Saving Science after Climate Gate: Recovering from the Loss of Scientific Credibility

By Jay Lehr, Ph.D. Science Director, The Heartland Institute, and Mike Gemmell

"Billions of dollars are being spent each year on publicly funded scientific research in the U.S. However, the Climategate scandal has brought to light glaring problems in publicly funded science including: the slowing of the advancement of science to a crawl, vast sums of money being squandered, and disturbing occurrences of political correctness, science by consensus, and alarmist science. This paper presents an integrated approach to reform based on the principle of full disclosure of data and data protocols at the time of research publication. The implementation of that principle -- combined with full disclosure by all parties during the grant application process -- and adherence to scientific objectivity, are used to demonstrate a fundamental approach to reform. The application of this reform approach should be a significant step toward restoring credibility in the scientific establishment and provide taxpayers with a much better return on the money spent on public scientific endeavors."      ………The results of 60 years of publicly funded science research have left us with a loss of scientific credibility as evidenced by:   To Read More…