Rigor Mortis: Wasted Billions On Sloppy Science

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A new book estimates that maybe half of the $30bn spent by US taxpayers on biomedical science goes on work that turns out to be wrong.

Rigor Mortis by Richard Harris — sloppy science

We live in a world with an awful lot of corners, the science writer Richard Harris wryly observes. We are told that cures for diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s lurk just around them. Mostly, it turns out that the wall is endless — or that the corner is not a corner at all but a spiral of wasted dreams coiled around shoddy science.

His thesis, set out starkly in Rigor Mortis, is that there is something seriously wrong with the way biomedical scientists go about their business. I started this book bristling at the schlocky subtitle: “How sloppy science creates worthless cures, crushes hope, and wastes billions”. By the time I had finished, I felt it was somewhat justified.

He estimates that maybe half of the $30bn spent by US taxpayers on biomedical science — research that underpins treatments and cures — goes on work that turns out to be wrong. It takes an extreme optimist to wave away such wastage as the normal run of scientific trial and error.

Harris, an award-winning reporter for National Public Radio, captures an angst that is rife in biomedicine: if the goal of research is to deepen knowledge, then it is structured in exactly the wrong way. Grants and publications are awarded on the basis of novelty, with academics plunged into a “publish or perish” culture. This fosters an ultra-competitive “publish first, correct later” spirit, which militates against the collaborative milieu in which truly great insights are so often born. And since everyone is busy moving on to the next big thing — and anxious not to be embarrassed in front of their peers — errors tend to languish and pervert the record indefinitely. As Harris notes, “it’s important to distinguish between speed and haste”.

This sense of competitiveness also disadvantages academics who share methods and data with rivals. Data-sharing is essential for ensuring studies are reproducible but it is equivalent to assisting the enemy. Many studies cannot, in fact, be replicated, a phenomenon known as the “reproducibility crisis”.

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June 5, 2017 at 10:23PM

80 Graphs From 58 New Papers Show That Modern Warming Isn’t Global, Isn’t Unprecedented And Isn’t Remarkable

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“Little agreement is found with climate model simulations that consistently overestimate recent summer warming and underestimate pre-industrial temperature changes” –Büntgen et al., 2017

Fig 7A —Büntgen et al., 2017 

Last year there were at least 60 peer-reviewed papers published in scientific journals demonstrating that  Today’s Warming Isn’t Global, Unprecedented, Or Remarkable.

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June 5, 2017 at 09:39PM

Extending a new Lunar thermal model, Part III: Modelling the Moon at various rotation rates

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Overview

More than a year after “Part II” of a guest post from Talkshop contributor ‘Galloping Camel’ on the Moon’s equatorial temperature here is “Part III”.  Peter actually sent this to Tim Channon last year, but Tim became to ill to deal with it and forgot to throw it my way. In current discussion of Ned and Karl’s new paper, the issue of planetary surface temperature variation due to speed of rotation arose. Ned thinks it makes no difference. Peter’s model says it does, so now is a good time for discussion, as this impacts theoretical estimates for the temperature of ‘Earth with no atmosphere’.

Modeling the Moon

It has been claimed that the GHE (Greenhouse Effect) is 33 Kelvin because the Earth’s average temperature is 288 K compared to a temperature of 255 K assumed for an “Airless Earth”.  The Diviner LRO showed that the Moon’s average temperature is 197.3 K which makes one wonder how an estimate based on impeccable mathematics could be so wrong?   Vasavada et al. published a paper in 2012 that mentioned a one-dimensional model of the Moon’s regolith.  As I was unable to obtain details of this model I attempted to replicate it using Quickfield, a powerful FEA (Finite Element Analysis) program.  Results obtained using my model were published here.

It is now clear that the 255 K estimate was wrong because it made unrealistic assumptions about the thermal properties of planetary surfaces.  In contrast Vasavada used properties of lunar regolith measured by Apollo astronauts.  There are now several other models that can reproduce the Diviner LRO measurements.

Rate of rotation

Scott Denning, Monfort Professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University has such a model and he sent me temperature data for a wide range of rotation rates.  I tried to replicate his results using my FEA model.

The above graph shows good agreement between our models and supports the idea rotation rate has a significant effect on the average temperature of airless bodies.   Here is a graph showing how temperatures should vary with rotation periods ranging from 14 minutes to 7,300 days:

MOON0.01 shows how temperatures should vary if the rotation period is 0.01 of an Earth day or roughly 14 minutes.  At the other extreme MOON7300 corresponds to one rotation every 20 years.  This graph shows that daytime temperatures remain constant until rotation rates can be measured in hours, whereas night time temperatures are more sensitive to rotation rates:

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June 5, 2017 at 09:09PM

Greens Founder Calls Germany’s Renewables Policy: “an Economic, Social and Ecological Disaster”

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When people turn on wind power, it’s a one-way proposition: they never, ever worship these things again. And when the convert was among those who first championed the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time, they don’t just quietly fall out of love, they tend to become the loudest critics of all; a bit … Continue reading Greens Founder Calls Germany’s Renewables Policy: “an Economic, Social and Ecological Disaster”

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June 5, 2017 at 07:32PM