If Americans increasingly distrust the scientific establishment it’s not because the public have straw in their beards. They may, and it may always have been one less-than-ideal reason for the traditional habit of regarding eggheads with skepticism. But the increase in such skepticism, the growing tendency to think that much of the research-industrial complex is vain, inept and elitist, is the product of major failings in the world of science, especially the problem of peer review and the famous and increasingly urgent “replication crisis”. Here at CDN we still get innocent souls who wave “peer review” at us as a silver bullet that slays error and fraud in a single shot without fail. But in point of fact this massive edifice erected by academics and for academics has failed horribly in its purpose, at least its ostensible purposes, while permitting the publication of endless eye-catching papers that assist multiple authors in getting career advancement and yet more grants without, alas, withstanding real scrutiny on the rare occasions that they get it.

To quote Wikipedia, so it’s not exotic knowledge hidden in obscure journals:

“The replication crisis is an ongoing methodological crisis in which the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to reproduce. Because the reproducibility of empirical results is an essential part of the scientific method, such failures undermine the credibility of theories building on them and potentially call into question substantial parts of scientific knowledge. The replication crisis is frequently discussed in relation to psychology and medicine, where considerable efforts have been undertaken to reinvestigate classic results, to determine whether they are reliable, and if they turn out not to be, the reasons for the failure. Data strongly indicates that other natural and social sciences are affected as well.”

Then there’s climate change. It is hard to think of another issue in which prominent results inevitably turn out to be more slipshod or plain wrong, except perhaps the government’s declaration that carbohydrates were the path to slender fitness in the 1970s while eggs were white ovals of death and red meat was poison. On these points the scientific establishment lined up obediently behind political orthodoxy, followed by an explosion of obesity. But on climate change, where’s the fearless questioning of government opinions that might justify vast amounts of government money to… uh… hang on.

What happens to researchers like Patrick Brown, Matthew Wielicki or Roger Pielke Jr. who won’t play the government’s game? No career for you.