William M. Briggs, statistician to the stars, has a few things to say about the “peer review” process, and they aren’t pretty,

I am a scientist and I have lived around fellow scientists for many years and I know their feeding habits well. I therefore know that the members of our secular priesthood are ordinary folk. But civilians were blind to this fact because our public relations department has labored hard to tell the world of our sanctity. “Scientists use peer review which is scientific and allows ex cathedra utterances. Amen.”

But the CRU “climategate” emails have revealed the truth that scientists are just people and that peer review is saturated with favoritism, and this has shocked many civilians. It has shaken their faith and left them sputtering. They awoke to the horrible truth: Scientists are just people!

Now all the world can see that scientists, like their civilians brothers, are nasty, brutish, and short-tempered. They are prejudiced, spiteful, and just downright unfriendly. They are catty, vindictive, scornful, manipulative, narrow-minded, and nearly incapable of admitting to a mistake. And they are cliquey.

Thus, we see that the CRU crew define a “good scientist” as one who agrees with them, a “bad scientist” or “no scientist” as one who does not agree with them, and a “mediocre scientist” as somebody who mostly agrees with them. Further, these judgments are carried to the peer-review process.

Claiming lack of peer review was once a reasonable weapon in scientists’ argument armamentarium. After climategate, all can see that this line of logic is as effective as a paper sword.

For example: the CRU crew publicly cry, “If our skeptics had anything to say, let them do it through peer review, otherwise their claims don’t count.” Never mind that this parry is a logical fallacy—an argument is not refuted because it was uttered outside a members-only journal. Pay attention to what they say privately:

Proving bad behavior [about peer review] is very difficult. If you think that [Geophysical Research Letters editor] Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.¹

They say that this journal or that one, because it dared publish peer-reviewed work that did not agree with the CRU consensus should be banished from the fold, and that its editors should resign or be booted, and that everybody should agree not to cite papers from those journals, and so on.

In other words, use muscle and not mind if you don’t like the results. Get rid of the editor and put an agreeable apparatchik in his place.

Peer review – the last refuge of a scoundrel?

Seriously though, I encourage all Netizens to read the whole thing, he makes quite a number of good points about this whole sordid turn of affairs. 

In many ways, it is very good that this scandal came out and that this all is being revealed.  Please keep in mind as I say this that I myself am a scientist.  The peer review process for most scientific journals is a joke.  In many cases, “peer reviewing” simply amounts to editing/proofreading to make sure that submissions conform to the style guidelines of the particular journal.  In other cases, such as the ones Briggs is decrying here, peer review becomes an excuse to institute political censorship of controversial topics. 

But yes, the old canard that something isn’t “science” because it isn’t published in a “peer reviewed journal” is bogus.  The ultimate peer reviewing is not whether other scientists agree or disagree with the theory and choose whether it should be published or not, but whether they can falsify it via their own research.   And this applies across the board (including, I might add, to questioning evolution – nothing ought to be “sacrosanct” in science).

Yet, this seems to be one of the striking features of the modern scientific establishment today – the reliance upon “science by consensus.”  Personally, I think this is a feature of the fact that most science done today is by committee and collaboration.  Sorry to disabuse the romanticists out there, but the days of the lone wolf scientist, sitting in his lab, mumbling to himself in an arcane tongue while scribbling random equations and whatnot on a chalkboard are long gone.  Science today is a collaborative effort – which is good because it pools resources and improves the rainfall from brainstorming sessions (and let’s face it – equipment is expensive), but also has the downside that it encourages consensus thinking which discourages dissenters from trying (or sometimes even being able to try) to pursue ideas that differ from the mainstream. 

This has been the case in the “global warming” debate.  Because some of the leading climatologists back in the late 1990s decided early on that global warming is real, dissenters from this were shut out.  Because so much money is on the line, and because the issue was cast in stark, eschatological terms to the point that we either “do something” or we “all die,” the pressure to suppress dissent was even greater than it would have been for a less politically and emotionally charged topic.   Hence, Chicken Little was put in charge of the peer-review process and we’ve wasted untold billions of dollars on climate research that was based upon a fallacious premise and had to be supported by professional dishonesty, as the email wad from the CRU server testifies. 

Great.  Now how is Al Gore going to make billions off that carbon credit snake oil he’s been selling?

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.

Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.

Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.

