Climategate begs the question: "is peer review in need of change"?

Improving the review process would be good, but I think the key to the issue here is the fact that legislation is being based on hidden data and methods.
So, what we need to do is establish standards of openness that are required for any science that is being used as a foundation for legislation.
All data and methods being used to justify public policy must be open source.

“checking out there books”?
[Corrected.]

CRU is just one example of the increasing politicization of science. And, not surprisingly, it runs both ways. Under the Bush administration, numerous scientists in the Forest Service and BLM chose to leave rather than sign off on scientifically unsound decisions that were pushed by resource users – users with connections in high places.
Most climate skeptics are conservative to very conservative. I happen to be one of the handful of left-sceptics on the planet. Here’s the question – are those who are clamoring for more rigorous scientific review processes willing to see the same standards applied when “their folks” are in the White House?

Review needs to be independent. From the e-mails, peer review in the CRU tape letters was manipulated and slanted. Corrupt is another word.

The Crime of the Century
November 30, 2009 by Doctor Zero
Few recent events have illustrated the ineptitude, and political agenda, of the mainstream media more dramatically than “Climagate.” The revelation of email correspondence from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, documenting various attempts to suppress data and manipulate scientific “consensus” with thuggish tactics, confirms what critics of the global-warming movement have always maintained: it has a lot more to do with money and politics than science. In fact, the global-warming movement is essentially the opposite of science – the manipulation and destruction of empirical data to support a theory whose accuracy was decided in advance.
Those tempted to compare global warming to a religion should consider that religious faith does not require the willful suppression of knowledge. Calling the belief in global warming a “religion” is an insult to religion. It’s a mistake I have made in the past, and I owe the faithful of all religions an apology for doing so.
Global warming is a scam, pure and simple. By any objective measure, it’s the crime of the century, with a dollar value that dwarfs the sins of Bernie Madoff or Enron. People like Al Gore have become millionaires by selling books and “carbon credits” to their marks… many of whom knew perfectly well they were being taken for a ride, but felt political pressure to play along, or saw opportunities created by the exercise of raw government power. The economic damage from legislation passed in response to this hoax will run into trillions of dollars, if Barack Obama’s disastrous cap-and-trade legislation passes the Senate.
An objective media would respond to this blockbuster news story with front-page headlines and “special report” television treatment. By now, the authors of the incriminating Climate Research Unit emails would be infamous around the world. Top operators of the global warming racket, such as Al Gore, would be hiding in their mansions, afraid to face the mob of angry reporters gathered outside. Liberals love to accuse big corporations of manufacturing crises and taking advantage of consumers with false product information and deceptive advertising. Here is the paramount example of those offenses, on a scale that would widen the eyes of the greatest titans of industry. If a private corporation had conducted a scam as vast, and as destructive to the prosperity of nations – and the aspirations of the working poor…
… but no private corporation could do anything like this, could they? The global warming scam is the kind of crime that only Big Government can mastermind.
Continue reading at: http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2009/11/30/the-crime-of-the-century/?print=1

I don’t think the problem is with peer review as such, but with politicized science. Climate “science” as currently practiced blurs the distinction between researcher and political advocate. Mann, Jones, Hansen, et al. do not merely promote the alleged correctness of their research, but agitate for political change as a result of it. Fundamentally, the IPCC is a political, not a scientific, organization.
If a biologist publishes a paper asserting, say, that the Amazonian spotted frog is the same species as the Patagonian spotted frog, no politician or activist is going to care. And it is highly unlikely that peer review would be corrupted in this case.
The solution, then, is to separate the politics from the science. To this end, all genuine scientists should shun researchers who corrupt the scientific method for political ends and who attempt to leverage their prestige as “scientists” to agitate for social change.

List the peers. Let their reputations be at stake for poor or corrupt work. Footnote disagreements between the author and the peers. In other words, TRANSPARENCY and ACCOUNTABILITY.

