Back again, Jeremy?

Knowledge of climate science is irrelevant to being aware of the problems of publication and peer review. In case you genuinely want some details on the climate change situation, the following may assist.

Here is what Carter says about his peer reviewed paper published in Journal for Geophysical Research :

“In July 2009 we published a paper in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) in which we described the results of comparing global atmospheric temperature since 1958 with variations in the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climatic framework. Our analysis supported earlier research that demonstrates a close link between these factors, and indicated that a large portion of the variability in global temperature is explained by ENSO variation, thus leaving little room for a substantial human influence on temperature”.

This excited the Climategate miscreants who were able to quickly publish an inadequate refutation of the paper, which stood as a reference for as long as they were able to stall Carter’s rejoinder.

It is amusing to read the Climategate email, in relation to their inadequate comment, which they thought would never see the light of day, exposing their unethical behaviour.:

““Incidentally I gave a copy [of the Foster et al. critique] to Mike McPhaden and discussed it with him last week when we were together at the OceanObs'09 conference. Mike is President of AGU. Basically this is an acceptance with a couple of suggestions for extras, and some suggestions for toning down the rhetoric. I had already tried that a bit. My reaction is that the main thing is to expedite this.”
Kevin Trenberth to Grant Foster, September 28, 2009

Robert Carter is an eminent and respected climate scientist, no doubt the reason that the fraud backers were keen to besmirch and obstruct publication of his science.

Dear "All":

Lets keep the Earth flat...its comfortable!

Dan...

Peer review has it's failings, but any author whose whinge is that they got rejected by Science and Nature, but accepted by PNAS has a planet-sized chip on their shoulder. If you submit articles to journals, you are going to get rejected sooner or later, and often for reasons that might not seem fair or reasonable. This is doubly true for top level journals like Nature, who are innundated with submissions, so can be incredibly picky about what they accept. Get over it and resubmit somewhere else - if your work has merit it will get published.

Of course "skeptics" abound with strategies which they roll out contingent on the task at hand (and I'm not targeting Don Aitkin here, merely noting that the skeptic movement appears to conform to a strategic modus operandi - which commonly has no scientific or evidence-based component)

Attacking "peer-review" is apparently the latest tactic.

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2007/05/08/beware-the-bashers-of-peer-rev/

Curmudgeon, Monday, 18 February 2013 10:15:18 AM wrote:

>>The paper should have gone in Nature.>>

I suspect that with the benefit of hindsight the editors of Nature agree with you. But we all make mistakes.

The point about being published in a prestigious journal is that other scientists will take note. All the Nature Publication Group Journals, Science, PNAS and other more specialised journals such as Reviews of Modern Physics or Cell are megaphones. Others, such as the impressive sounding Journal of Pediatric Biochemistry, that seem to exist mainly to enable second rate academics to claim some publications, are barely audible whispers. It's hard to hear them above the noise. In fact a fair proportion of what appears on their pages is noise.

On the whole the more prestigious journals deserve their reputation. Most of the really interesting scientific papers first appear there. Open Clinical Chemistry Journal may have published some ground breaking research but I doubt it.

Getting a controversial paper into PNAS guarantees it will get a fair hearing. Maybe in this case the peer review system did not work as well as it should have, but it got there in the end. Contrary to the conspiracy theorists, important scientific research was not suppressed.

If anything in this case Nature's and Science's rejections actually gave the paper more prominence than it would otherwise have had.

Now if anyone can think of a better system of ensuring a reasonable standard of quality in scientific journals than peer review let's hear it. That would be a much more interesting conversation than dark hints of evil scientists conspiring to suppress inconvenient research.

So what are the alternatives to the peer review SYSTEM?

It appears that sceptics are just as ridiculed in the medical research field as they are in the climate science field. Society is the poorer as a result.