The Unstoppable Momentum of Outdated Science
Roger Pielke Jr.:
“…A 2015 literature review found almost 900 peer-reviewed studies published on breast cancer using a cell line derived from a breast cancer patient in Texas in 1976. But in 2007 it was confirmed that the cell line that had long been the focus of this research was actually not a breast cancer line, but was instead a skin cancer line. Whoops.
Even worse, from 2008 to 2014 — after the mistaken cell line was conclusively identified — the review identified 247 peer-reviewed articles putatively on breast cancer that were published using the misidentified skin cancer cell line. A cursory search of Google Scholar indicates that studies continue to be published in 2020 mistakenly using the skin cell line in breast cancer research.
The lesson from this experience is that science has momentum, and that momentum can be hard to change, even when obvious and significant flaws are identified. This is particularly the case when the flaws exist in databases that underlie research across an entire discipline.
In 2020, climate research finds itself in a similar situation to that of breast cancer research in 2007. Evidence indicates the scenarios of the future to 2100 that are at the focus of much of climate research have already diverged from the real world and thus offer a poor basis for projecting policy-relevant variables like economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions…
…As a result of the growing recognition of the divergence between scenarios and the real-world, the climate research community is in a similar place to where the breast cancer research community was in 2007. Evidence is now undeniable that the basis for a significant amount of research has become untethered from the real world. The issue now is what to do about it.
The challenges for climate research are significant. Consider that in contrast to the 900 articles that misused a skin cancer line as a breast cancer line, our literature review found almost 17,000 peer-reviewed articles that use the now-outdated highest emissions scenario. That particular scenario is also by far the most commonly cited in recent climate assessments of the IPCC and the U.S. National Climate Assessment. And every day new studies are published using outdated scenarios.
The elevated role of scenarios across climate research means that there is a huge momentum behind their continued use. A research reset would be a massive endeavor and would require essentially writing off the policy, economic or other real-world relevance of thousands of studies, and perhaps even their scientific utility. Though to be fair, there are reasons to use exploratory scenarios in modeling or theoretical studies, but such uses shouldn’t be confused with practical relevance — just as studies of skin cancer lines should not be confused with breast cancer lines…”
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