by Dr. Roger Pielke Senior
There is an informative article by Ross McKittrick
McKitrick, Ross R. (2011) “Bias in the Peer Review Process: A Cautionary and Personal Account” in Climate Coup, Patrick J. Michaels ed., Cato Inst. Washington DC.
This article appears in the book
Michaels, Patrick J., 2011: Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives. Cato Institute. ISBN: 978-1-935308447
with the summary of its content
“A first-rate team of experts offers compelling documentation on the pervasive influence global warming alarmism now has on almost every aspect of our society-from national defense, law, trade, and politics to health, education, and international development.”
With respect to Ross’s chapter, Pat Michaels writes
“The second chapter in this volume goes to the core of what we consider to be the canon of science, which is the peer-reviewed, refereed scientific literature. McKitrick’s and my trials and tribulations over journal publication are similar to those experienced by many other colleagues. Unfortunately, the Climategate e-mails revealed that indeed there has been systematic pressure on journal editors to reject manuscripts not toeing the line about disastrous climate change. Even more unfortunate, my experience and that of others are that the post-Climategate environment has made this situation worse, not better. It is now virtually impossible to publish anything against the alarmist grain. The piles of unpublished manuscripts sitting on active scientists’desks are growing into gargantuan proportions…..”
Pat is correct that the peer reviews process and, also, the funding of research, has become very politicized and biased.
Ross starts his article with the text [highlight added]
“Showing that the IPCC claim is also false took some mundane statistical work, but the results were clear. Once the numbers were crunched and the paper was written, I began sending it to science journals. Having published several against-the-flow papers in climatology journals, I did not expect a smooth ride, but the process eventually became surreal. In the end, the paper was accepted for publication, but not in a climatology journal. Fortunately for me, I am an economist, not a climatologist, and my career doesn’t depend on getting published in climatology journals. If I were a young climatologist, I would have learned that my career prospects would be much better if I never wrote papers that question the IPCC. The skewing of the literature (and careers) can only be bad for society, which depends on scientists and the scientific literature for trustworthy advice for wise policy decisions.”
His conclusion has the text
“Some people might be tempted to defend climatology by saying that normal scientific procedures have broken down due to the intense policy fights and political interference. But in my opinion that confuses cause and effect. The policy community has aggressively intervened in climate science because of all the breaches of normal scientific procedures. The public has lost confidence in the ability of the major institutions of climatology, including the IPCC and the leading journals, to deal impartially with the evidence. It doesn’t have to be this way. My own field of economics constantly deals with policy-relevant topics with major public consequences. Of course, differences of opinion exist and vigorous disputes play out among opposing camps. But what is happening in climate science is very different, or at least is on a much more intense scale. I know of no parallels in modern economics. It appears to be a profession-wide decision that, due to the conjectured threat of global warming, the ethic of scientific objectivity has had an asterisk added to it: there is now the additional condition that objectivity cannot compromise the imperative of supporting one particular point of view.
This strategy is backfiring badly: rather than creating the appearance of genuine scientific progress, the situation appears more like a chokehold of indoctrination and intellectual corruption. I do not know what the solution is, since I have yet to see a case in which an institution or a segment of society, having once been contaminated or knocked off balance by the global warming issue, is subsequently able to right itself. But perhaps, as time progresses, climate science will find a way to do so. Now that would be progress.”
Both Pat and Ross are correct that a prejudice exists in the climate science community with respect to publication and in funding. My experiences have been similar to theirs.
I have posted on this subject in my posts. Several examples are
My Comments For The InterAcademy Council Review of the IPCC
Is The NSF Funding Process Working Correctly?
Invited Letter Now Rejected By Nature Magazine
Comments On The Peer-Review Journal Publication Process And Recommendations For Improvement
It is important that policymakers become aware of the inappropriate control on the peer review process and in the funding of research by the NSF and other agencies. I have summarized this for policymakers most recently in my testimony
Pielke Sr., R.A. 2011: Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulation. Testimony to the House Subcommittee on Energy and Power
where I wrote with respect to the CCSP assessment process [which is one of the source of information for the 2007 IPCC]
“The process for completing the CCSP Report excluded valid scientific perspectives under the charge of the Committee. The Editor of the Report [Tom Karl] systematically excluded a range of views on the issue of understanding and reconciling lower atmospheric temperature trends.
