German theory would help heal the bad feelings over the just ended First World War. Here's a paper arguing that Eddington wasn't biased; if you're interested in the many articles claiming he is, they ought to be cited in the references:
astro.berkeley.edu
-- Carl |