Ultimately, it’s up to the editor. If a reviewer makes unreasonable criticisms, then the editor has to make a judgment.
The double-blind idea is interesting, though I must note that sometimes one could still guess who wrote the paper – just as one can sometimes guess who wrote the anonymous review, based on the content.
I don’t share your enthusiasm that blogs will replace much of anything; rather, they will add something new. Blogs can be a place where ideas are refined, informal discussion takes place, and the laymen can learn or ask questions. Sometimes, a paper can have its roots in a blog post. That’s all useful and good. But face it, most blog comments are from non-specialists, who don’t “have some working knowledge of the topic”; their helpfulness in improving the work is thus very limited. A formal peer review process is still necessary, though not sufficient.
Open peer review is very interesting, but it would again come to the authors and ultimately the editor to decide which comments and criticisms are most helpful and worth heeding. Participation could also be sporadic; reviewing a paper takes time out of the day, and so you aren’t going to run around voluntarily reviewing everything that comes along.
As for what the emails show, keep in mind that publishing a single paper and writing the IPCC assessments are different processes, but ultimately, the papers in question did end up being mentioned in the IPCC report. As for anything else, if you think a paper makes basic errors which are apparent on a quick reading, it’s your job as a reviewer to point them out.

Whilst we’d all desire a fairer system for peer review, I wonder that there is a broader issue.
Imagine for a second that there are no sceptics, and we all believe the experts on a particular topic. How does that become corrected?
Asking for fairer peer review is not unlike asking for a fair Guru; the Guru can always turn round and say to his devotees, “I am the Guru, I know more than you, and if you disagree, it is because of your own ignorance.”
Those who deeply disagree have no option but to leave. Perhaps they start their own alternative, and wait years for recognition. But say everyone is captivated by the authority of the Guru, and as far as anybody knows, everything he or she says makes sense. What then?
In trying to imagine this scenario, I come to think that the real problem with AGW theory, isn’t that peer review should have exposed flaws sooner—experts will argue whether even the flaws that have been discovered are of any significance in the end anyway—the problem is more subtle and wider. I suggest the problem is that we imagine it highly unlikely that the best scientific methods and data could, even when everyone agrees they are of high quality, turn out to be wrong.
In other words, even if 100% of all scientists (really all of them) came up with a watertight theory of global warming, and nobody had reason to be sceptical of it, we should still, for no other reason than simple, “survival”, have a plan B in case the world cooled instead of warmed. And we should not act as if we knew warming was going to happen.
We far overestimate our collective abilities (and I’m trying to say this respectfully to all scientists) whilst underestimating the complexity of the future world.
I realise this makes any debate much more complex, if we shift from arguing about what we think will happen, to what we don’t know might happen. But disasters are typically the nature of the unthinkable.
“We have to act” should never have been a collective response to the knowledge of the day. I’d prefer, “we need to be ready to adapt to a variety of scenarios”.
We have many technological marvels, but nonetheless, stuff doesn’t always work the way we expect, even when we really really expect it.

Help I’m in shock.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8388485.stm
‘Show Your Working’: What ‘ClimateGate’ means

From the CRU e-mails, I think it’s pretty clear that the peer review process in climate science is broken, at least with respect to the journals that the climate cabal (Mann, Jones, et al) were associated with. For example, here is an e-mail from Michael Mann that illustrates the problem:
Original Filename: 1047388489.txt
From: “Michael E. Mann”
To: Phil Jones ,rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx, …
.
.
.
It is pretty clear that thee [sic] skeptics here have staged a bit of a coup, even in the presence of a number of reasonable folks on the editorial board (Whetton, Goodess, …). My guess is that Von Storch is actually with them (frankly, he’s an odd individual, and I’m not sure he isn’t himself somewhat of a skeptic himself), and without Von Storch on their side, they would have a very forceful personality promoting their new vision. There have been several papers by Pat Michaels, as well as the Soon & Baliunas paper, that couldn’t get published in a reputable journal. This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal!
So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…
What do others think?
mike
–