The Executive Summary of the CCSP Report ignores critical scientific issues and makes unbalanced conclusions concerning our current understanding of temperature trends.”
Ross’s article and Pat’s experiences document further that the exclusion of research papers in a number of major journals and research funding by the NSF and other agencies is a systematic and serious problem that has compromised objective scientific inquiry into climate science.
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Al Gored
April 20, 2011 at 12:47 pm
It is at least as bad in the pseudoscience called Conservation Biology.
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You just ruined my day(just kidding), but in truth I get sad when I think about this. I had wanted to get a degree in Ichthyology or wildlife science, but because I could not handle the insistent deluge of Marxist propaganda that students in those fields are subjected to, I decided not to.
Excellent post, one of many on the subject.
What seems to be necessary is to create an online resource of such stories, f.ex:
The biases of peer review:
– Steig vs O’Donnel ea.
– McKitrick vs
– McIntyre vs..
etc, etc..there must be hundreds of such stories from both students and renowned professors.
This database of warmist political failures could be expanded to chapters on the workings (and failures) of the IPCC, the proven (but never admitted) wrongdoings of “official” climate science, the disproved predictions, the hilarious and fantastical future predictions, etc, etc.
An easy reference site for debunking warmist propanda.
And what better place than the Watts Up Climate Fail Files for a reference of the collected wrongdoings of climate science?
At the moment it is scattered all over the internet.
Let’s get organized!
the current state of climate study on the whole is no longer science, again on the whole … yes, there are plenty of individuals but at the top of the field and in the journals they are no longer acting as scientists … they are propagandists …
I recommend f.ex the interview with former IPCC Expert Reviewer Madhav Khandekar, as an example of evidence of IPCC bias:
Part 1: (NB: 4 parts)
Next 3 parts of the Khandekar interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjqcQnyLGGA&feature=related
I’m surprised that no one has quoted Richard Horton, editor of the respected British medical journal The Lancet, who wrote a profound indictment of peer review:
“The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding.”
“Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong.”
“http://tinyurl.com/y816zh6”
Here, Here!
It seems we are seeing a Cardinal Bellarmine effect here, in as much as he ordered Galileo not to “hold or defend” the idea that the Earth moved around the Sun. I guess that’s what happens when ideas are based on dogma instead of science. It looks like many young scientists are being finacially forced to “abjure, curse and detest” any scientific ideas that challenge AGW.
You’d think it was the 1600’s not the 21st Century.
Without at all meaning to widen the discussion into being off-topic, climatology is not the only science in which the paradigm defenders exist.
It is my clear and fairly well-informed opinion that it also exists in physics, archeology, paleontology, geology, just to name a few. Anybody ever heard of uniformitarianism?
Kuhn’s mention of anomalies is extremely cogent. Anomalies are simply ignored/swept under the carpet as if they don’t exist.
Fortunately for climate science there are serious skeptics who are yelling loud and long. All the sciences should have such vocal skeptics. Keep it up, Ross, Steve M, Anthony, John Christy, Pat Michaels and Richard Lindzen, to name a few. Science needs paradigm busters in all its disciplines. The skeptic haters are the ones who, decades or centuries later, are the ones who are laughed at, for trying to keep a lid on knowledge. “Skeptic” really means “non-b.s.ers” or “straight shooters” – otherwise known as true scientists, those who play the cards as they are dealt, not those who play liars poker.
Theo Goodwin says: April 20, 2011 at 2:29 pm
Depends on what you mean by “scientific publication.” To create a first-rate scientific publication, all you need are money for staff and for an editor who has the time and will to be a leader.
I agree about the editor, but I don’t agree about the money or staff. I’m sure many journals have been set up with just one enthusiastic person who has volunteered to be the editor and a few (unwilling) colleagues to help out.
