Saturday, November 28, 2009

Peer Review: Fuggeddibouddit!

Dennis Mangan cites The Telegraph's James Delinpole on how a cozy, self-selecting coterie of climate czars have corrupted science beyond repair:
What the CRU’s hacked emails convincingly demonstrate is that climate scientists in the AGW camp have corrupted the peer-review process. In true Gramscian style they marched on the institutions – capturing the magazines (Science, Scientific American, Nature, etc), the seats of learning (Climate Research Institute; Hadley Centre), the NGO’s (Greenpeace, WWF, etc), the political bases (especially the EU), the newspapers (pretty much the whole of the MSM I’m ashamed, as a print journalist, to say) – and made sure that the only point of view deemed academically and intellectually acceptable was their one.
Neutral observers in this war sometimes ask how it can be that the vast majority of the world’s scientists seem to be in favour of AGW theory. “Peer-review” is why. Only a handful of scientists – 53 to be precise, not the much-touted 2,500 – were actually responsible for the doom-laden global-warming sections of the IPCC’s reports. They were all part of this cosy, self-selecting, peer-review cabal – and many of them, of course, are implicated in the Climategate emails.
Now peer-review is dead, so should be the IPCC, and Al Gore’s future as a carbon-trading billionaire. Will it happen? I shouldn’t hold your breath.

Yes, corrupt the institutions and the ripe, low-hanging apple can be plucked by moral knuckle-walkers like Hansen and Mann.

1 comment :

GW said...

Shannon Love also brings up a critical point. Irrespective of the corruption of the peer review process by the AGW crowd, peer review is systemically unreliable as practiced in climate science. Much of modern climate science relies on data being fed into complex computer programs. These programs are, as a rule, never provided to the reviewer as part of the peer review process. Thus the mantra we here now of "peer review" as some sort of gold standard of reliability could not be more false. Indeed, it would seem that peer review provides no stanrd - and that's before you even get to these AGW hacks stacking the deck.