The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”

Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

You know, you can almost smell the disappointment in this article.  It’s like they’re thinking, “Well &%$, there goes our excuse for the destruction of the American economy and the imposition of all the massive taxes and intrusive regulations we had planned.” 

Three things sort of leapt out at me from the article. 

1) Obviously, there really has been a ten-year, ah, alteration in the “warming trend,” just like the “climate change sceptics” have been saying all along.  It’s so obvious, even the people with the vested interest in tubthumping for global warming are having to admit it.  This rather makes all those pseudo-scientific types out there, such as Peter Sinclair at “Climate Crock of the Week,” look like the ill-informed dunderheads that they, in fact, are.  The evidence also seems to be shaping up in support of decadal oscillation theories for cyclical climate fluctuation, which right now is my personal horse in the race.

2) AGW-supporting climatologists are finally admitting that computer-generated models are not as good as actual data.  The problem for them, of course, is that the actual data don’t support their theories, so they’ve been trying to do just about everything they could think of to get around having to use them.

Which brings us to,

3) There is an obvious bias in the way that a good number of climatologists approach this issue.  Specifically, it is apparent that they want really, really badly for AGW to be true, and that affects the way they treat the information we have.  For instance, there is the assumption that temperatures should just keep going up, despite evidence to the contrary that suggests that temperatures fluctuate – and not in accord with average CO2 levels.  This, then, accounts for the “puzzlement” felt by these scientists – which would not be felt if they simply let the data do the leading, instead of trying vainly to force it into the hockey-stick shaped mold that they want it to go into.

Why?  Probably a number of reasons.  Many of these scientists, especially the European ones, are ideologically sold out to the environmentalist movement.  For these, it truly is a matter of holy writ, and for them, the idea that temperatures aren’t indefinitely rising because of man’s wicked and abominable use of the internal combustion engine is akin to a Muslim being told that the Qur’an is full of errors and inconsistencies, and that Allah is a moon god.  If these guys weren’t against weapons too, they’d probably be cutting our heads off. 

For others, it’s all about the money.  Let’s be honest here – “Big Oil” isn’t the only one with a dog in this race.  It is common knowledge that university research which “happens” to find evidence for AGW tends to lead to more grant money to further investigate this problem.  Conversely, projects that don’t support the politicians desire to use AGW as a springboard to the destruction of economies and the curtailment of freedoms are liable to find their funding dried up. 

And then there’s the billions that people like Al Gore and his bankrollers stand to make if they can convince everyone of the need to use “carbon credits.”  As an aside, I foresee “carbon credits” becoming a sumptuary phenomenon in the future, helping to widen the gap between those companies and individuals at the top who can afford to “offset” their carbon production at the expense of the ever-growing mass of serfs at the bottom who can’t, since they lost their jobs, etc.  In essence, AGW is a route to the destruction of the middle class – that group of people that nobility, pretended or otherwise, has always despised. 

Speaking of Al Gore, I know this is kind of old news now, but this is the guy who claimed a couple of days ago that the interior of the Earth is several million degrees.  Memo to Al – if that were the case, we’d all be plasma.  That, friends, is the quality of scientific mind that is driving the AGW hysteria.  No wonder Peter Sinclair (oh, did I mention that he’s not a scientist, but an independent film maker?) is so popular with this crowd.

More bad news for the eco-fascists, as it appears that the earth system is much more capable of “sinking” carbon than we’d previously been hearing,

New data show that the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to 35 billion tons a year now.

This suggests that terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb CO₂ than had been previously expected.

The results run contrary to a significant body of recent research which expects that the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO₂ should start to diminish as CO₂ emissions increase, letting greenhouse gas levels skyrocket. Dr Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol found that in fact the trend in the airborne fraction since 1850 has only been 0.7 ± 1.4% per decade, which is essentially zero.

The strength of the new study, published online in Geophysical Research Letters, is that it rests solely on measurements and statistical data, including historical records extracted from Antarctic ice, and does not rely on computations with complex climate models.

This evidence flatly contradicts the hard-data-free models which “suggest” that the earth’s carbon sinking capacity is already declining.  This is what happens when you use actual data gathered by real scientists, instead of operating on assumptions drawn from computational climate models programmed to give pre-determined results by non-objective partisan hacks.

Each day that goes by renders it more and more difficult for the doom-and-gloomers to peddle their eco-twaddle.  That’s because, despite the de facto lid being kept on it, more and more actual results from science by science are getting out there to compete with the claims being made by those utilising science by special interest group.