Malikov wrote:Soviet Haaregrad wrote:
So far he's only claimed the first. Though it seems you're really trying to prove the second one true.
You aren't part of our conversation, so get out of it.Dododecapod wrote:
Noo, my friend, it's clear you've never worked in academia! (And may I never have to again!) The credibility of a journal is given by the academic community as a whole, and a more back-biting, vicious group of over-educated thugs you will never find. They will go WAY out of their way to tear down a competing hypothesis, and their battlefield is the scientific journal. If a journal gets a reputation as ANYTHING other than a STRICTLY NEUTRAL battleground for competing ideas, it will be dropped like a hot coal and never considered again. One of the BIG journals, like Nature, can survive a bad situation with only moderate loss of income; the small ones vanish without a trace.
And note I did NOT say that taking a side would increase sales. I said publishing an anti-warming paper that ACTUALLY WORKED would. Major difference.
This is all assuming that the battlefield in question has a healthy number of competing forces, which global warming does not have. there are not a large number of scientists that will say "man-made global warming is not occuring". Which brings me to my next point. The scientists like publicity of themselves, and their ideas. The scientific community are not the only ones buying scientific journals. More often then not, it's the gneral populace wondering what the hell global warming is. The journals have a larger audience with them, and include a bias that will garner them more sales. The scientists see nothing wrong with it, because they're reporting their opinion, which they believe to be correct, as do the very large majority of others, as the global warming battleground is not even, as previously stated. Thus the bias goes unchallenged, and the general populace preaches it as dogma.
I think you overestimate the sales of these journals to laymen. It happens, but frankly, it's rare; especially in the more specialized journals, but also in the general ones, a lot of the writing assumes a standard of knowledge the layman just doesn't have. For most people, a lot of the published work is both unintelligible and dry as sand.
Anyway, you have the bias exactly wrong. There's no bonus in being orthodox; it's the same-old same-old, the varnished tale so often overtold. There's really no market for yet MORE documentation of global warming.
But for an heterodox view, ah! That;s something different! New! Edgy! A paper opposing global warming, that made it through peer-review and had the full data to back it up? SNAPPED UP LIKE A HOTCAKE. It could make a journal's name, or confirm a larger one's sales for aother year.
There is NO reason not to publish such a paper other than...no such paper existing. THAT is the problem.