Politics and Science Don't Mix

From Science:

A major controversy in marine biology took a new twist last week when the University of Delaware (UD) found one of its star scientists guilty of research misconduct. The university has confirmed to Science that it has accepted an investigative panel’s conclusion that marine ecologist Danielle Dixson committed fabrication and falsification in work on fish behavior and coral reefs. The university is seeking the retraction of three of Dixson’s papers and “has notified the appropriate federal agencies,” a spokesperson says.

Among the papers is a study about coral reef recovery that Dixson published in Science in 2014, and for which the journal issued an Editorial Expression of Concern in February. Science—whose News and Editorial teams operate independently of each other—retracted that paper today.

The investigative panel’s draft report, which Science’s News team has seen in heavily redacted form, paints a damning picture of Dixson’s scientific work, which included many studies that appeared to show Earth’s rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels can have dramatic effects on fish behavior and ecology. “The Committee was repeatedly struck by a serial pattern of sloppiness, poor recordkeeping, copying and pasting within spreadsheets, errors within many papers under investigation, and deviation from established animal ethics protocols,” wrote the panel, made up of three UD researchers.

This is always a grave danger whenever scientists work in a politically charged environment. I have worried about this sort of thing for decades now, ever since the political pressure to find worrisome things about climate change became intense. In a field where political positions are so strongly entrenched, science needs to be perfect to persuade anyone. But right now the rewards for findings that support climate change alarmism are so large that of course some people will give in and shade their results.

On the other hand, Dixson was eventually caught, and the paper retracted, which puts science as a field way above most. If only political pundits were held to this standard. . . .