A Hidden Universe of Uncertainty
13 hours ago Kip Hansen 86 Comments
Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 18 October 2022
Every time someone in our community, the science skeptic or Realists® community, speaks out about uncertainty and how it affects peer-reviewed scientific results, they are immediately accused to being Science Deniers or of trying to undermine the entire field of Science.
I have written again and again here about how the results of the majority of studies in climate science vastly underestimate the uncertainty of their results. Let me state this as clearly as possible: Any finding that does not honestly include a frank discussion of the uncertainties involved in the study, beginning with the uncertainties of the raw data and then all the way through the uncertainties added by each step of data processing, is not worth the digital ink used to publish it.
A new major multiple-research-group study, accepted and forthcoming in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is set to shake up the research world. This paper, for once, is not written by John P.A. Ioannidis, of “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False” fame.
The paper is: “Observing Many Researchers Using the Same Data and Hypothesis Reveals a Hidden Universe of Idiosyncratic Uncertainty”. [ or as .pdf here ].
This is good science. This is how science should be done. And this is how science should be published.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/10/17/a-hidden-universe-of-uncertainty/