Come on this is hardly rocket science. Say e.g. you estimate you will be publishing 4-6 papers a quarter, this is well within the workload of one editor. Obviously there some up front work like e.g. you have to set a journal “standard” both in terms of content and style (e.g. consistent references). You need to correspond with potential writers and reviewers. No doubt when journals start, the reviewers are usually the editor and some others in their department whose arm can be twisted.
These days, you don’t even have to engage a publisher because it can all be done online. Now obviously such a journal isn’t going to compete with the well known journals, but so long as it has an ISBN number, a title and some basic academic standards, then it becomes a potential reference journal for academic work.
Technically there is nothing stopping another climate journal. But what is currently stopping it, is the lack of interest from academics – academics who will complain about the unfairness of the other journals, but who effectively support the status quo, because they won’t provide the support a new journal.
Breaking news!!!
Not sure if this tweet has been peer reviewed yet so to follow SOP of the AGW media let’s call it a ‘preliminary finding’ or ‘soon to be published’ in the prestigious Journal of Celebrity Tweets.
“Cameron: Global warming overtakes ‘Skynet’ as threat
By Ben Geman – 04/20/11 09:53 AM ET
Director James Cameron is warning that global warning is a far greater threat to humans than the Terminator.
In a post on Twitter, Cameron said people should be much more worried about the effects of global warming than of machines taking over the earth.”
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/677-e2-wire/156969-james-cameron-global-warming-overtakes-skynet-as-threat-to-humans
Well, The King of the World has spoken. Debate’s over. AGW is more of a threat than a science fiction plot.
Or is it? Let’s try one day without any action on AGW and compare that to one day without computers.
When the science is, at best, a weak fledgling and the politics is a powerful behemoth, the classical idea of peer review seems beyond reach. We have only peers in ignorance and hubris. The remaining open venue for presenting honest professional research is the technical report or monograph. The journals have been captured by the same mushy mind-bend that invaded academia in the late 1960’s.
As a journal editor we require that all correspondence pertaining to the submission, review reports, corrections. etc of accepted papers are posted online. I have no doubt that in the near future all serious journals will require this. Also I believe that in the near future papers may be interactive in that any qualified person may challenge findings.
The new book Climate Coup looks good – I just ordered my copy.
Smokey – that link to Professor Trebino was priceless – Thanks! I got a good laugh, but it is actually a sad story and an indictment of our current peer-review process. How far we have fallen.
A real good summary of “climate”
http://www.nolanchart.com/article8572.html
Economics is a science, SOCIAL science. The decision making paradigm shifts from pure NATURAL science where consensus means nothing, to need of some form of consensus in applied NATURAL science or engineering in terms of design standards and criteria, to consensus as the basis in experimental SOCIAL science such as economics to consensus is everything in political science and law as pure SOCIAL science. The problem with the AGW debate is a free for all. Every person puts his own decision making paradigm on the table without any consideration that the other branches of science operates on another point of view. When some scientist puts their cases on the “science is settled their is a consensus” I always checked the background of the person making the statement. In almost all cases the person is either a social scientists like Ravetz or a natural scientist losing debate. I have no objection with Post normal science as a political decision maker but what I found uncomfortable with the AGW debate is the lack of HEDGING. If the politicians have decided to support in their policies, plans and programs the AGW then almost all the research budget should go to the skeptical sides so that if the decision made under uncertainty is wrong then decisions made under uncertainty could be reversed at the earliest time and before much damage is made of the wrong decision. On the other hand if the research invested for the other side of the debate proves the decision made under uncertainty is correct, then the politicians have a stronger basis to move forward with the decisions made under uncertainty. But as mention earlier in this blogs, politicians have very big egos and they would only like to see their decisions proven correct and their also natural scientists who are willing to carry out the will of their political masters and hide behind the social science decision making paradigm.
