Climate Scientists are Dispassionate gods of Truth

There are those who will tell you that scientist are all about the Truth. Cool, logical, dispassionate, untainted by greed or ideology. And certainly not subject to political pressure! Oh no, of course not!

And this of course is where peer-review comes in. Because if one is going to present 'honest, logical, dispassionate' research for the sheeple, errrr, people to Believe in, that logical, dispassionate, untainted-by-greed-or-ideology scientists' work has to be gone over by someone else.

What is peer review?

Peer review is the evaluation of creative work or performance by other people in the same field in order to maintain or enhance the quality of the work or performance in that field¹.

It is based on the concept that a larger and more diverse group of people will usually find more weaknesses and errors in a work or performance and will be able to make a more impartial evaluation of it than will just the person or group responsible for creating the work or performance.

Peer review utilizes the independence, and in some cases the anonymity, of the reviewers in order to discourage cronyism (i.e., favoritism shown to relatives and friends) and obtain an unbiased evaluation. Typically, the reviewers are not selected from among the close colleagues, relatives or friends of the creator or performer of the work, and potential reviewers are required to disclose of any conflicts of interest.

Peer review helps maintain and enhance quality both directly by detecting weaknesses and errors in specific works and performance and indirectly by providing a basis for making decisions about rewards and punishment that can provide a powerful incentive to achieve excellence. These rewards and punishments are related to prestige, publication, research grants, employment, compensation, promotion, tenure and disciplinary action.

So we see that peer review is all about making certain that they got the science absolutely right. There can be NO questioning it. Climate scientists are dispassionate, incorruptible, untainted-by-ideology gods of Truth. IT IS WHAT THEY SAY IT IS, SO YOU BETTER BELIEVE THEM AND ACT ACCORDINGLY!

*Ahem* sorry, getting carried away a bit early.

So we all know that climate scientist across the globe are dispassionately proving that the Earth is going to Hell and it is all YOUR fault. Peer-reviewed science proves this.

Allow me to give you a few examples of peer review in action. Some of it is not climate-related, some of it is. But it is necessary to give you a range of examples, to show just how logical, dispassionate, and ideology-free science really is these days.

We shall start with Stap cells.

From Guardian Professional:

Academics Anonymous: scientific publishing is a licence to print money, not the truth

Earlier this year, newspapers reported on the discovery of a simple protocol that could turn any kind of cell into a super-pluripotent stem cell – referred to as a Stap cell. The discovery, published in two articles in the prestigious scientific journal Nature, held out the promise that scientists could develop simple procedures to create patient-matched stem cells. These stem cells would then be used to repair damaged or diseased organs.

The story was too good to be true. The Stap phenomenon pushed the envelope of biological plausibility a bit too far, yet its appearance in Nature granted a hefty advance of credibility. Immediately, numerous labs all over the world set out to reproduce the amazing technique and failed, without exception. As the evidence for insidious data manipulation and falsification grew, it was believed that Stap cells never existed in the first place.

Misconduct and even data falsification are much more common in science than one would hope. It's likely that the banal motivation behind this is money, in this case (Stap) public funding. Though it is hardly ever pocketed (there are cases), a scientist is always as big as his funding is.

What turns scientists into money-magnet bigwigs? It's all about where they publish their work. In life sciences, it is the big three: Nature, Science, and Cell, followed by several other, slightly smaller journals, often from the same publisher. The pledge these journals claim to sustain their influence and the tremendous cashflow is that they select only the most relevant and top-quality research.

-------

See? Nothing wrong here. Just like in climate science! I mean, who could possibly believe that climate scientists are all about the money and prestige they can bring, both to the universities they work at / for, and for themselves? Climate scientists are just dispassionate, incorruptible, untainted-by-ideology gods of Truth. But Hey, you know, if your work gets you famous, you could write a book and become a flaming a*****e....

But I digress.

---

Naturally, if you want to get a paper published, peer review is the best way to ensure that all the bases have been covered. A scientific journal or society (such as the American Meteorological Society) chooses a number of people in your field, who study your research and determine its' veracity / worthiness for publication. You wouldn't want someone to just gloss over problems and pass it on for publication, would you? That would be... dishonest.

Here’s the beginning of a statement from SAGE:

London, UK (08 July 2014) – SAGE announces the retraction of 60 articles implicated in a peer review and citation ring at the Journal of Vibration and Control (JVC). The full extent of the peer review ring has been uncovered following a 14 month SAGE-led investigation, and centres on the strongly suspected misconduct of Peter Chen, formerly of National Pingtung University of Education, Taiwan (NPUE) and possibly other authors at this institution.

