CCD and Neonics: Scientific Corruption and Conspiracy!

Neonics ban tied to corrupted bee research by scientists at EU’s ethically-challenged IUCN? Part I

By David Zaruk

Within a day of publishing the internal document and the first part of his investigation, one of the scientists behind the IUCN Taskforce on Systemic Pesticides threatened and then started legal proceedings against him. The blog host in Brussels, EurActiv, took his article down. Then, as the GLP reported on Thursday, the Times of London reported the key findings of Zaruk’s story, calling it one of the biggest scientist scandals since ClimateGate. EurActiv agreed to restore the blog, conditioned on an “apology”, which he amended to this report. When I asked Zaruk how he felt about the circus, he said: “Welcome to Brussels”.

Here is Zaruk’s article, the first article in a multi-part series scheduled to appear on EurActiv, and reproduced in full for the Genetic Literacy Project:

The Risk-Monger recently came across a strategy document carelessly left on-line by activist scientists that lies at the heart of the founding of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (ICUN) Taskforce on Systemic Pesticides. The Addendum to this document (see page 3) spells out a rather distasteful anti-neonicotinoid campaign strategy lacking in scientific integrity. The process has been tried and tested before by activists, but their behaviour has never been so clearly articulated in writing. I thought this document should be shared so we know the type of people are standing behind the “science” defending the bees.

[Note: The Genetic Literacy Project’s Jon Entine uncovered a similar case of possible research corruption in the United States in an investigation of the disputed studies on neonics and bees by Harvard nutritionist and organic activist Chensheng Lu.]

How did this story unfold?......To Read More....

Bee-gate: European IUCN task force mired in corruption scandal over neonics ban plot. Part II

David Zaruk

 

The IUCN Taskforce on Systemic Pesticides has demonstrated how activist scientists can exploit the weaknesses in the peer review process. The group is set up like a private club of like-minded researchers who publish articles citing each other and recommending each other to peer review their papers…..If one needs any further proof of how this taskforce confirms their bias among themselves, look at the list of references at the end of the “high-impact” concluding publication. Of the total of 14 sources, 10 were to articles from the same very authors of the report. Was there really so little other credible science out there that they had to keep referencing themselves?……It was sadly neither published in Science nor Nature (as the 2010 anti-neonic strategy document had expected), but instead, the journal of Environmental Science and Pollution Research. Rather than being in the upper echelon of scientific publications, this tepid, dare I say mediocre journal is an open-source, pay-per-publish service (it has an Impact Factor of 2.76 – for comparison, Science has an Impact Factor of 31.48 and Nature has 42.35 – Impact Factor, to simplify, is based on the average number of citations each article receives). Environmental Science and Pollution Research’s publisher, Springer (along with IEEE), recently had to retract 120 articles from open-source journals for being computer-generated gibberish. Was this high impact paper even subjected to a peer review?....To Read More....