Oh, come on, Reverend! You are not going to tell us that the love of money is root of all evil, are you? "Follow the money" indeed... "Follow the power" or "Follow the folly" are both more correct.

If you read Retraction Watch you will find other examples where the authors' original thesis was contradicted by the published data, and as a consequence, the publisher retracted the original work. It happens rarely. Usually investigators know where they want the data to take them, but if it goes somewhere else, they understand that, too. Once in a while, the data need to be interpreted for the primary investigator. It has happened before. It is not a failing. It is how science can work. Again, consider Einstein's greatest blunder.

So, Einstein committed a moral failure when found and reported a flaw in his previous work?

Nonsense. See above about Einstein. The reason for the retraction is important. Not all are moral failures.

That is exactly what this current occupier of the oval orifice has in mind, for us to be more of a banana republic than a constitutional republic.

Right on the money!

Chapter 11, as in "moral bankruptcy", perhaps?

Ellis Wyatt was doing fracking, in the Gulch.

Ayn Rand didn't use the term "fracking", but there is no doubt that it was fracking.

This comes as no surprise. I am sure that the media will give this the coverage that it deserves as they so viciously attacked Franking in the past. (SARCASM)

I will save this link to use for the next time I get into it with some of my Liberal acquaintances.

As someone else suggested, it is all about the money, and control of the people. If American citizens are finicially stable they Government has no way to use fear to control us. Hell this entire BLM and Dallas thing is the same thing with a different face on it.

The coal industry bites the dust, and oil and nuclear are fighting for their lives. So where does that leave us? Purveyors of bananas? Washington's single minded attempt to make us dependent on vile dictators has been grinding away for quite some time, and sad to say, making progress.

"Follow the money" will lead to the who and why we are not developing the resources we have. The Beltway is the culprit on the receiving end to snuff out the oil industry in this nation.

Excellent observation. Climate science and environmental science are political.

My livelihood has been directly impacted by deliberately fraudulent "science" used by federal land management agencies in their implementation of land use policies with the sage grouse FEIS. I will elaborate someday.

Now let's see a retracted CO2 paper!

WOW...someone actually responded differently once the knew they got it wrong...it's a red letter day.

If you have not read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions you owe it to yourself. Not in Kuhn, as a I recall, the fact is that Ohm's Law was ridiculed. It seems pretty basic to us. They found it absurd in its statement and impossible to validate empirically.

Don't blame the government. They are culpable. But not for everything. People can be stupid on their own.

Agreed on both counts.

Einstein's biggest blunder ... was not a mistake after all (maybe)
http://www.space.com/9593-einstein-bi...

But, the point is that he admitted that he was in error. And, he was exceptional.

The science establishment (and not just in the US) has been rotten to the core for decades, mostly because the government agencies who write the grant checks have political agendas.

But some people in that establishment do want to clean it up, and it's nice to see that starting to happen. It's only a start, though.

From its inception, most Gulchers have recognized the value of Fracking. Even before that, I remember that many years ago people lamenting that if we could only get at that shale oil, we'd be oil independent. Now that dream has come true and we can easily become oil independent but for those idiots and connivers in the Beltway.

Libtard politicians and "journalists" will still cite such studies as progressive doctrine in speeches and correspondence galore.
It's what liars do.

Well, I would say that some branches of science--those whose practitioners are not looking for practical solutions--are political. Climate science and environmental science have become political. The original authors sought to please the Luddite crowd. That's why those papers saw publication to begin with.

Time was when we never heard about such retractions. Now we do.

The narrative here in the Gulch is that universities are corrupt centers of Kantian philosophy and then from that comes the claim that what we get is pseudo-science in service to collectivist politics. That claim is similar to the post-modernist "we can't know anything" in its outcome, but is differently motivated: "we can't trust anyone."

What I see here among some is a merger of two themes identified by Richard Hofstadter: the paranoid style in American politics; and the anti-intellectual tradition.

Some people have read that view into Atlas Shrugged, but that was not Rand's viewpoint.

Yes, retraction. The intellectual equivalent of chapter 11.

". But through the decades of discovery, more emphasis was on publishing new materials, not revisiting previous works. That has changed. It appears to have been a paradigm shift in the practice of science."
I wonder if this has been a slow change, maybe starting around the time of William Harvey, who starts of On Circulation of the Blood saying it may be shocking to readers that there's something left to discover beyond Galen's work over 1000 years earlier.

Maybe the printing press started, the telegraph, continuing through low-cost high-throughput data. What hath God wrought?

"So, maybe science is safe for now."
I perceive that many people not working around science do not understand science. This article talks about sensational headlines. Science writers make a study interesting by pointing out how it's vaguely similar to sci-fi technology like FTL travel or teleporters. Then a different person writes a sensational headline that often has nothing to do with the real research.

I don't know if it's because of the sensationalism, but many non-scientists seem to start with the premise that all science is actually politics. It seems like they say we can't actually know anything through science, so we might as well pick comforting answers and find evidence to support them.

Michael Pollan does this in In Defense of Food. The book makes good points, but at times he seems to go to that argument that because scientific opinion changes over time, it's unreliable. He says at one point scientist told us all nutrition came from macronutrients, completely missing micronutrients. He talks about how research is funded industry, so we study the benefits of food processed before it gets to the consumer more than the benefits of food that's provided raw for the consumer to cook and process. I think he has a good point. But the answer is not to throw our hands up and say we can't know anything.