In 2013 the then Editor-in-Chief of JVC, Professor Ali H. Nayfeh,and SAGE became aware of a potential peer review ring involving assumed and fabricated identities used to manipulate the online submission system SAGE Track powered by ScholarOne Manuscripts™. Immediate action was taken to prevent JVC from being exploited further, and a complex investigation throughout 2013 and 2014 was undertaken with the full cooperation of Professor Nayfeh and subsequently NPUE.

In total 60 articles have been retracted from JVC after evidence led to at least one author or reviewer being implicated in the peer review ring. Now that the investigation is complete, and the authors have been notified of the findings, we are in a position to make this statement.

While investigating the JVC papers submitted and reviewed by Peter Chen, it was discovered that the author had created various aliases on SAGE Track, providing different email addresses to set up more than one account. Consequently, SAGE scrutinised further the co-authors of and reviewers selected for Peter Chen’s papers, these names appeared to form part of a peer review ring. The investigation also revealed that on at least one occasion, the author Peter Chen reviewed his own paper under one of the aliases he had created.

SAGE and Nayfeh then confronted Chen with the allegations, and weren’t satisfied with the responses, so in September 2013 they alerted NPUE to the case. Chen resigned from NPUE on February 2, 2014, according to the release, and in May Nayfeh retired and resigned as editor in chief of the JVC.

You can find quite a bit more about this little mess at Retraction Watch.

I find it interesting that several of the papers listed in the article, have to do with ecosystems. The kind of material that is useful in climate research. If you are peer-reviewing your own research, it stands a much better chance of getting used, eh? Just imagine the glowing reviews your research will get!

But... The IPCC is 'the gold standard' in climate science. And as some people on DA will tell you, climate scientists are dispassionate, incorruptible, untainted-by-ideology gods of Truth.

Well, that what they say! There couldn't possibly be any cheating going on in the IPCC. After all, the science is reviewed by 'millions of scientists,' if we are to believe some people here on DA...

'Andrew Challinor is one of eight lead authors for Chapter 7. (There are also two chapter heads, 10 contributing authors, and two Review Editors.) According to the headline on a University of Leeds media release issued this week, Challinor’s latest, hot-off-the-press research paper demonstrates that Climate change will reduce crop yields sooner than we thought.

The media release tells us that this new research

feeds directly into the Working Group II report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, which is due to be published at the end of March 2014. [bold added]

It’s unclear what is meant by the "feeds directly into" claim. IPCC personnel aren’t supposed to be promoting their own careers or advancing pet hypotheses. Their job is to objectively examine the scientific literature already in existence.

But here’s where the conflict-of-interest comes in. Challinor, while serving as a guest editor for the March 2013 edition of the Agricultural and Forest Meteorology journal, decided that 20 research papers deserved to be published. Via this act of publication, these papers gained "peer-reviewed scientific literature" status.

As a lead author of the IPCC’s Chapter 7, Challlinor then decided that nine of these 20 papers were crucial to Chapter 7′s conclusions. In other words, the person passing judgment on the merits of these papers was not independent. He had an agenda. He was an IPCC lead author who wished to cite these papers in his IPCC chapter.

But it gets better. Challinor is himself the co-author of three of these 20 papers (see here, here, and here). So first he writes three papers. Then, wearing his journal editor hat, he decides that all three of them are worthy of publication in the very same edition of a peer-reviewed journal. Then, wearing his IPCC lead author hat, he arranges for two of his own works to be cited in the IPCC’s Chapter 7.

Another Chapter 7 lead author is David Lobell. While he and Challinor were working closely together on the IPCC report, Challinor decided that a paper written by Lobell also merited publication in the journal he was guest-editing.

We’ll never know how many of the following nine papers (all being cited as evidence in Chapter 7), would have made the cut if the journal editor had been someone unconnected to the IPCC................'

So not only did he get to peer-review his own research, he got to decide whether or not it should get included as part of the report. Win-win-win, hey? And YOUR life is going to become that much better for it!

Hardly sounds 'objective,' does it now?

But climate scientists are dispassionate, incorruptible, untainted-by-ideology gods of Truth.

We know this to be so, 'cause people like tells us so.

Background: In 2000, the Bulletin of the Meteorological Society published "Impacts of Extreme Weather and Climate on Terrestrial Biota" by Camille Parmesan, Terry Root, and Michael Willig. The paper introduced to the peer-reviewed literature analyses by Parmesan that extreme weather events had caused an extinction event in California’s Sierra Nevada and advocated the extreme weather was the mechanism by which global warming was driving animals northward and upward as Parmesan claimed in her first controversial paper discussed here. According to Google Scholar, the BAMS paper has been cited by 324 consensus articles. Thomson Reuter's Essential Science Indicators report that by December 2009, Parmesan went on to be ranked #2 among highly cited authors for papers devoted expressly to global warming and climate change.

