In a controversial bid to expose supposed bias in a top journal, a US climate expert shocked fellow scientists by revealing he tailored a wildfire study to emphasize global warming.
I think this is worse, arguably. Don't get me wrong, Wakefield wasn't good. But this is actually worse.
Wakefield wanted to call into question a thing which, at the time, was a relatively small thing: the MMR vaccine. There was no political platform of vaccines back then, it was the fallout from his con years after that created that platform. He wanted to do that so he could sell his own snake oil cure-all for autism. He frankly didn't care about vaccines, he simply knew people were hesitant about shots and overly concerned about normalcy.
So Wakefield really was just a greedy sonuvabitch ready to capitalize on the tremendous effort parents of autistic children are ready to commit for their kids. Bad, but just selfish greed. Not trying to accelerate an already existential crisis for political maga points.
This though, climate change, is already the political platform. This is very clearly an attack on the very institutions of academia themselves. This is trying to discredit the act of collecting data and replicating experiments as real science. And there's frankly a lot to say about that topic today (p<0.05 apocalypse) but this isn't saying any of that. It's simply saying "here's a reason not to trust climate science at all". That's the argument. That's way more dangerous than anti-vax arguments. Thank God this instance was as ineffective as it was.
Silver lining, it took almost ten years for Wakefield to get caught and detracted. This didn't take long to catch at all because the guy who did it was smug about his shitty goal, in typical right winger fashion: he went and published an opinion piece on his own paper, to the surprise of even his co-author.
For anyone out there who doesn't want to browse to TikTok, the short version is that the Reddit communications staff refuses to comment on information that's being used for upcoming stories, and instead they say that they will issue corrections after the fact.
This is of course an old tactic that companies have tried to use to discredit reporters, but it doesn't work very well when you tell everyone that you're using it.
Scientist shocks peers by 'tailoring' climate study (phys.org)
In a controversial bid to expose supposed bias in a top journal, a US climate expert shocked fellow scientists by revealing he tailored a wildfire study to emphasize global warming.
The statement Reddit gave us is the oldest trick in the book. (The Verge) (www.tiktok.com)