Climate Denial and Predatory Journals

Anyone who is motivated, for whatever reason, to deny something that requires them to hold a position that is contrary to the prevailing scientific consensus, can shore up that denial by criticising the scientific endeavour.  Sadly enough, there have been a couple of problems that provide succour to denialists of all stripes – evolution deniers, round Earth deniers, climate deniers and so on.

Before leaping into the topic, it’s worth pointing out the difference between pseudoscience and science.  A pseudoscientific claim is one that has put on the white lab coat of science, using words that sound like they come from the science handbook, but from which one or more of the elements that are essential to the scientific method are missing.  These elements are testability, reproducibility (or replication), falsifiability, comparison to the null hypothesis, peer review and so on. 

Unfortunately, there have been problems with two key elements of the scientific method in recent times.  The first is associated with the reproducibility crisis.  The fundamental problem with replication is perhaps best illustrated by a paper from 2018 in which it was found that of 21 experimental studies published in Nature and Science, both prestigious journals, only 13 were reproducible – in that the new, more rigorous results pointed in the same direction as the original experiment – and, on average, the strength of the indication was about half of the original.

The name given to the “crisis” is a little misleading.  First, it’s not really a crisis of science – to the extent that it is a crisis at all, it’s about publishing and labelling of results as “scientific” before they have met the criterion of reproducibility.  There’s also a nuance that is often missed in discussions of the “reproducibility crisis”, there are two aspects that need to be reproducible: the experiment and the results.  A scientific experiment must be formalised in such a way that the experimenter’s peers can reproduce the experiment.  That formalisation is peer-reviewed and an assessment is made as to whether enough detail is provided for anyone, who is both interested and sufficiently well-funded, can perform the same experiment.

What that does, to a certain extent, is keep experimenters honest.  If you cheat with your experimental results and/or misreport how you got them, then there is a likelihood that you are going to be found out when someone tries to replicate your experiment.  What properly describing your experimental methodology doesn’t necessarily do, at least not by itself, is identify results that can’t be replicated.  To do that, there is a need for the experiments to actually be performed by other people.

This doesn’t always happen.  Scientists wanting to make a name for themselves focus on the boundaries of our knowledge, they aren’t interested in repeating other people’s experiments.  Then there is the question of funding.  While it is crucial that experiments are repeated, if we are going to have confidence in the results, repetition isn’t as exciting as (potentially) breaking new ground and less money is available to this very important work.

This bias towards the new also manifests in publishing and scientists are frequently under pressure to “publish or perish”.   Researchers who don’t produce interesting results are going to have difficulty attracting funding, so not only is there less interest in going over old ground but there has also been a skewing of new published work towards the more exciting.  This means that there is also a “bottom drawer” problem, or publication bias.  If an experiment fails, or fails to produce interesting results, the work is shelved (in the bottom drawer) and results never see the light of day.  This might be a benign decision on the part of an impartial experimenter, or it might be a deliberate attempt to obtain a wanted result on the part of an experimenter who is being funded by an organisation that favours a particular outcome.

If a large number of well-designed and properly executed experiments are conducted and only the “interesting” results are published, this results in bias – often confirmation bias, as the experimenter is going to be less interested in experiments that don’t confirm her hypothesis.  This is a particular problem in drug trials, where significant sums are spent on developing a new drug and an experiment that demonstrates the drug’s total ineffectiveness would be an unwanted outcome.  Sometimes the bias is only towards exaggerating the effectiveness of a drug.

Ben Goldacre gave an interesting TED talk on problems in drug trials.  At his website, AllTrials, he is campaigning for experiments (on drugs specifically) to be registered in advance and for all results to be published, good or bad, even if those results are hideously boring.  This is a principle that could be expanded to cover all science, including social science in which there has been a serious problem with reproducibility.

The upshot of all of this is that, for some people, the shine has faded from science.  The results can be questioned.  The reliability of scientists can be questioned.  This might be unfair, since the people at the forefront demanding reform tend to be scientists, but a denialist isn’t obliged to be fair.  A denialist, when confronted with scientific evidence that contradicts his claim, has the option of simply rejecting the authority of science.

Perhaps they are just producing the results that their funders want. 

Perhaps they are labouring under some sort of unconscious confirmation bias.

Both these claims have been made by denialists.  The “climategate scandal” was whipped up into a story about scientists at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia being engaged in “scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming” (spoiler: there was some significant spin and cherry picking involved to reach that conclusion).

JP, my interlocutor on climate change, has made the claim that while climate scientists aren’t involved in a sprawling conspiracy to manufacture the appearance of anthropogenic climate change, there may be some confirmation bias in their results.  JP is trying to avoid stepping into conspiracy theory here, but I don’t know if that effort is entirely successful.  There would still have to be a conspiracy of inaction, a willingness on the part of climate scientists to not look at results too closely and go into a form of denialism when “climate contrarians” point at perceived problems with climate science measurements, modelling and interpretation.

Another (and closely linked) keystone of science is peer review, which also bring scientific publishing into question.  A scientific journal is not supposed to just publish any and all papers that are submitted to it.  A credible journal will subject all papers to peer review before even considering publishing it.  Experts in the field will check that the paper is scientific – is the methodology adequately detailed, are the results clearly presented, do the conclusions follow from the evidence provided, does the author demonstrate a suitable understanding of the field and is it new work (if not, is the original research adequately referenced, thus avoiding plagiarism)?

A “no” to any of these questions won’t necessarily prevent the paper being published eventually, since the author can rework it to address identified problems and resubmit … and then there are other options.

There is an increasing number of predatory journals which don’t require or provide peer review – some claim to, but other don’t even make the pretence of offering peer review, they are purely “pay-to-publish”, you pay your money and you can publish whatever tosh you want to publish.

