Peer Review Or Dirty Politics

It has long been suspected that the peer review process has been corrupted and controlled by the global warming true-believers. Now the leaked Emails in the ClimateGate scandal are proving these accusations to be true. This represents more than a couple of unethical, "loose cannon" scientists. It is pervasive and is like a cancer running through the entire "climate science industry". The following article by Roger Pielke, Jr. and excerpts from some of the leaked Emails proves the case. (source)
Peter

Treating Peer Review Like a Partisan Blog

John Christy and David Douglass provide a detailed accounting of how a comment on one of their papers was handled in the peer review process (even more detail here). Their experience, with the gory details revealed by the CRU emails, show in all of its unpleasantness how activist scientists sought to stage-manage climate science from the inside.

Their story hits very close to home with me, as I went through a very,very similar process with respect to a comment (PDF) and reply (PDF) on the "shameful article" on hurricanes and global warming that I co-authored in 2005 (PDF). (If my emails ever get hacked you'll see that ugly episode from the inside.;-) That situation had a positive outcome only because at the time I protested efforts to deny us a right to respond in accordance with journal policies and threatened to go public with the improper efforts at stage-management. I am sure that these sort of shenanigans go on in academia more than we'd like to admit, however that does not justify them.

What these episodes reveal is an effort by activist climate scientists to stage-manage the peer review process much like how one might manage a partisan blog for public consumption. The blog management philosophy of Real Climate was described as follows in the CRU emails:

I wanted you guys to know that you're free to use [the RealClimate blog] in any way you think would be helpful. Gavin and I are going to be careful about what comments we screen through, and we'll be very careful to answer any questions that come up to any extent we can. On the other hand, you might want to visit the thread and post replies yourself. We can hold comments up in the queue and contact you about whether or not you think they should be screened through or not, and if so, any comments you'd like us to include.

You're also welcome to do a followup guest post, etc. think of RC as a resource that is at your disposal to combat any disinformation put forward by the McIntyres of the world. Just let us know. We'll use our best discretion to make sure the skeptics dont'get to use the RC comments as a megaphone...

While bloggers are of course free to operate their turf as they see fit, whatever one's views of climate science, climate policy or the Douglass et al. paper, we should all be able to agree that efforts to stage manage the peer review process are not good for science, however they might be justified.

Land Use/Land Cover Effets On Climate Greater Than Energy Use

There are more and more articles coming out showing how the CO2 released from burning fossil fuels plays in insignificant role in global warming and climate change. This is, as Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. says, something that should be communicated to policy-makers.
Peter


Feb 06, 2008Excellent Report On Land Use/Land Cover Effects On The Climate System
By Roger Pielke Sr., Climate Science
As a follow up to the NASA press release on the diagnosis of landscape changes in the eastern 2/3 of the United States that was posted on Climate Science on February 4 2008, there is an excellent slide presentation by Professor Jon Foley of the University of Wisconson at the April 2007 NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change Program meeting. Professor Foley’s slides are titled ”Planet Against the Grain”.

It includes the very important conclusions that “agriculture and land use release more greenhouse gases than any other single human activity”, “effects on physical climate often get ‘washed out’ in outdated climate metrics of radiative forcing and global mean temperature”, “global change is much more than CO2 and global warming” and “current focus on CO2/Climate Connection is very short sighted”.

The entire set of slides is very much worth seeing. Professor Foley effectively summarizes the perspective on the human role in the climate system that should be communicated to policymakers. The current emphasis on energy reductions of CO2 emissions will not have the benefit of altering the climate that is being claimed by the AGU Position Statement on “Human Impacts on Climate” where they state “The cause of disruptive climate change is tied to energy use”. This is much too narrow a perspective of how humans are altering the climate system. Read Roger’s full post here.

Pielke Research Group Conclusions on Climate Change: Highly Skeptical

This information comes from the Pielke Research Group, which is affiliated with the University of Colorado in Boulder. It has a very credible and accomplished membership and I think, should be granted a great deal of respect in the area of global warming and climate change. Here are their latest conclusions. Note that they downplay the role of CO2 in climate change, they say computer climate models are inadequate, and they strongly criticize the IPCC and other "official" reports. What do you think?
Peter

go here to see their organizational and membership list: http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/pielke/people/

from:
http://climatesci.colorado.edu/main-conclusions/

Main Conclusions
The Climate Science Weblog has clearly documented the following conclusions since July 2005:
The needed focus for the study of climate change and variability is on the regional and local scales. Global and zonally-averaged climate metrics would only be important to the extent that they provide useful information on these space scales.

Global and zonally-averaged surface temperature trend assessments, besides having major difficulties in terms of how this metric is diagnosed and analyzed, do not provide significant information on climate change and variability on the regional and local scales.

Global warming is not equivalent to climate change. Significant, societally important climate change, due to both natural- and human- climate forcings, can occur without any global warming or cooling.

The spatial pattern of ocean heat content change is the appropriate metric to assess climate system heat changes including global warming.

In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO2 relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate climate forcing on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.

Global and regional climate models have not demonstrated skill at predicting regional and local climate change and variability on multi-decadal time scales.

Attempts to significantly influence regional and local-scale climate based on controlling CO2 emissions alone is an inadequate policy for this purpose.

A vulnerability paradigm, focused on regional and local societal and environmental resources of importance, is a more inclusive, useful, and scientifically robust framework to interact with policymakers, than is the focus on global multi-decadal climate predictions which are downscaled to the regional and local scales. The vulnerability paradigm permits the evaluation of the entire spectrum of risks associated with different social and environmental threats, including climate variability and change.

Humans are significantly altering the global climate, but in a variety of diverse ways beyond the radiative effect of carbon dioxide. The IPCC assessments have been too conservative in recognizing the importance of these human climate forcings as they alter regional and global climate. These assessments have also not communicated the inability of the models to accurately forecast the spread of possibilities of future climate. The forecasts, therefore, do not provide any skill in quantifying the impact of different mitigation strategies on the actual climate response that would occur.

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