Robinson (08:54:39) :
Robinson, you need to explain to your MP that 50 billion tons of CO2 is….nothing compared to the total mass of the atmosphere, that it is not a poison but plant food.
50 billion tons is only 10ppmv/million.
He makes politics about nothing.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/politics_and_greenhouse_gasses.html

>>I don’t think the problem is with peer review as such, but with politicized science. Climate “science” as currently practiced blurs the distinction between researcher and political advocate. Mann, Jones, Hansen, et al. do not merely promote the alleged correctness of their research, but agitate for political change as a result of it. Fundamentally, the IPCC is a political, not a scientific, organization.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

“same standards applied when “their folks” are in the White House?”
Absolutely
The public is not that stupid, and the other choice is to let government take over our lives and make all decisions for us.

There MUST be transparency in the entire process, otherwise it is simply a futile exercise.

I think the failings of the peer reviewed process has been overstated. After all the shenanigans we have read about, skeptical papers have in fact been published. You can read emails where the likes of Santer talk about writing a paper to refute Douglass’s paper.
The real and much larger problem comes from the politicization of the whole science, from the IPCC through a fawning media and gullible learned societies. Ask yourselves, what difference would it have made if the peer review process worked perfectly? No skeptical papers would still have been included in IPCC reports, and they certainly would not have been mentioned in the media.
What to do then? The first change to make, is to make it a firm rule, that all data and methods must be archived with every peer reviewed paper. If we had had that simple mandate to begin with, we wouldn’t have needed FOI requests, we wouldn’t be struggling to reverse engineer and second guess the true meaning of various temperature trends and proxy studies. All would have been clear from the beginning, and scientists would have been able to challenge outrageous statements years ago, before any of this warmist nonsense had reached critical mass.

Isn’t it the editor’s responsibility to enforce the peer process? And didn’t they violate their own written peer process by playing hide the data?
Which editors should resign first?
Open science is the only science. The rest is just a game.

“I think AGW has been distracting us from real provable environmental problems for too long.”
I agree. One of the things that bothers me is the framing of this where those who are skeptical are labeled as political right wingers potentially in the pay of big oil. Unfortunately I see many people biting, which many of those who most go along with the framing can’t see how they are putting the environment at risk by wanting to devote so much time and resources into something that might not do much at all for the environment. I can think of a number of reasons for instance that I’d want to save forest habitats, which none of those reasons involves carbon credits. It’s rather sad thinking of all the billions/trillions of dollars that could be wasted on the environment (CO2), when true environmental problems are ignored both financially as well as not given much bandwidth in high profile discussions.

In 2005, I was designated to be my team’s GHGV “expert” by my then employer British Standards in an effort to build a strong client list of Canadian “emitters” to sell our services to. Ironic though that my exploration into the field of climate research (in order to be of value to my employer and clients) brought me an understanding completely removed from where I was before I started asking questions.
As a trained process auditor, and someone who believes in continuous improvement through methodologies such as the Shewhart cyle, internal auditing, documentation of non-conformances, respective corrective actions and above all, transparency, i’m pleased to see that an ISO technical committee has been established to develop an international standard for statistical data and meta data exchange (ISO/NP TS 17369).
An external, unbiased 3rd party audit of the quality principles relating to any data and the respective code used in models would be a good start in at the very least validating the quality of the processes used to create hockey sticks.
Cheers Anthony, and keep up the great work!

Excess fussiness on my part, but I had to say that ‘begging the question’ is not the same as ‘inviting the question’ or ‘raising the question’ or its equivalents. Begging the questions is a rather poorly named logical fallacy.

All data, methods, calculations, etc. must be openly published and independently archived.