A sufficiently motivated denialist can point to this issue as well and use it to summarily dismiss any scientific evidence for climate change, etc etc.

This is not to say that denialists will be content with dismissing science.  Not at all.  Some will claim, in order to contest certain facts, that they have alternative facts.  They will, if they can, try to publish these alternative facts, but when they find that respectable peer reviewed journals won’t publish their arguments, they may turn to those who, for a fee, will publish anything.  The overall effect of a climate denialist publishing bad science in any journal, even if it is known to predatory, is to damage the apparent legitimacy of science in the mind of the layman, including but not limited to climate-related science.

As mentioned above, one of the complaints that my interlocutor on climate change, JP, has levelled against climate change science is that researchers are victim to a form of confirmation bias.  Many scientists working together on a similar topic develop a consensus and evidence that goes against that consensus is tacitly discouraged.  Being particularly difficult can be punished by dismissal (such as is claimed with respect to Peter Ridd – the fact that he won a case for unfair dismissal is celebrated among denialists) or being labelled as a crackpot climate denier (and placed on an Orwellian list such as at DeSmog).

Once you are frozen out by your peers for your transgressions, supposedly, your only options if you want to speak the truth are to get into bed with the Heritage Foundation or the Heartland Institute or the Cato Institute or the Institute for Public Affairs or the CO2 Coalition or the Fraser Institute or the Global Climate Coalition or the Global Warming Policy Foundation or the Galileo Movement or you could get a gig with Sky News or Fox News or … well, it seems that your options aren’t really that limited after all.

When it comes to real confirmation bias, a paper on sea levels around Fiji by climate denialist Nils-Axel Mörner is illustrative.  This paper contains 28 references, of which 22 are work by Mörner (as lead author if not sole author).  This is hardly a good sign - to what extent is confirmation bias going on when the vast majority of your references are to things you have written yourself?

First, let’s look at Mörner’s references to other people’s work.  The first is a fleeting mention of the IPCC Report AR5 (which reported that sea levels are rising), the second is to the UN Climate Change Conference of Parties 23 (which coincidentally was chaired by Fiji’s Prime Minister).

The other four are ganged together and linked to the statement “From a survey of available literature(e.g. [5-8]), the Yasawa Islands were chosen for our field studies”.  None of the references that were not written by Mörner provide any support to his argument whatsoever, the latter four of them appear to be included for no other reason than to lend credibility to the “paper”.

The author for all of those papers was Patrick Nunn, a Lead Author of the Small Islands chapter of the next issue of the IPCC Assessment Report (AR6) – as he was for the Sea Level Change chapter of AR5, along with being referenced numerous times in the Small Islands chapter – who has worked, as geographer and geologist, on the Pacific Basin for 30 years and who holds a Professor of Geography position at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

Nunn reviewed Mörner’s paper before it was to be submitted for publishing and pointed out the major deficiencies and misleading conclusions – and that was the last Nunn heard from him (per private correspondence).

When you look at the four papers written by Nunn and referenced by Mörner, you can see a trend.  Note that Mörner’s conclusion is that there is no sea level rise observable in Fiji, but rather there has been “a 10-20 cm fall in sea level in the last 60 years forcing corals to grew (sic) into microatolls under strictly stable sea level conditions” (my emphasis).  Nunn’s papers were all about events in the distant past, thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago, not over the past century.  Additionally, Nunn’s papers are about how the islands of Fiji have been subsiding geologically – ie falling relative to the sea level – over thousands (and thousands) of years.

Now let’s turn to Mörner’s multiple self-references.  First, I want to point that, in the good old days, Mörner was a “well respected geoscientist”.  He was able to publish in peer reviewed journals.  He is still able to publish in respectable peer reviewed journals, for example he published in the Journal of Coastal Research in 2017 and Ocean & Coastal Management in 2018.  Neither of those journals appear dodgy to me, but please note that I am not an expert in the area.

Mörner mentions three peer-reviewed journals: Energy and Environment, the Journal of Coastal Research, and Global and Planetary Change.  Energy and Environment has been criticised for publishing substandard papers, rating a mention at both Desmog and SourceWatch.  Global and Planetary Change appears to be quite reputable (the paper is from 2010, but Mörner has been a denialist since before 2000).  The Journal of Coastal Research is referenced, but the paper in question was noted as “submitted”.  When a search is run on this paper, it turns out to have be loaded onto to ResearchGate by Mörner and it does not appear in the Journal of Coastal Research.

There are a couple of Proceedings, the SpringerLink references for example were from a conference and a workshop.

There is reference to a self-published book, Data Opposing CO2 Emissions as the Primary Source of Global Warming, to which Mörner contributed a chapter (here’s a review, there are reviews at Amazon as well, it’s worth checking the other reviews by the reviewers, you might observe a trend).

Otherwise, it’s all predatory, pay-to-publish journals.

See here also for a tangential discussion of Mörner’s paper in the “International Journal of Earth and Environmental Sciences”.

As a counterexample, Responding to the challenges of climate change in the Pacific Islands: Management and technological imperatives is a paper by Patrick Nunn.  He references 73 works of which 13 are his own.

This article is far from comprehensive with regard to the problem of predatory journals with respect to climate change.  However, it does indicate that 1) when it comes to confirmation bias, accusations that legitimate climate scientists are victims of it are problematic to say the least and 2) it’s worth checking the quality of any scientific paper that is referenced by a climate denialist, don’t just skim it and scroll down to the conclusion.  Take a closer look and, at the very least, check the credentials of the journal in which it was published (if indeed it was published in a journal).

Also, given that I am not publishing in a well-respected, peer reviewed journal, don’t take my word of any of the above.  Check it out yourself.  If I am wrong or have been unfair, let me know in the comments below.