Obamacare, if enacted as proposed, eventually will result in a healthcare industrial complex crippled by the same problem as the UN IPCC and the EPA: the failure of the scientific peer review process. There will be one big difference: the climate crisis is not real, but the failure of the peer review process is guaranteed to cause a real crisis in health care, and inevitably a crisis with your personal health care or the health care of someone in your family.

Obamacare, requires multiple concatenated, multi-disciplinary task forces and committees to report recommendations up to the head of HHS; healthcare by consensus. Over time, these will become bureaucracies and fiefdoms like the IPCC committees, NASA GISS, Hadley CRU, and the EPA, all of which are now accused of fraud. How will this community-organized healthcare industrial complex work if the scientific peer review process has failed? How will it work if the credibility of a scientist or a medical research institute or a diagnostic instrument company on the task force is established by political connections and willingness to “tow the party line,” instead of credibility validated by empirically replicated science and engineering? The healthcare industrial complex will be unable to evaluate or debate the underlying science, having been institutionally hindered by conflicting interests. Healthcare will fail just as the Copenhagen and Rio+20 climate conferences failed.

Are you ready to trust your health care to a railroad engineer? Is a social worker’s opinion part of the consensus that sets the ‘standard of care’ for the cleaning procedures for a kidney dialysis machine between patients? Do a career politician and the community have a vote in the consensus decision which defines the ‘standard of care’ for your next medical procedure?  This are part of Obamacare.

If the peer review process is not repaired by the professional scientific societies, then your health is in danger, with or without Obamacare.  Arguably, we are already in danger.  The managers within each professional society have fiduciary responsibility to diligently manage the peer review process and professional ethics within that profession, but that is not happening today.  For that reason, many scientists and physicians are resigning from their professional societies.

Managers of professional societies cannot delegate their diligence responsibilities to other  organizations, such as one of the hundreds of new Obamacare agencies.  To do so would contradict the definition of peer review process. A meta-organization such as the National Academies of Science or National Research Council (or a multi-disciplinary committee as defined in Obamacare) does not have the skills or experience to replicate experiments and evaluate the data; attempting such a process would look like the UN IPCC and their gray literature instead of peer reviewed science.  The UN IPCC is a political organization, and  Obamacare mandates hundreds of similar political agencies, and these agencies will be making your health care decisions.

A properly functioning scientific peer review process keeps an organization or an individual honest and focused on goal … typically the means justify the end result. In contrast, in political ideologies typically the ends justify the means; a certain community organizer comes to mind. Politics and science are opposite in many respects.

The problem of junk science in the human-caused global warming fraud is just the tip of the iceberg. The problems will spread unless the peer review process within professional societies is fixed.

Management and editors at professional scientific societies are negligent in their failure to vigorously condemn scientific organizations and individual scientists who have not made their data and methods available to other investigators. These societies should be removing the publications by these scientists or clearly marking them as unvalidated work.  The societies and editors should not have published the work in the first place. The societies and the managers of these societies have not fulfilled their fiduciary responsibility to their members and sponsors and the result is now many examples of failure of the scientific peer review process.

Recently there have been many more revelations about fraud among global warming proponents. Phil Jones, manager and scientist at the UK Hadley Climate Research Unit has resigned.  Serious problems with distorted climate data from NOAA and NASA have been described by D’Aleo, Watts and others.  The EPA is faced with several lawsuits and a Congress determined by good reason to stop EPA regulation of greenhouse gases.  If a similar scandal were to happen in the healthcare industrial complex, there would be a real healthcare crisis and people would be dying.  The global warming alarmists are spending billions of dollars measuring sea level by the millimeters, CO2 by parts per million, and temperature changes in tenths of degrees over decades.

A couple of years ago, the TV show “60 Minutes” calculated that fraudulent healthcare claims total $60 billion a year.  Does anyone believe that the amount of fraud will now decline since Obamacare creates hundreds of new agencies in more than 900 pages of law?   If so, then yes, I have that proverbial bridge to sell you.

Where is the vigorous condemnation of this non-scientific behavior among the professional scientific societies? Where are the internal investigations of failures in the peer review processes within the scientific societies?  Where is the rejection of these unethical scientists from their peer review groups?  The editorial corrections for un-substantiated reporting are extremely rare.

Posted below is the commendable statement to the UK Parliament by The British Institute of Physics which describes problems with peer review process in the global warming fraud. The American Physical Society (APS) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) have taken the opposite position, having decided to endorse work by some of their members and defer to the UN IPCC; APS and ACS managers have inappropriately delegated their responsibility, when instead they should be demanding to review the underlying science and investigating their internal peer review problems.  Members and sponsors (including Congress) of U.S. professional societies should be actively condemning negligent management and taking legal action against management if they do not respond appropriately.  Where is the vigorous repudiation by Congress of the UN IPCC and its negligence, malfeasance and fraudulent peer review process?  American taxpayers are paying for a big part of UN fraud.

It is the negligence of management at these societies which is destroying the professional credibility of scientific societies. These managers are defending their bureaucracy and budget.  As a result, the world is accelerating backwards down a slippery slope into chaos and dependency on government by consensus.