After it is all said and done the net effect of the CRU whistleblowing will be as follows:
1) The current versions of the major temp data sets will have a version publicly on the web. It will be almost unusuable in its public form but it will be there to insure transparency.
2) All new studies will be based on the public datasets that the study authors “improve” in ways that are incoherent and impossible to reproduce. The studies will still be “transparent” because it cannot be helped that skeptical morons cannot figure out the amazing techniques the gods of climate employ.
3) A journal or two may change their peer review process and there may be a few actual skeptic papers published that would not have been otherwise. The “concensus” group will ignore these published studies like the plague and they will not be included in any IPCC or other summaries.
4) Phil Jones will be admonished and kicked upstairs and another “lackey” with clean credentials will take over the CRU dataset to clean it up and make it transparent. Lost data will not be recovered and the adjustments made to data will not be changed. The adjustment process will be briefly explained but no skeptical moron will be capable of duplicating the adjustments made by the climate gods.
5) People will forget about climate gate after about 6 months and things will go back to the pre-existing condition.
6) Concensus scientists will learn to write very nice politicaly correct FOIA sensitive emails while at work.
7) Concensus scientists will learn how to communicate via personal Blackberrys in order to handle all other “correspondences” off the FOIA grid.
8) In the year 2020 a hacker will discover a system cache of Blackberry text messages between AGW scientists that documents them laughing about keeping skeptics unpublished, boosting warming trends in their datasets and how they circumvented their FOIA restrictions.
9) The Court of Climate Denialism will sentence the Blackberry text hacker to death by injection in a special IPCC televised “Climate Justice” episode.
Shiny
Ed

Perhaps as part of the review process the data and methodology (software) should be distributed to reviewers. Reviewing the data and code would be a part of the process. It’s doubtful anyone would attempt to completely reprocess the data to arrive at the same analysis, but it would put the brakes on deliberate fudging. If the paper is accepted, the code/data is also made available to subscribers. This would encourage some housecleaning on the data processing prior to publication – if you know you have to package everything up for the peer review, it would discourage leaving it in a messy state.
Authors should not suggest reviewers. Editors should be familiar enough with the scientists to know who would be a good reviewer. If not, perhaps they should not edit that journal. Reviewers should be anonymous. I don’t think you could do a double-blind review as the reviewer could probably figure out who wrote the paper just from the style, citations, and emphasis in the research.

I think the article misses the point. It’s not peer review that is the problem- one thing that is the problem is the deliberate, repeated presentation of peer review as a system which ensures good science, and that peer reviewed papers are in some sense trustworthy or even “true”. Journals are supposed to be a forum in which scientists can present their work- whether it be ultimately correct or incorrect- to other scientists, to add to the general pool of knowledge in the science. They are not repositories of Truth. You cannot create, nor should attempt to create, a process which only allows “true” work into journals. Publication is merely the start of a process of new scientific knowledge being added to the corpus of scientific knowledge in general.
Where some process of auditing needs to occur is when science breaks out of the bounds of the scientific community to affect, in particular, politics. When collective decisions are made on the basis of it, when lives or zillions of groats are being wagered on it, then it needs to be scrutinised as finely, and with as much hostility, as possible. Effectively, when science morphs into politics, it ceases to be simply a matter for scientists. This is the central problem. Scientists jealously guard their independence (eerily, despite having political views which promote interference by the state in every other aspect of human existence) and science, itself, should indeed remain independent. But once it has become enmeshed in politics, once it becomes something which profoundly affects lives and livelihoods, it cannot any longer cling to that independence. Because it isn’t science any more, it is politics.
“Minister, you must implement this policy because scientists say so” is not good enough. This is the point when the science and the scientists must be subjected to the most rigorous examination for error and bias. The real scandal of the IPCC is that despite claiming “peer review”, in fact none of the science in their reports is checked in any way. If a paper has been published and a chapter author decides to include it, it is presumed by the system to be true. An IPCC, or equivalent, which were really doing its job would be auditing every paper, and the auditors would be hostile and looking for flaws. The journal system of peer review is no business of anybody’s but scientists and journal editors. They must be free to publish what they wish. It is at the interface with politics and society that the rest of us must get our oar in and demand the very highest of standards and most rigorous of checks and balances- because it is only at this point that the stakes become high.

