Some years ago, I was hired by an environmental pressure group to investigate reports of widespread environmental contamination from certain trace organics in less developed countries.
At first glance the reports appeared plausible. After all, it is not a stretch to describe the environmental regulators of some nations as weak and even corrupt. There were photos of rivers into which wastewater was being discharged with persistent foam (not unlike the ones I used to swim in as a kid, before it was called “wild swimming”!).
However, the chemicals I was asked to look into don’t actually cause foaming, and no one had actually shown either that there was significant pollution of the rivers by these chemicals, or that anyone had taken a bung to turn a blind eye to it.
Some further probing revealed that the environmental pressure group’s sole evidence base was a report which itself turned out to be a hysterical piece of propaganda produced by another environmental pressure group.
In turn, the only published scientific research underpinning that report was essentially the output of a single obscure researcher who was using the issue to raise his personal profile and rattle his research fund collecting tin. His papers were reasonably cautiously written, all ending with the standard researcher in-joke non-conclusion FRIN (Further Research Is Necessary), but these papers were then quoted selectively by scientifically illiterate propagandists to add the thinnest veneer of rational foundation to what was ultimately groundless hysteria.
In this particular case, there was actually a great deal of relevant mainstream research which my client was rather hoping I would ignore. The conclusions of that research were crystal clear: the problem I had been asked to investigate had been investigated, and was a non-problem. The report I had been asked to look into (for which read: endorse) was garbage. I was somewhat more diplomatic in articulating my opinion to my client, but it still went down very poorly, to the extent that my client didn’t want to pay me at all for the work. They felt strongly that they had bought my integrity rather than my time.
They did pay me in the end, on the condition that I never disclosed publicly what I had found. I had no problem with this, as very little of my professional work is ever published. It does however make me wonder when I see reports by people who should know better supporting groundless nonsense. Were there other reports which didn’t get the “right” answer, and were therefore suppressed?
The answer is yes. Pretty much no-one publishes negative results, and very few researchers state in advance exactly what they will consider to be a positive result or (for example) how they are going to collect, analyse and test their results. This last point might seem unrelated, but if you do not state this in advance, you can potentially move the goalposts as you go along to generate some kind of publishable positive finding.
This is a recognised problem in all scientific research, and is rampant in the “soft sciences”. The bias produced by only publishing “positive results” might explain why so few of the landmark studies of psychology appear to be capable of replication. As soon as you get into the humanities, or into any area of the soft sciences where political issues arise, any idea of publishing politically unpopular positive results should be forgotten.
This is the case even with professional researchers who are at least trying to appear objective, subject to a peer review process which in theory at least catches the worst abuses. When you are dealing with non-peer reviewed reports self-published by avowedly partial organisations, you should in my view assume the content of such publications to have been selected to support their agenda.
Pretty much all disciplines, from the hardest of sciences to the fluffiest of humanities, have opinions on environmental issues. I’m an engineer, who was originally an environmental scientist, so I like a rational approach, balancing costs and benefits and based as much as possible on the best possible data. Clearly, there is a range of political opinions on what should be done, but that’s not my part of things. Society decides what it wants to do, and engineers get it done safely and with minimum resources.
I’m sure the propagandists on both sides have their part to play too, but I have no time for cherrypicking, whether it is done by corporate PR shills or screaming greenies.
