L’appello dei 79 premi Nobel per la medicina non è servito, scrive Michele Catanzaro su Nature. La Corte suprema iraniana ha confermato la condanna a morte di Ahmadreza Djalali, il ricercatore dell’Istituto Karolinska, e prima dell’Università del Piemonte orientale, a Novara, arrestato nell’aprile 2016 e accusato di “collaborazione con un governo ostile”:
Djalali’s lawyer intended to appeal against the death sentence during the 20-day period allowed for an appeal. But according to Amnesty International, the Supreme Court clerks failed to provide him with the necessary information to file his defence submission.
Forse resta una speranza, in Iran i responsabili di Amnesty International sono ancora in libertà al contrario di quanto succede in Turchia, per esempio.
In Argentina, dopo una denuncia del gruppo “Jáchal No se Toca“, il glaciologo Ricardo Villalba è stato accusato di aver truccato i dati dell’Inventario nazionale dei ghiacciai per favorire gli interessi di Barrick Gold, un colosso canadese delle miniere d’oro e dell’inquinamento, e i piani liberisti del governo Macrì. Mi pare strano perché Villalba li aveva criticati insieme ai tentativi di modificare la legge sulla tutela dei ghiacciai. Rif. la spiegazione di Glacier Hub.
Richard Van Noorden sfata il “myth of uncitedness”, secondo il quale metà delle pubblicazioni scientifiche non sarebbero mai citate, con una rassegna delle ricerche in tema e dei loro limiti, e un’analisi propria:
To get a better handle on this dark and forgotten corner of published research, Nature dug into the figures to find out how many papers actually do go uncited (explore the full data set and methods). It is impossible to know for sure, because citation databases are incomplete. But it’s clear that, at least for the core group of 12,000 or so journals in the Web of Science — a large database owned by Clarivate Analytics in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — zero-citation papers are much less prevalent than is widely believed.
Web of Science records suggest that fewer than 10% of scientific articles are likely to remain uncited. But the true figure is probably even lower, because large numbers of papers that the database records as uncited have actually been cited somewhere by someone.
Nelle discipline umanistiche, la stragrande maggioranza degli articoli è ignorata. In quelle scientifiche anche uno mai citato nella letteratura può essere influente.
Nei paper con un citation index elevato invece, Sean Gulick et al. ricostruiscono la storia della “Sabrina Coast shelf” nel Settore Aurora della calotta glaciale in Antartide orientale (EAIS) negli ultimi 50 milioni di anni:
Our results imply a dynamic EAIS response with continued anthropogenic warming and suggest that the EAIS contribution to future global sea-level projections may be under-estimated.
Probabile, commenta Sarah Greenwood, ma servono più dati. Per adesso danno ragione a Jim Hansen – tanto per cambiare…
Jo Marchant parla di risultati di un trial americano con l’agopuntura, presentati a un simposio 10 giorni fa e subito contestati. Aspetterei la pubblicazione.
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Jonathan Amos e Victoria Gill della BBC raccontano le presentazioni all’assemblea dell’American Geophysical Union, sulla quantità d’acqua precipitata sul Texas durante l’uragano Harvey e sulla Groenlandia nel caso i suoi ghiacciai fondessero.
Dana Nuccitelli, sul Guardian, spiega le ultime ricerche sugli effetti della comunicazione del consenso scientifico in materia di clima, la prima pubblicata da Nature Human Behaviour.
Previous research led by Stephan Lewandowsky has shown that informing people about the expert consensus increases acceptance of human-caused global warming. However, Yale social scientist Dan Kahan has remained unconvinced and continues to argue that 97% consensus messaging is polarizing and therefore counter-productive.
To test which side is correct, social scientists Sander van der Linden, Anthony Leiserowitz, and Edward Maibach conducted a survey of over 6,000 nationally-representative Americans, of which 934 were conservatives with at least a college degree. […]
In the control group, college-educated conservatives thought the expert consensus was about 64%, and college-educated liberals put the number at 78% (a 14% partisan gap). After being informed about the actual 97% consensus, the conservative answer increased to 83% while the liberal response rose to around 90% (a 7% partisan gap).
Dan Kahan non era convinto, quindi
the authors have just published a second paper in the Journal of Science Communication that responds to Kahan’s critiques by including the data addressing those questions. It shows that consensus messaging increased acceptance of human-caused global warming by about 5%, both for the participants as a whole and specifically for college-educated conservatives. Similarly, support for climate policy rose by about 2% across the political spectrum.
Rif. anche da Carbon Brief, “Why scientists think 100% of global warming is due to humans” di Zeke Hausfather
While there are natural factors that affect the Earth’s climate, the combined influence of volcanoes and changes in solar activity would have resulted in cooling rather than warming over the past 50 years.
e “Beyond Misinformation: Understanding and Coping with the “Post-Truth” Era” del trio Lewandowski, Ecker & Cook:
Imagine a world that has had enough of experts. That considers knowledge to be “elitist.” Imagine a world in which it is not expert knowledge but an opinion market on Twitter that determines whether a newly emergent strain of avian flu is really contagious to humans, or whether greenhouse gas emissions do in fact cause global warming, as 97% of domain experts say they do.
Anche Simon Jenkins, sul Guardian, è per far a meno dei “bastioni di privilegi”, ma per le discipline umanistiche.