How Climategate killed 'peer review'

Telegraph Blogs (U.K.) ^ | January 13, 2010 | James Delingpole

[Schnucki]

“Peer-review. Peer-review. Peer-review.” This used to be every Climate Change Alarmist’s favourite mantra – most memorably deployed by tofu-crazed green activist Ed Begley Jr when he went postal on Fox News.

Sadly, their beloved peer-review is now dead – killed by Climategate. So argues Patrick Courrielche at Big Journalism in the thoughtful piece I mentioned yesterday.

He explains:

The establishment’s peer review process is one that subjects an author’s scientific research to the scrutiny of other experts in the same field of research. An author typically submits their research to a recognized peer review publication, and this publisher then sends the article to a select group of peers for critical review. The peer review literature is a lot like the mainstream media. It’s an old system where the spaces on its pages are guarded by a very select group of gatekeepers. It’s a control system of sorts – an elite group is the decision maker that designates which papers are to be, or not to be, considered serious.

As Climategate has shown, this process became compromised – causing an instability. As seen in the leaked emails, many within the climate establishment were interrelated and working together to ensure their message of global warming wasn’t diluted. There were even desires to redefine the peer review literature to punish journals that published skeptic’s papers.

Which is pretty much what I said at the time – but Courrielche takes the argument a step further. Climategate has caused a radical shift in the way scientific discourse is conducted: not any more through the corruptible process of “peer review” but by what he calls “peer-to-peer.”

The global-warming establishment’s futile attempt to resist pressure from an opposing, grassroots collective caused a shift to occur –

[avacado]

Liberals have killed the Scientific Method. They have taken science back to the dark ages of witches, goblins, and boogiemen.

[steelyourfaith]

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[grobdriver]

Don't forget "concensus".
If enough people say the world is flat, well, then... it must be!

[Flycatcher]

Liberals have killed the Scientific Method. They have taken science back to the dark ages of witches, goblins, and boogiemen.

Yes, and they've dragged whatever was left of fair and responsible mainstream journalism down with them.

It's a two-fer.

[mountainlion]

I like CRIMEITGATE

[OldDeckHand]

This is precisely what Michael Creighton was so worried about when he made his anti-catastrophic climate change comments some years ago - comments that found him at the receiving end of the "scientific community's" ire. He knew, even then, that this would all eventually blow up and hurt good science in the process.

As a country that enjoys a leadership position in the increasingly technological world, we need science and we need scientists. Science is our friend, or at least it should be. And, this "global warming" fiasco only gives ammunition to people in society that are anti-science. That is bad, very very bad and counter to what America needs most as it competes in the new century against an emerging China.

[Matchett-PI]

Michael Crichton has been vindicated.

Michael Crichton Speeches

http://www.crichton-official.com/speeches/index.html

“Fear, Complexity, Environmental Management in the 21st Century”
Washington Center for Complexity and Public Policy, Washington, D.C.
November 6, 2005

“Testimony of Michael Crichton before the United States Senate”
Committee on Environment and Public Works, Washington, D.C.
September 28, 2005

“The Impossibility of Prediction”
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.
Janaury 25, 2005

“Science Policy in the 21st Century”
Joint Session AEI-Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C.
January 25, 2005

“Environmentalism as Religion”
Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, CA
September 15, 2003

“Aliens Cause Global Warming”
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA
January 17, 2003

“Why Speculate?”
International Leadership Forum, La Jolla, CA
April 26, 2002

“Ritual Abuse, Hot Air, and Missed Opportunities: Science Views Media”
American Assoc. for the Advancement of Science, Anaheim, CA
January 25, 1999

“Mediasaurus: The Decline of Conventional Media”
National Press Club, Washington D.C.
April 7, 1993

[Dryman]

Further proof that Pluto is NOT a planet.

Dinosaurs are Birds.

Evolution is how/why we got here.

etc. etc. ad infinitum.

[NavVet]

Bookmark!

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Schnucki.

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