Parmesan et al biased their conclusion by omitting observations that all other individuals in the surrounding natural habitat had survived better than had ever been observed during the same weather events. Only the butterflies that had recently colonized a novel plant species in a highly disturbed logged area had been extirpated. If all observations were honestly presented, it would have been both an example of nature’s resilience and an example of the effect of landscape changes on microclimates. By omitting half of the data, their paper manufactured an illusion of extreme climate catastrophe as discussed here. So I requested an official retraction. It was no more honest than Enron officials leaving half the data off their books.

Nonetheless, Parmesan’s illusion was immediately adopted by top climate scientists David R. Easterling, Gerald A. Meehl, Stanley A. Changnon, and Thomas R. Karl who immediately invited Parmesan to co-author the paper Climate Extremes: Observations, Modeling, and Impacts published in the journal Science. The bulk of that paper showed there was no increase in heat waves, droughts or other catastrophic events, but they then offered Parmesan’s half-truths to suggest just few extreme events related to climate change will cause grave ecological disruptions writing "In wild plants and animals, climate-induced extinctions, distributional and phenological changes, and species’ range shifts are being documented at an increasing rate." However that paper’s only example of "climate-induced extinctions" were Parmesan’s butterflies and amphibian extinctions at Monte Verde as discussed in the unsupported story of the Golden Toad discussed here. This new paper, according to Google Scholar, was then cited by over 1790 consensus articles.

(And)

The AMS’ climate change statement claims the "AMS Information Statement intended to provide a trustworthy, objective, and scientifically up-to-date explanation of scientific issues of concern to the public at large." Perhaps the AMS fears that retracting a faulty paper would call attention to the possibility that there may be more peer reviewed papers that are not so trustworthy, papers that demand more skeptical scrutiny. By not retracting a paper that so blatantly manipulated the data presentation, you bite off your nose to save your face. The justifications used to avoid retracting the paper suggests the AMS editorial policy strayed from being "objective, nor scientifically up-to-date".

That the AMS would justify publishing half-truths based on technicalities and spurious precedents taints the rest of the scientific community who strive to uphold science’s highest standards. It undermines the public’s trust in environmental science, making it much more difficult for us to convince others about cases where we truly need better environmental stewardship. Good environmental stewardship demands unadulterated science to guide our policies, not the half-truths the AMS now condones.

---

Of course we know the AMS is one of those many organizations which have put forth statements supporting the UNproven theory of 'man-made' global warming. As you can see, they even provide some of the science to prove that it is ALL YOUR FAULT.

Because ya know, these guys are just dispassionate, incorruptible, untainted-by-ideology gods of Truth. And the above peer-reviewed research is a prime example of that!

---

And of course we know that POLITICS has absolutely nothing to do with science. There ain't no political pressure on climate scientists, no, none whatsoever. Just because the IPCC is a POLITICALLY-APPOINTED body, with POLITICAL funding, who's leadership have POLITICAL TIES UP THE WAZOO.....

*ahem* Sorry. I meant to say the people at the IPCC are dispassiona-

Ok, enough of that.

' Over the course of the two hours of the contact group deliberations, it became clear that the only way the assembled government representatives would approve text for SPM.5.2 was essentially to remove all "controversial" text (that is, text that was uncomfortable for any one individual government), which meant deleting almost 75% of the text, including nearly all explications and examples under the bolded headings. In more than one instance, specific examples or sentences were removed at the will of only one or two countries, because under IPCC rules, the dissent of one country is sufficient to grind the entire approval process to a halt unless and until that country can be appeased.

I understand that country representatives were only doing their job, so I do not implicate them personally; however, the process the IPCC followed resulted in a process that built political credibility by sacrificing scientific integrity. '

That, from one of the IPCC's own scientists.

Is there more? Yes! TONS more. And even that list barely scratches the surface.

But now you know: Peer review is the Ultimate expression of Truth, in climate science. No one does it for money. No one does it for prestige. No one makes the claims they make, out of peer pressure, or political pressure, or ideological leanings. You can trust the IPCC to be totally above-board and honest in its presentation of the science**.

In a pig's eye.

Definition and more on peer review can be found Here.

Re: the image of Galileo:

Galileo was the Skeptic of his time, working against 'consensus' (Aristotelian) science. The Church was not his enemy- it was the Academics of the day, supporters of the Aristotelian view of the solar system, who turned Galileo's friend and ally, the Pope, against him.

**Activist climate scientist / activist scientists in general, very often make claims to the public which a reading of the science in the IPCC will actually DISAGREE with. But you likely won't be reading the report yourself, so you Must trust them, right?

Right?

........Right?