A valid warning from an “old soldier” and a competent politician:
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Farewell Address
delivered 17 January 1961
Excerpt: “Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.
“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.
“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
What Ike feared could happen did happen. Public policy has become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. The AGW proponents.
I would rather see the peer review process be done away with altogether, with all proposed papers published on the internet, for all interested people to be able to review and comment on. Then these comments could be culled to be rid of all comments (responding documents) which contained personal/ad hominem attacks. There is no place for such in a “scientific setting”.
There are a good many of us who are not involved in the “college scene” who nevertheless have a good understanding of various basics of science, and a good many years of experience, having seen many concepts which seemed like a “good idea at the time” which contained serious basic errors.
During my own professional career, I was always pleased to have “devil’s advocates” on my staff or as reviewers. A good many times these “devil’s advocates” did advance serious questions about my proposed approach to “solving problems” as I call what I did, which if not accounted for, would have resulted in at least minor disasters and large wastes of public funds.
People who work for private companies or on their “own dime” are one thing, and it is mostly “the market” which will determine the success of their intellectual endeavors. But when the taxpayer is the one footing the bill, all work done should be subject to review of those taxpayers, at least those who are interested in review.
AS lot of work, certainly. But a lot of public moneys are riding on any ultimate public policies based on these research projects and endeavors.

In simpler words, I much enjoy Anthony’s methodology. Anthony has been doing excellent work, his publishing of his endeavors is most interesting to those of us who have a real interest in the science of it, enjoyable to read, and comments do flow in. I am sure that Anthony does take into consideration those comments which are based on actual science, even if there are those of us who are not “professional climatologists” making comments.

To my mind, the principle problem with peer review lies in the rhetorical use the alarmist crowd has made of it in their propagandistic efforts. The mantra like repetition of the term was clearly and intentionally meant to reinforce the implicit fallacy that peer review existed to guarantee the correctness of a paper’s conclusions, something it was never intended to provide and which the present controversy has shown to have been moved much farther from its original intent within the realm of climate science. Unfortunately, they have been all too successful in imbedding this fallacy as conventional wisdom in the minds of those outside the scientific community unfamiliar with peer review’s actual purpose and ,from many of the comments I’ve seen here and elsewhere, many in the science field who should know better.
Given that a majority of the “science” produced in the climate field involves complex and arcane computer programs, which few potential reviewers have either the time or expertise to evaluate adequately, it is not clear that providing complete and open access to data and methods will significantly improve the effectiveness of peer review in this area.
Ultimately, peer review is a peripheral issue to the main problem, which is the almost complete domination of the funding of science in all fields by government provided money controlled by politicians more interested in their own agendas than in the advancement of science.
The debate that we really have to create is how we can address this very intractable quandary. Science in all areas is becoming increasingly expensive and it’s hard to envision a way to move toward other sources of funding that would be adequate to the purpose and it’s equally difficult to imagine a system which can insure that, if governments are to remain the the primary funding mechanism, safeguards can be created which will be able to remove political considerations from the allocation of grants. I don’t have any easy answers for any of this, but I believe it is something we need to be thinking and talking about on an urgent basis, as we are already far down the road to the “post science” world where all of science is driven by someone’s agenda and if that world is allowed to materialize fully, humanity will be damaged in ways that make Gore and Hansen’s most hysterical prognostications seem like a hangnail.

Ian B (10:54:05) :
“I think the article misses the point. It’s not peer review that is the problem- one thing that is the problem is the deliberate, repeated presentation of peer review as a system which ensures good science, and that peer reviewed papers are in some sense trustworthy or even ‘true’.”
While I agree with that, you haven’t pursued it far enough. Remember that the pirate crew at CRU hijacked and perverted the peer review process. As such it was “peer review” in name only. Perhaps “co-conspirator review” might be a more apt title, with the crooks vouching for each others’ honesty.
Peer review at it’s best may need some tweaking, but when it works it’s mostly relatively effective. Unfortunately, there is never any guarantee against corruption. Only constant vigilance, of the kind we’ve seen by so many scientists and others honest citizens fearful of the consequences, can minimize the chances of this happening. And the more wealth and power that are at stake, the more vigilant one must be.