Creating a new scientific journal would be easy and relatively inexpensive. Establishing a following for that journal is quite another matter as its success would depend greatly on citation of published articles by articles published in other scientific media. Success economically would likely require a large subscriber base to establish a multi-year commercial viability to sustain operations long enough to generate a body of cross over references in books, newspapers, popular press magazines and particularly other scientific journals.
jackie says:
April 20, 2011 at 5:04 pm
As a journal editor we require that all correspondence pertaining to the submission, review reports, corrections. etc of accepted papers are posted online. I have no doubt that in the near future all serious journals will require this. Also I believe that in the near future papers may be interactive in that any qualified person may challenge findings.
So go a few more steps: Acclaim (and recognize publicly, actually honor) those who do reviews for a journal with as much credit as those who write for the journal.
That is, in the title block and summary of the paper list the reviewers as well as the co-authors. During the review process itself – until the paper is accepted, keep the reviewer hidden. Thereafter, acknowledge the effort of the reviewer.
This does several things – all good. First, the time and effort spent reviewing another author’s work is recognized – by department heads, by other readers, by other members of the reviewer’s faculty. And let’s face it: peer acclaim is the way most “scientists” get their rewards. (Money first ? Not really – it just pays the bills.)
Second it keeps the viewers – and editors – honest. Incestuous self-reviewed papers written by the same core that reviews other incestuous writers will become exposed. Prejudices are shown. Maybe not removed, but at least the closed loop incestuous process can begin to be shown.
Can one reviewer veto a paper? No. Let that “reject” statement stand on its own “merits” – the reviewer who rejects a paper (or a part of a paper) has his/her record visible. The rest of us get to read the heresy that being being rejected by the hide-bound cleric of old ideas!
—…—
Now – to one more point. How many “journals” do the “clerics” claim as their “climate” theocracy? 4? 6? We have been deluged with reports that 77 writers (out of the original 3196 surveyed for their views on CAGW) represent 97% of the climate papers being published nowdays.
So, how many different journals (different editors-as-inquisitors) do those 77 writers represent?
eo:
You have a naive understanding of realpolitik. Politicians most of all want to be reelected. Least of all to be criticised, or give the oppositions any free points. They want to be able to say they are necessary to save the world.
And of course the opposition will destroy the world as we know it.
So politicians tend to fund scientists who say that the opposition will mean the end of the world.
As payment for their treachery, institutions are erected with Lead scientists, becoming Media Figures, Enormous Salaries are distributed, the most selfish and egotistical persons flown to the tropics on diverse conferences to save a world which needs no saving.
A match made in hell: politicians pay to get scientific support for their policies, and science obeys like a snake, charmed by the flute of money, attention, importance and position.
The leftist rot goes throughout academia. Anyone who believes this result wasn’t planned decades ago is naive. The corruption of peer review parallels the corruption of school textbooks.
I think WUWT is the answer to peer review and the perversion of science it highlights.
Open source, open review, identify editors and reviewers.The truth or the nearest thing to it are much easier to see.If an expert truly understands their own work, they should be capable of explaining it to an nonexpert.
“The public has lost confidence in the
abilitywillingness of the major institutions of climatology, including the IPCC and the leading journals, to deal impartially with the evidence.”There. Now matches the evidence and the rest of the text.
John;
If you read British, you should know that it’s “Hear! Hear!”, from the UK Parliament; short for “Hear the man!”
“the public has lost confidence in the ability of the major institutions of climatology, including the IPCC and the leading journals, to deal impartially with the evidence. ”
Exactly! (without reading the rest of this post)
“the public has lost confidence in the ability of the major institutions of climatology, including the IPCC and the leading journals, to deal impartially with the evidence. ”
When this happens a revoloution follows where the people take action aginst those institutions.
Science has dabased itself, it is now no better than partisan, than a religion. It deserves to be treated with the disdain it has earned.
This happens to any science that is disconnected from physical reality and whose hypotheses can’t be verified by physical experiment, for various, perfectly valid reasons. It’s happened to Astronomy, astrophysics, geology and archaeology to some extent. These discplines deal with either the far, far away or the long, long time ago.
These disciplines rely on artful rhetoric to settle disputes or to maintain the litany, especially those that use mathematics and computer modeling. All of the above disciplines resort to proving their hypotheses rather than falsifying them.