rationalskepticism.org

Problems in social science are being used to discredit climate science

A conference in California next week says it aims to make scientific studies more reliable, but critics fear the event is a new tactic used by those who question the reality of climate change.
The event, called Fixing Science, is being run by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a non-profit organisation based in New York.
The conference’s programme focuses on the reproducibility crisis – the claim that science has an increasing problem with poorly performed or even fraudulent studies – with a portion dedicated to how that applies to both economics and climate change.
In recent years, psychology and medicine have suffered a series of embarrassing incidents, where well-established results collapsed under scrutiny. Many scientists believe we must reform how science is organised to avoid such errors.
So it is no surprise that the upcoming conference has attracted a number of high-profile experts on reproducibility.
On the surface, identifying flawed studies “looks like a very good mission”, says Philipp Schmid at the University of Erfurt in Germany, who studies science denial. He isn’t attending the conference.