You won´t believe this:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/30/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=0,4
Rajenda Pachauri nominee as one of the ten most brilliant thinkers of the world.

…and the 68 runner up is….James Hansen!

Dave Wendt (11:32:46)
Very well put.
No perfect check may be found for accenting good science. Somewhat similar to regulating the Market – all the regulations will not eliminate all the abuse or excessive exploitation.
Re science perhaps limiting Gov. size would reduce many of the review problems.
Increasing amounts of science/research/tech being done make for ongoing and evolving challenges to quality research. Good luck.

For a guide on how to proceed when the peer review process becomes unreliable, look at the testing of medical therapeutics in the US. We have developed a set of rules and regulation (Good Laboratory Practices or GLP) to ensure a high standard of quality in studies involving actions that could endanger the lives of people. Peer reviewing is not a requirement. Rather, what is required is a quality assurance unit that is properly staffed, empowered, and trained. Universities need quality assurance units to protect faculty from themselves. Science will recover when institutions ensure quality.

It is a bit of a diversion to argue about how to improve peer review.
As people have said, the problem was the taking of “peer review” as some kind of guarantee of correctness—and this article seems to be saying: well if only we could improve it when it fails, then we could take it as even more correct.
The simple truth is that boffins can make blunders.
It should always be acceptable for the people and leaders to say, “our strategy is to do nothing and hope that the scientists got it wrong.”
Whomever was driving this AGW agenda, seems to have known that this is how people ordinarily see things, and decided to counter it by making scientists overstate their claims and their levels of confidence.
“All the world’s top scientists are unanimous”…. yeah well so what? But then they accuse you of being “anti-science” and a “flat earther”.
It is not anti-science to admit that there are limits to what can be known with high confidence. To respect those limits is to respect science, just as a film-maker respects what his lens can shoot, and an athlete respects the limits of their physical endurance.
It is about respecting the craft, not about turning scientists into oracles for our favorite agenda.
At the end of the day, you can listen to science, but that still leaves you with the problem of making a decision about risk. Peer review doesn’t magically disappear the risk. There is always the chance that the scientists are flat wrong, and that whatever you try to do under their advisement turns out to have unintended consequences. It is almost an existential problem—people don’t like feeling that they are flying blind through an uncertain universe. But just wait a bit, wait a bit… look here comes another surprise…

Using medical terminology, when a patient presents in the ER with infection, the first thing to do is “debread” the wound (remove all the dead and infected tissue). Unfortunately, AGW is not a patient, it is a rotting corpse. There is nothing to treat.
Alternatively, we could look at the problem as a cancer, which has metastasized. The pathology is everywhere in the body: in addition to the body scientific, it’s all throughout the body politic and the body economic. This is a very sick world, and it is their fault. The epithet “CLIMATE CRIMINAL,” which clowns like Monbiot throw at us, really aptly applies to them.

Don’t know if anyone reads down this far, but the institutions of science that we’re all familiar with, such as peer review and the less-than-complete descriptions of data and methods, all evolved in an environment where they maximized the progress of science.
In a pure-science world populated with independently funded curiosity- and reputation-motivated researchers and journal editors, each scientist has pretty much the correct incentives under the traditional system:
Your goal in reading the literature is to figure out which results to build on in your own quest for discoveries and recognition.
Publishing scientists want to be just as careful as necessary to get people to cite them and build on their work, but not so careful that they slow themselves down and get scooped.
Journal editors use peer review so that scientists will want to read their publications in their search for useful clues for their own research.
As long as everyone is primarily motivated to make discoveries and get cited, the incentives line up very well. Read Michael Polyani’s “Republic of Science” essay for a good description of this world and all the optimal sloppy shortcuts it entails.
The problem is when the incentives and consequences change, so that scientists want to influence policy and attract funding by taking certain positions. Then 1) biases are likely to creep in and 2) the traditional level of reproducibility of results will be below that necessary for policy makers to make costly decisions. What’s good enough for curiosity-driven debates is nowhere near good enough for redirecting industrial civilization.

