When Peer-Reviewers Are Really Political Fanboys

_{Barry Arrington

November 15, 2018

Intelligent Design}

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Climate contrarian uncovers scientific error, upends major ocean warming study

“The findings of the … paper were peer reviewed and published in the world’s premier scientific journal and were given wide coverage in the English-speaking media,” Lewis wrote. “Despite this, a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts as to the accuracy of its results.”

Really? A casual review of the first page by one person with a modicum of skepticism found issues that a whole team of experts missed in their peer review process? Yes. Why? Easy. When it comes to climate change, the politics come first. Facts take the hindmost. And sometimes that winds up biting them in their, ahem, nether regions, shall we say.

Comments

Andrew
Sorry, Ed George! It was vmahuna’s!
Thanks. For a minute there I thought that my memory had finally gone.Ed George_{November 16, 2018
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Sorry, Ed George! It was vmahuna's! Andrewasauber_{November 16, 2018
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Andrew
I agree with your comment generally, but what I quoted from you above, to me demonstrates a conceptual problem that is inherent in climate science.
I assume that you meant “for you”, not “from you”. I am pretty sure that I never said that.Ed George_{November 15, 2018
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I think that advancements have been made in weather prediction, but that has nothing to do with what climate science produces. Andrewasauber_{November 15, 2018
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Climatology is a valid scientific field, merging bits of meteorology and archeology to allow Historians to better understand what was going on weather-wise during centuries before it was possible to record temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, etc., etc.
Ed George, I agree with your comment generally, but what I quoted from you above, to me demonstrates a conceptual problem that is inherent in climate science. I'm repeatedly to told that climate isn't weather, and that weather events aren't necessarily climate-change driven events. But they might be? There might be a statistical correlation derived somehow? So given this built-in uncertainty, what is the practical value of even paying attention to what someone says a Global Climate is? Andrewasauber_{November 15, 2018
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Thanks [not] Ed. :-)Barry Arrington_{November 15, 2018
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Barry@5. My early papers were in the marine sciences, an outcome of post graduate studies, but my more recent ones have been in the field of analytical chemistry. Or, cook-book chemistry as many refer to it. Nothing in the climate sciences, evolution or ID. No, I am not the statistics Ed George. My stats expertise peaks at regression analysis, t-tests and F-tests, and I probably don't use them correctly all the time. Ed George is not my real name. I use a pseudonym because I sometimes post comments from my work place (bad me). :)Ed George_{November 15, 2018
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Ed George, now I am curious. What topic were the papers? Are you the statistics Ed George? I took a case to trial last year that was heavy on stats. Carl Moody at W&M was my expert. Are you acquainted? Barry Arrington_{November 15, 2018
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A follow-up to my comment at 2. Part of the problem with peer-review is the internet. It has resulted in a proliferation of "so-called" peer-reviewed on-line journals that would never pass the smell test of an impartial, professional journal. Every time I publish a paper in a journal, I get inundated with emails from other "journals" wanting me to submit a manuscript. I move them quickly to spam. More and more reputable journals have the ability for readers of an article to access the raw data used for the paper. This allows others to examine the data themselves to confirm the conclusions of the authors. This being said, I have never accessed any of this data myself. I have no idea how often it is done, but my gut tells me that it is not frequent. If anyone here has done this I would be interested to hear their experience. It is obvious that peer review has its problems, but I have never heard anyone suggest a better alternative. Journal editors may be paid, but they are not the ones reviewing a manuscript for scientific robustness. The people who review the manuscripts for methodology and conclusions derived from the data are other scientists with expertise, either directly or indirectly, in the field. They are volunteers and some are better than others.Ed George_{November 15, 2018
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asauber @ 1 Climatology is a valid scientific field, merging bits of meteorology and archeology to allow Historians to better understand what was going on weather-wise during centuries before it was possible to record temperature, barometric pressure, wind speed, etc., etc. The problems began when people from other disciplines saw a change to improve their demands for national and international control of human activities by claiming that ONLY surrender of scads of daily human activities MUST be turned over to "objective" international committees, who would of course require scads of money be given to them without any outside controls. For those of you too young to remember the '70s, man, the ORIGINAL scheme was to claim that exhaust gases from jet airliners flying over the North Pole were already triggering a New Ice Age. That never really sold very well, but the "under-arm spray deodorant gases are destroying the ozone over the South Pole" sold a LOT better, resulting in the WORLDWIDE elimination of "ozone-depleting substances". A decade later, serious scientists discovered that the actual Hole in the Ozone is a perfectly natural event whose size and duration change every year. But the Interventionists had already won, and the Truth was never widely promoted. This gave the International Bureaucrats a shot at selling some new Crisis, and the Crisis they picked was Global Warming. Global Warming sold well, especially after a number of senior Meteorologists discovered that could get SERIOUS grant money to create and tweek FAKE "climate forecasts". Oh, an interesting side note is that the ENTIRE field of Chaos Theory was born from the early Weather Forecasting programs. A meteorologist kinda guy was AMAZED to discover that changing the value of a temperature projection in its 2nd or 3rd decimal place COMPLETELY changed the temperatures forecast for next month. So the details of Earth's atmosphere a month from now are CRITICALLY dependent on the Initial Conditions right now. Global Warming projections use the same general approach in their attempts to forecast Weather 5 or 10 YEARS from now, which is nonsense. The only valid basis for true long term weather forecasting is analysis of Sun Spots, because we have CENTURIES of Sun Spot records to compare against sporadic reports of weather bad enough to cause crop failures, etc. The Global Warming guys of course HATE Climatologists who ask them why their computer models don't use the well defined cycle of Sun Spots in their models.vmahuna_{November 15, 2018
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Peer-review is like any other human endeavour. It has its strengths and weaknesses. I published two papers in the same journal over the last year. The first one was very thoroughly reviewed and I made numerous changes to the manuscript as the result of these reviews. My second had very few comments, generally limited to recommending a couple additional references to support my conclusions. I wold like to think that the limited comments on my second paper was because it was so well written and the conclusions so logically constructed that they were indisputable. But that would be delusional. In short, some reviewers are very thorough and some are lazy.Ed George_{November 15, 2018
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a quick review of the first page of the paper was sufficient to raise doubts
It's so funny, because a cursory review of climate science is sufficient to raise doubts. I mean, when you examine what modern climate science is producing, it's really just marketing images... squiggly lines that go up on the the end. It's the same image you might see when a new toothpaste is introduced as more effective or a chart of worker productivity after new training. It's PowerPoint Presentation material at a sales seminar. So I say... really? That's it? Statistical manipulations? Yes. That's all it is. Andrewasauber_{November 15, 2018
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