For the Guardian, it has been a week of finally coming to terms with what we’ve known here at WUWT for months now. The issues of Climategate are finally getting full sunlight in the UK, and it’s white hot light. Even Monbiot is calling for resignations beyond that of Phil Jones. Though Monbiot needs a bit of education on who “broke” these stories. It certainly wasn’t the Guardian.
By Fred Pearce
Scientists sometimes like to portray what they do as divorced from the everyday jealousies, rivalries and tribalism of human relationships. What makes science special is that data and results that can be replicated are what matters and the scientific truth will out in the end.
But a close reading of the emails hacked from the University of East Anglia in November exposes the real process of everyday science in lurid detail.
Many of the emails reveal strenuous efforts by the mainstream climate scientists to do what outside observers would regard as censoring their critics. And the correspondence raises awkward questions about the effectiveness of peer review – the supposed gold standard of scientific merit – and the operation of the UN’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The scientists involved disagree. They say they were engaged not in suppressing dissent but in upholding scientific standards by keeping bad science out of peer-reviewed journals. Either way, when passing judgment on papers that directly attack their own work, they were mired in conflicts of interest that would not be allowed in most professions.
The cornerstone of maintaining the quality of scientific papers is the peer review system. Under this, papers submitted to scientific journals are reviewed anonymously by experts in the field. Conducting reviews is seen as part of the job for academics, who are generally not paid for the work.
The papers are normally sent back to the authors for improvement and only published when the reviewers give their approval. But the system relies on trust, especially if editors send papers to reviewers whose own work is being criticised in the paper. It also relies on anonymity, so reviewers can give candid opinions.
Cracks in the system have been obvious for years. Yesterday it emerged that 14 leading researchers in a different field – stem cell research – have written an open letter to journal editors to highlight their dissatisfaction with the process. They allege that a small scientific clique is using peer review to block papers from other researchers.
Many will see a similar pattern in the emails from UEA’s Climatic Research Unit, which brutally expose what happens behind the scenes of peer review and how a chance meeting at a barbecue years earlier had led to one journal editor being suspected of being in the “greenhouse sceptics camp”.
The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, as a top expert in his field, was regularly asked to review papers and he sometimes wrote critical reviews that may have had the effect of blackballing papers criticising his work.
Here is how it worked in one case.
Read the rest of this article at the Guardian here
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Doubts about “hockey stick” graph revealed
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Could someone please ask the AGW fans who constantly state “the overwhelming majority of the science supports that warming is real and man-made…” to follow-up this party line statement with a reference to some, ANY, actual science that backs this statement up! I swear to Odin that the repetition of this statement by “Climate Communication Specialists” is grating on my very last nerve. I don’t think I have EVER seen someone issue that platitude and then point to anything…not even the highly contentious Global Climate Model predictions! HOLD THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR WHAT THEY SAY!
UK Telegraph swings back against AGW.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100024871/david-cameron-should-take-note-agw-is-so-yesterday/
Paul Coppin
Go on, extrapolate a few people to represent all 60 million of us in the UK. We didn’t do Enron, or WorldCom, or Watergate, or glaciergate, or Bernie Madoff…
There’s no need to be egregiously nasty. Save your venom for the warmistas of every nation. I wonder what the “colonies” would look like without the founding traditions of the British emigrants from whom you are undoubtedly descended.
Now I know what happen to the honor of the science community, they have been contaminated from contact with National Science Foundation employees!
Probe of cam-to-cam sexporn in government office. ,i.”…a report from the National Science Foundation — a report that says NSF employees have been spending significant amounts of company time on smut sites and in other explicit pursuits. In one particularly egregious case, the report says one NSF “senior official” was discovered to have spent as much as 20 percent of his working hours over a two-year interval “viewing sexually explicit images and engaging in sexually explicit online ‘chats’ with various women. Investigators calculated the value of the time lost at more than $58,000 — for that employee alone.” http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0109/18070.html
So now we know where Rajendra Pachauri got his ideas for a his book from. He must have read this report./sarc
This explains everything:
“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself. Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead.” – The First Global Revolution, a report by The Club of Rome
http://www.green-agenda.com/spiritualunitednations.html
Watch for the ad hominems and emotional responses in the comments section. http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/19624
Kate (06:49:17) :
For those interested in British national news coverage of global warming, here are two items from yesterday’s TV news:
Channel 4 News
UEA email item
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1529573111
Pity Snow can`t keep his mouth shut and let the elderly Lord Lawson finish, I wonder if channel 4 would air another documentary similar to The Swindle.
