Hoaxes are fun, right? At least some are, like the Onion’s latest “leak” of 700 pages of parody documents from “an anonymous source within the White House.” Trump has yet to denounce this leak as fake news, but knowing he’s threatened to sue them in the past, we wouldn’t be surprised. Among the documents like VP Pence’s list of Heretics in the Senate and everyone’s daily schedule, there are even a few EPA docs - in one set, Pruitt details to Trump his efforts to destroy his office with a hammer. In another, a Superfund site becomes sentient. So with that festive spirit in mind, let’s take a look at a recent climate-relevant hoax. (No, not that the whole thing is just a Chinese invention…)
Over at Breitbart, James Delingpole has found what may be his perfect story. Combining his hate of climate science with gender studies denial, dear James tells us about the latest Sokal-style hoax. (A Sokal hoax refers to an incident in the 1990s where a researcher submitted, and got published, a paper consisting of randomly generated postmodern jargon.) Writing about a deliberately nonsensical paper focused on critiquing gender studies, which referenced climate as one example of “the conceptual penis as a social construct,” Delingpole chose the elegant headline “Penises Cause Climate Change” for his piece.
The relevance here is that deniers like Delingpole are pointing to the hoax-y paper as an example of just how unreliable peer-review publishing actually is. But the authors note the paper was rejected from one journal, and only found publication in the type of “pay-to-publish” predatory journal they set out to criticize--hardly proof of lax standards in the academic community, and far from an indictment of the rigorous of journals that publish real climate science.
More embarrassingly for deniers is while it’s apparently possible for pure gibberish to get published, they still struggle to work their brand of gibberish into peer-reviewed journals. And even when they do, it seems it’s just a matter of time before their sloppy work gets called out.
Case in point: a recent Paul Karp piece in the Guardian shows why “experts reject” Bjorn Lomborg’s 2015 finding that limiting warming to 2°C is a “poor investment.” The piece points out Lomborg’s errors of omission as well as reliance on outdated or flawed data. Not exactly a hoax--at least not an intentional one--but the result is the same: people spreading misinformation that experts reject.
On the plus side, this quote and headline means that in addition to “bullshitters”, we can now add “rejects” to the list of acceptable names for folks like Lomborg and other deniers whose studies get rejected from real journals.
Though Karp notes that Bjorn’s group got $640,000 for that project, which seems like pretty good payment for pretty easy work. Guess the joke’s on us…
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