The plain English movement started because scientists came to realise communicating effectively with the broader population was desirable. That remains true, but the lesson is forgotten.

The mantra of publish or perish by which academics/scientists are judged sits in the context of exponential development of “knowledge”. The viral video “Did you know” (whether apocryphal or not) repeated the estimate that 4 exabytes 4x10^19 of unique information was generated in 2008, equal to 5,000 years of knowledge development preceding it. It also points out the increasing pace of change that is occurring.

Whatever is true amongst the chatter and need to chatter sooner and faster a price will be paid – and that price is a loss of diligence and accuracy.

Science can’t afford a loss of integrity, but it is increasingly subject to pressures to make a presence felt in order to ensure funding. One must wonder whether work such as Watson and Crick’s could occur in the frenetic world in which much research is now conducted.

Remember, the world wants answers and it wants them now. The reality is the more that is known the less we, as individuals, are able to know and integrate into some meaningful context. Stanislaw Ulam described in his “Adventures of a Mathematician” the random manner in which ideas are picked up, paid attention to or ignored.

Perhaps academies should stop concentrating on novel ideas and work on bringing coherence to the noise?

The Himalaya glaciers error should be seen in context - it was an error not the deliberate inclusion of bad science; the supporting documentation all had the correct figure of 2350. I don't think that (and one other mistake in thousands of pages), corrected as soon as it became known, is a huge blot on the IPCC or indicated any fundamental propensity to include incorrect or inappropriate data. And they have made efforts to ensure data comes more directly from the source documents and is checked more thoroughly - mostly as a reaction to widespread politically motivated attempts to portray the IPCC as having a fundamental and widespread propensity to include incorrect or inappropriate data. I'm not even sure why the authors included mention of it.

Yes Ken, let's look at the big picture:

The IPCC lifted the glacier story from the WWF's Nepal Program.
The WWF lifted it from an obscure glaciologist Syed Iqbal Hasnain, at the The Energy and Resources Institute in New Delhi.
And Syed Iqbal Hasnain, well, he's not quite sure why and how he came up with the story.
Meanwhile not to be left out, IPCC chief, Dr. Rajenda Pachauri's, is writing a story ( a "'smutty' romance novel, Return to Almora") of his own.

Sort of reminds of this:
http://www.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://www.mallenbaker.net/csr/images/blame.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.mallenbaker.net/csr/blog.php%3Fmonth%3D2009-12&usg=__SpiPjQw-zJX1CLQgwAV_dkYUkbI=&h=330&w=500&sz=11&hl=en&start=0&zoom=1&tbnid=rcJ8jJYWQ3oFIM:&tbnh=126&tbnw=180&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dfinger%2Bpoint%2Bblame%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG%26biw%3D1148%26bih%3D670%26gbv%3D2%26tbs%3Disch:1&itbs=1&iact=rc&dur=359&ei=ZfjPTM2YJcWpcfby-IsC&oei=ZfjPTM2YJcWpcfby-IsC&esq=1&page=1&ndsp=24&ved=1t:429,r:19,s:0&tx=66&ty=65

Yeah, right.

The publicly recoreded funding and stringent quality control and record preservation of academic researchers is *so* questionable.

As a former researcher of lung cancer I can assure anybody wanting to look that the funding and motivations of pro-tobacco research were at minimum byzantine. I suggest that anti-warming research makes big tobacco look like clueless children.

Note that owners of renewable sources cannot be blacked out by decree except by locally directed force.

Good luck

Rusty

Rusty you are on the money...so to speak.
For every transparent public funded research group there is now days an industry funded group that has questionable objectives.
Since Big Tobacco there has been a range of anti-science "science". From benign ones like the "Ponds institute" to the pure evil of "creation science" where policies such as seeding children with misinformation and political messages so as to create doubt and distrust in established science. Not only do they miss out on one of the best understood and beautiful models in science, they also are instilled with doubt about certain types of people. (Don't trust the godless academics!) Instead of a BS detector, these kids get indoctrination and paranoia from a young age.
Given how easy it is to lose your job due to political reasons in a profit based society I don't blame scientists for being edgy in developing countries, or declining ones like the US where anti-science has become an art form at many levels of society.
Transparency is indeed the key. This is needed in finance, military exercises and government too.

Horus, very sordid ... except that if you looked at All the IPCC said about glaciers the correct information from the original sources was all there all the time. And, of course, they corrected that mistake ASAP, unlike the denial industry which repeats their wrong information over and over and deliberately defies correction of even the most egregious lies.

Meanwhile Himalayan glaciers are indeed in serious retreat, potentially lost by 2350, posing water supply problems well before then for one of the most populated and agriculturally intensive regions of the world. Meanwhile global warming continues unabated. Meanwhile the fundamentals of climate science are more solidly grounded in real science than ever. If you think that mistake means the science underlying AGW is on shaky ground you are deeply mistaken.

Again, I don't know why the authors even considered that mistake to be indicative of a 'culture' of publishing crap science. In a document of thousands of pages that's pretty much the worst, with virtually nothing else wrong to be found in an information dense tome.