Did anyone notice the revelation that the scientific cabal that recommended mass vaccinations for the porcine flue had financial connections to the vaccine makers. It’s not just jealousy and tribalism – it’s plain old selfish greed.
One thing Rhys didn’t mention is that the most employable professors are those who can write good grant applications. Such skills are not that common because quite frankly, base dishonesty is essential and most scientists are actually quite honest. It’s why Universities readily tolerate gross professional misconduct from certain professors, and yet very good but honest professors (such as the one who warned a minor hurricane would burst the New Orleans levees) are easily dismissed if they affect University funding. It’s why the most blatantly dishonest and incompetent individuals always rise to the top.
“flu” i meant!
” Veronica (08:48:48) :
[…]
I wonder what the “colonies” would look like without the founding traditions of the British emigrants from whom you are undoubtedly descended.
[…]
Veronica, thank you for proving my point.
Of course, gross generalizations are mostly inappropriate, but are they when they actually begin to define a national character? The trademark of the political left is its moral relativism. That’s not to absolve any other persuasion of its moral transgressions, but I’ve always felt the mainstream media were an important bellweather of the moral pulse of a society. There is a line between reporting and discussing perspectives, origins of sources and stories, and the wholesale fabrication of stories, failure to honestly attribute material, and the perversion of the message of the media for more than the bottom line of the business. When the map of the higher road has been lost to purveyors of “knowledge”, so will go the society.
Britain is known around the world for its tabloids, and of late, seems to offer no other alternative to them, and its showing. I actually heard a reporter recently profess her preference for “stunt journalism”, as if there actually was valid connection between the concepts.
The problem of “global warming” won’t go away until an awful lot of moral relativists can sit in a circle, hold hands, and instead of singing kumbyah, simply say, “Hello, my name is Phil (Gordon, Michael, Al, David, ad redundum), I am a fraud, and its been many years since I last confessed”.
Rob (09:24:01) :
Pity Snow can`t keep his mouth shut and let the elderly Lord Lawson finish, I wonder if channel 4 would air another documentary similar to The Swindle.
…At the moment this is a red-hot issue for C4, so they are more likely to let someone else make a program which they will broadcast. C4 has a problem with cashflow at the moment and they don’t want another version of The Great Global Warming Swindle with all the accompanying controversy. If I was making a program about global warming for C4 it would be covering the Great Carbon Trading Swindle, and how much this is costing everybody every day, and how obscenely rich a few people are getting from this racket. That would do some real political damage in Britain, unlike the endless arguments about climate science which most people find confusing at the best of times. Everybody understands money.
As for the C4 news item, what I found very amusing was watching Dr Watson’s pained expression when he was listening to Lord Lawson speaking global warming heresy. He wriggled and squirmed around in his seat and looked in considerable distress with his red face all scrunched up and practically bursting at the seams with indignation at Lawson. These global warming people have had it so easy for so long they don’t know what to do when someone knowledgeable answers back.
Leonard Young,
Don’t underestimate us long term Guardian readers, we have the nous to know when the paper is going off ‘half-cocked’!
Comment on Fred Pierce’s latest climategate piece on Yamal from James Randerson, the editor of their environment bit. Seems they’re planning to play the “it was all a bad dream” card when the series ends:
“Is there evidence in the emails of data manipulation? Is there evidence of abuse of peer review and FOI? Is there evidence of “hiding” temperature declines? Is there evidence of fraud and conspiracy? etc etc
The answer to most of these questions turned out to be no. ”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/03/yamal-data-climate-change-hacked-email?showallcomments=true#CommentKey:e0ef5aea-839d-45ed-b8d8-023619833cf5
Ref – Paul Coppin (07:30:40) :
“Fraud, in its various forms, seems to have become a national disease in Great Britain….”
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Paul Ol’ Man, I think you’re a little too focused. Step back and look at the pathetic condition this country is in (I’m assuming you’re a Greengo, Yankee, etc.) The good ol’ USofA is so in debt to everyone that we don’t even have the wherewithall (guts, nerve, macho) to tell the Chinese to shut up about Taiwan, or The Dalhi Lama, or the price of grits in Georgia. That’s the way it happens Sport, one day you’re on top of the world, the next you’re under it. Happens to every generation that thinks they can spend and waste their grandchildrens’ money. We’s in da po’house!
Paul Coppin (10:38:40) :
____________
A “little” under the belt:-(
Ever work at the UN?