Consensus and crony capitalism are life threatening when used in sciences, engineering and healthcare, but that is exactly what is defined in Obamacare. Citizens and Congress can act to stop it or else watch as our standard of living slides into the third world and beyond.

March, 2010 ———Updated July 13, 2012
Letterhead

Parliamentary Business

Memorandum submitted by the Institute of Physics (CRU 39)

The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia

The Institute of Physics is a scientific charity devoted to increasing the practice, understanding and application of physics. It has a worldwide membership of over 36,000 and is a leading communicator of physics-related science to all audiences, from specialists through to government and the general public. Its publishing company, IOP Publishing, is a world leader in scientific publishing and the electronic dissemination of physics.

The Institute is pleased to submit its views to inform the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry, ‘The disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia’.

The submission details our response to the questions listed in the call for evidence, which was prepared with input from the Institute’s Science Board, and its Energy Sub-group.

What are the implications of the disclosures for the integrity of scientific research?

1. The Institute is concerned that, unless the disclosed e-mails are proved to be forgeries or adaptations, worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and for the credibility of the scientific method as practised in this context.

2. The CRU e-mails as published on the internet provide prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law. The principle that scientists should be willing to expose their ideas and results to independent testing and replication by others, which requires the open exchange of data, procedures and materials, is vital. The lack of compliance has been confirmed by the findings of the Information Commissioner. This extends well beyond the CRU itself – most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other international institutions who are also involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change.

3. It is important to recognise that there are two completely different categories of data set that are involved in the CRU e-mail exchanges:

· those compiled from direct instrumental measurements of land and ocean surface temperatures such as the CRU, GISS and NOAA data sets; and

· historic temperature reconstructions from measurements of ‘proxies’, for example, tree-rings.

4. The second category relating to proxy reconstructions are the basis for the conclusion that 20th century warming is unprecedented. Published reconstructions may represent only a part of the raw data available and may be sensitive to the choices made and the statistical techniques used. Different choices, omissions or statistical processes may lead to different conclusions. This possibility was evidently the reason behind some of the (rejected) requests for further information.

5. The e-mails reveal doubts as to the reliability of some of the reconstructions and raise questions as to the way in which they have been represented; for example, the apparent suppression, in graphics widely used by the IPCC, of proxy results for recent decades that do not agree with contemporary instrumental temperature measurements.

6. There is also reason for concern at the intolerance to challenge displayed in the e-mails. This impedes the process of scientific ‘self correction’, which is vital to the integrity of the scientific process as a whole, and not just to the research itself. In that context, those CRU e-mails relating to the peer-review process suggest a need for a review of its adequacy and objectivity as practised in this field and its potential vulnerability to bias or manipulation.

7. Fundamentally, we consider it should be inappropriate for the verification of the integrity of the scientific process to depend on appeals to Freedom of Information legislation. Nevertheless, the right to such appeals has been shown to be necessary. The e-mails illustrate the possibility of networks of like-minded researchers effectively excluding newcomers. Requiring data to be electronically accessible to all, at the time of publication, would remove this possibility.

8. As a step towards restoring confidence in the scientific process and to provide greater transparency in future, the editorial boards of scientific journals should work towards setting down requirements for open electronic data archiving by authors, to coincide with publication. Expert input (from journal boards) would be needed to determine the category of data that would be archived. Much ‘raw’ data requires calibration and processing through interpretive codes at various levels.

9. Where the nature of the study precludes direct replication by experiment, as in the case of time-dependent field measurements, it is important that the requirements include access to all the original raw data and its provenance, together with the criteria used for, and effects of, any subsequent selections, omissions or adjustments. The details of any statistical procedures, necessary for the independent testing and replication, should also be included. In parallel, consideration should be given to the requirements for minimum disclosure in relation to computer modelling.

Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA adequate?

10. The scope of the UEA review is, not inappropriately, restricted to the allegations of scientific malpractice and evasion of the Freedom of Information Act at the CRU. However, most of the e-mails were exchanged with researchers in a number of other leading institutions involved in the formulation of the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. In so far as those scientists were complicit in the alleged scientific malpractices, there is need for a wider inquiry into the integrity of the scientific process in this field.

11. The first of the review’s terms of reference is limited to: “…manipulation or suppression of data which is at odds with acceptable scientific practice…” The term ‘acceptable’ is not defined and might better be replaced with ‘objective’.

12. The second of the review’s terms of reference should extend beyond reviewing the CRU’s policies and practices to whether these have been breached by individuals, particularly in respect of other kinds of departure from objective scientific practice, for example, manipulation of the publication and peer review system or allowing pre-formed conclusions to override scientific objectivity.

How independent are the other two international data sets?

13. Published data sets are compiled from a range of sources and are subject to processing and adjustments of various kinds. Differences in judgements and methodologies used in such processing may result in different final data sets even if they are based on the same raw data. Apart from any communality of sources, account must be taken of differences in processing between the published data sets and any data sets on which they draw.

The Institute of Physics
February 2010