Tag Archives: Research

The Ivory Tower

This is a post I’ve been thinking about for a while, and my thoughts are still not fully fleshed out, but I’ll have a go at writing it anyway. You sometimes encounter a suggestion that academics regard themselves as living … Continue reading

Posted in ClimateBall, Global warming, Greenhouse effect, Research, Science, The philosophy of science, The scientific method | Tagged , , | 31 Comments

Doing science

This whole furore about Karl et al. has got me thinking more about how we actually conduct science/research. There is, I think, a perception that doing science/research involves following a fairly well defined set of procedures about which there should … Continue reading

Posted in ethics, Research, Science, The philosophy of science, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , | 9 Comments

Excellence!

Unless you’re a UK-based academic, you may not know that yesterday was an important day in UK academia; it was the release of the results from the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise. This is an assessment of most of … Continue reading

Posted in Science | Tagged , , , , , , | 70 Comments

Elements of truth

Stoat’s recent post about peer review, reminded me that there was something related that I had been considering writing about. There appears to be many climate “skeptics” (deniers some would call them) who regularly make claims about peer review being … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, Science | Tagged , , , , | 48 Comments

Value-free science?

Reiner Grundmann has a new post on Die Klimazwiebel discussing whether or not philosophy can enlighten climate science. Reiner also has an earlier post about the same topic. As far as I can tell, the basic argument seems to be … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, Global warming, Roy Spencer | Tagged , , , , , , | 161 Comments

Watt about the con-men?

There is a recent Watts Up With That (WUWT) post called how a scientist becomes a con-man. This was about a Dutch psychologist called Diederik Stapel who carried out research in the general area of sociology. Some of his work … Continue reading

Posted in Anthony Watts, Climate change, Global warming, Watts Up With That | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments