The MMGW thing cast a pall on the credibility of peer review. They used “incestuous peer review” practices that would have gagged any legitimate scientist. They worked it like this.
One would be the “lead researcher” on a paper, with two others acting as “assistants”. Then a fourth member of their group would write the “peer review”. Then they would rotate positions, so that in one cycle of four papers, each of them would be lead once, peer reviewer once, and assistant twice. Then the cycle would start over with the fifth paper.
With tricks like this, the entire MMGW cabal was restricted to a few dozen insiders, some outsiders who believed, but were kept outside the primary group to cheer lead, and any others they could sucker into supporting them.
Truthfully, they didn’t even innovate this corruption of the peer review process. Credit for that goes to the pharma companies, who for years openly hired peer reviewers with the understanding that they would support the science, unless there were some really glaring errors, which they would quietly refer back to the pharma company.
Very true, unfortunately, and the blatantness of it as revealed in the "Climategate" emails REALLY p*ssed me off, because what they did hurts all of science and technology research.
And the above is why I plan to spend some time working through the references to the paper. But the details given in the paper itself don't raise any serious alarm bells in my mind based on what I already know about science in general and this topic area in particular. There are no "magic unknowns" that have to be overcome or laws of physics that seem to be contraverted (as in cold fusion).