Junk Science

In my offshore days I worked as a contractor for NMFS and I had to really do some mental gymnastics to sleep at night knowing the work I was doing.

Now granted the work I was doing wasn’t all that bad. I stuck to our collection protocols and delivered the best data sets I could every trip out. Still I had one captain say this to me, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget it: “I like you just fine, and I know you’re just here to make a living, but let’s face it NOTHING good will come from me letting you on my boat.”

This was said ON his boat while we were offshore and fishing. I went through bumper years where the fishermen were hauling in great catches, and I went through down years where the fishing wasn’t great. No matter WHAT the word from the .gov was the same: The fish were declining and commercial fishing needed to be further regulated.

Now on a side note I ended up leaving the Fisheries Observer industry because I was laid off. There was a massive budget cut to NOAA to help pay for the Iraq war, and myself, and about 90% of all the contractors for my company were cut lose.

You see fisheries data isn’t the highest priority in government funding. Can you imagine how it would be if they told the truth about the fisheries, rather than cooking numbers to make it look like population crashes are on the verge? If they said things were going well, the government would cut the funding and the truth-telling scientists would be out of work for their honesty.

A similar story can be found here, where NOAA was using the regulations to feather their own nest.

Borepatch has a similar story of a fisheries researcher cooking the books with a junk science study with a sample set of TWO FISH (I’ll point out that I doubt they only CAUGHT two fish as two is a REALLY small sample size for field work, even lazy field work, I suspect many were caught but two were cherry picked to fit the study. Why would somebody do this? MONEY! The same reason why the climate change racket was set up that was shown in the East Anglia leaked emails, you see if you do climate research it isn’t like my current field of cancer research where the end-result is a money-making cancer treatment, there is nothing profitable about climate research….well almost nothing. Instead climate scientists need to survive off of grants. This isn’t bad news there’s lots of pure science research that yields interesting information, but will never actually pay for itself. Still money doesn’t grow on trees, so SOMEBODY has to pay for it. Think of it this way, if you only had X dollars, and that could pay for research for a cure for cancer OR the mating habits of a deep sea sea-slug, but not BOTH, which would you chose? Deep sea life is cool, and we really don’t know a ton about it, but really how often does somebody think about the Mariana Trench while you’re helping a sick loved one who’s dying of cancer?

But besides private funding and university funding, more steady research grants can be secured if a perceived disaster is at hand. In my case I was paid because the US government was lead to believe that the fishermen were raping the ocean and without government funds the domestic fish supply would end. The Climate Change Cult lead the government to believe that unless they properly regulated CO2 production the seas would rise and the world would end. The government didn’t exactly care if the studies were bunk or not, as they could use the data to push further regulation, and stir up fear in re-election campaigns. Still maybe all of them weren’t so dishonest, maybe they were just too stupid to understand how the scientific method works. I’d be willing to buy that for many of our elected officials. In the case of East Anglia they got a nation-wide conspiracy going simply because if somebody talked they’d kill the goose that was laying the golden eggs. Like all REAL conspiracies tho, somebody’s conscience got the better of them and the emails were leaked.

Still the cultists are still pushing the debunked idea. Its really more religion than science.