David Archibald on Climategate

Heliogenic Climate Change
Monday, November 30, 2009

“The only thing that the Climategate emails tell us about the peer review process is that it was used as a gate-keeping exercise to keep sceptical papers out of the system. For those of us who served in the trenches in the climate battle, part of the much larger culture wars, this revelation is not news. In disparaging my papers, one of the first things that warmers would say was that they were not peer reviewed. They were, but that did not matter either, because like the warmer scientists, I got to choose my own reviewers. One of my papers passed a higher test than peer review. Real Climate devoted a post to attacking it, which was fabulous because it told me that I was having an effect, and gave me encouragement to keep going. …

I don’t believe that changing the peer review system will help, in fact any prescribed changes are likely to make it worse. As the Climategate emails show, the warmers captured the whole system – all the journals, all their editors and the journals’ boards. They successfully removed inconvenient editors. As a last line of defence, they were going to change the definition of what peer review meant. Making the system more prescriptive will simply entrench the corrupted establishment …

The way to improve the review of papers is to break the power of the corrupted establishment. Two of the most prestigious science journals have been Science and Nature, but both of these now publish a certain amount of twaddle. In fact Nature seems to have degenerated to occupy the niche formerly occupied by New Scientist, and New Scientist has degenerated into the publishing arm of Greenpeace.” “Peer review locks gate”

Print this page.

Comment Rules

Comments are closed.