Follow the money!
Look, peer-review in reality is a control gate to publishing, and some people must do so or perish, meaning not gain tenure and lose funding. The people who control the gate ultimately control the money flow.
It’s all about the funding. If you’re in with the CAGW cabal, you get funded and published. If you’re out, you’re out in every way imaginable, including losing your job.
That’s what’s wrong with the system. That’s how it is politicized. Follow the money.

Welcome to the Sausage Factory…

“is peer review in need of change”?
I laughed when I read this.
Changing the system won’t eliminate corruption. Corrupt players will angle any system!
The most that can be achieved: A change in whose turn it is to be dominant, perhaps…
the ebb & the flow – another phase …
My preference: Liberalize the d*mn system! so that some fresh ideas can stir the stagnation. Tight-*sses can have their turn running the system again some years out after creative forces have a turn.

Whether we want a mess around us is one thing. Needlessly killing animals until they become extinct is another of those one things. “Preserving as existing” is quite another. Causing the water in rivers and lakes to be so pure that it provides little or no nourishment to various “critters” is stupid. Whenever humans have attempted to do what is obviously stupid, it never worked.
The planet turned quite nicely all by itself until humans came along, and will continue to turn quite nicely if humans get themselves gone through human stupidity.

Science used to be ratified by a system of “peer usage” – that is to say other scientists actually had to find a real use of the original science in a different application – or ideally in a number of different applications. Hence Newton’s theories on gravity became accepted science because the theories could be used to make calculations in a variety of other areas where the calculations worked and worked well.
“peer review” is a relatively new process that has only gained traction in the last 40 years or so. It seems to me to be driven by economics rather than good science because obviously funding research on the basis that the science can be proven to be worthwhile (via peer usuage) is so much more difficult than doing science and have a number of your mates give it the thumbs up and then all get funding. Peer review lends itself to exactly the kind of financiallly motivated corruption we have seen in the AGW camp. It also leads itself to what psychologists and socialogists call “an escalating commitment to a particular course of action”, since it tends to result in informal teams of pals getting together with a particular belief system all inadvertently encouraging each other to validate each other’s erroneous conclusions in order to remain part of the in-crowd. They actually don’t realise that they are lying to each other and they have built a whole set of conclusions based on lying to each other and now they can escape from their own tower of lies.

There are no doubt some improvements that can be made in the peer review process but the true nature of the beast that is besetting us is all too human. Professional societies, organizations (to include those of the hard sciences) and their “journals” can rarely take political positions or make endorsements and retain their credibility with the public (not to mention their own members). When the leadership –or outspoken members– of these organizations have obviously begun to take political stances they have currupted themselves and their organization. Consider this: the military in most advanced nations are allowed to vote freely for whomever they choose, but they are forbidden to wear their uniform and endorse –or actively canvass/campaign for– any political party or candidate over another (while in uniform). Professionals –especially hardcore scientists– and their professional organization(s) actually face similar restrictions when dealing with the public and political issues whether they want them or not. As soon as a scientist (or a professional organizations “leadership”) takes a political stand (or begins to exclude their fellows for their diverging views) the entire membership is painted with the same brush in the eyes of the public. There are “laws” in science, and there are “laws” of human nature. Unfortunately for all of us, some scientists and the leadership/editors of some professional organizations believe that they are special, that the laws don’t apply to them, that they are better and smarter than everyone else is. Life isn’t that simple. No one gets to have it both ways. No doubt, for some, the damage done will necessitate renaming their journel and/or deactivating the organization itself and beginning afresh. The two orgainzations I love to hate the most serve as perfect examples: The American Medical Association and The American Bar Association (I didn’t want to hit too close to home but I think the point is clear to all. There are others.)