Post modernism is creeping into science. The bizarre rationalizations for the self-admitted scientific fraud perpetrated in the ClimateGate scandal are a radical departure from traditional scientific standards. Scientists are rushing to defend the indefensible: manipulating data, faking data, destroying data to prevent examination by other scientists, and conspiring to take control of peer review to advance a particular scientific theory. All of these acts constitute gross scientific misconduct, and several decades ago commission of any of these transgressions would have ended a scientific career.
No so any more. The leading scientific journal Nature has defended all of these scientific crimes by asserting that these scientists were under stress, and the Nature editors have made the bizarre claim that evidence for widespread manipulation of peer-review doesn’t cast doubt on the body of climate science that has been validated by the same corrupt peer-review process revealed in the emails and of which Nature has been a part.
Peer review is the jury that decides what counts as valid science. Manipulation of peer-review is to science what jury tampering is to justice; it’s a crime, it is perhaps the most dishonest thing a practitioner can do, and it invalidates verdicts, scientific or judicial, arrived at through the corrupt process.
Does evidence really matter in science? Does data matter? A science blogger at climate alarmist blog Get Energy Smart! Now!!! sums up the emerging attitude in ideologically motivated science:
“True information, if it is true, doesn’t necessarily mean truthful.”
Derrida is in the laboratory.