Peer-Review Process Fails Again

The mainstream orthodox scientific establishment, aka the Cult of Consensus, has failed again. This time by publishing work with unrepeatable results. Why are peer-reviewers publishing papers that make claims that are unrepeatable? The answer: because science is a religion.

New York Times: Nobel Laureate Retracts Two Papers Unrelated to Her Prize.

Linda B. Buck, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for deciphering the workings of the sense of smell, has retracted two scientific papers after she and her colleagues were unable to repeat the findings.

The retractions, which did not concern the work for which Dr. Buck won the Nobel, were published Thursday on the Web sites of the journals where the papers appeared. One had been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005, the other in the journal Science in 2006.

“I sincerely apologize for any confusion that its publication may have caused,” Dr. Buck wrote in the retraction of the Science paper.

The retractions follow a separate one, two years ago, of a paper by Dr. Buck that was published in the journal Nature in 2001.

Pseudoscientists Have Captured Peer-Review Process

A Harvard University astrophysicist is repeating what everybody already knows: 2009 International Conference on Climate Change: Update #3. (Via Heliogenic Climate Change)

NEW YORK--Willie Soon, a Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist with scores of peer-reviewed papers and books to his credit, said he is "embarrassed and puzzled" by the shallow science in papers that undergird the proposition that the Earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.

Soon told the second International Conference on Climate Change here, "We have a system (of peer reviewing scientific literature) that is truly, truly appalling." ...

Sununu and Soon both said global warming alarmists, particularly the politicians and the few scientists who wrote the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, have captured the scientific paper process, and in Sununu's words, have been successful in "taking control of who gets funding, who gets published, who gets acclaimed, and who gets demonized."

"What happened to the peer-review process?" Soon asked rhetorically as he reviewed egregious and complex examples of doctored data and sloppy scholarship in global warming alarmist literature.

Hmmm, sounds familiar.