Letters to the Editor
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Desperation and Science make dangerous bed-fellows
I apreciate you wasting your time to respond, Droogoy, and in the end we shall obviously both be at the same place we are now: me doubting the validity of the IPCC data and you convinced the peer review process has been successful. But, what happens when the peer reviewing your paper is evidently antagonistic towards you? (as has been your own experience.) I guess you seek a more friendly peer, one more likely to grant credence to the majority of your conclusions, no? By this, I am suggesting the peer review system is itself flawed since the IPCC set out with a clear POLITICAL agenda, not a scientific agenda, which is to allow the UN to govern every single country’s industrial output. Thus, the ‘peers’ chosen to do the reviewing were more likely to have been selected for their likelihood to lean towards one conclusion or another. One of the obvious outcomes of this political agenda is to create a new global tax on you and me, basically for just breathing. Another more dangerous outcome would be to sanction experiments with man-made techniques for actually altering weather and/or eco systems. We’ve been doing this kind of thing for years, with invariably disastrous results, from genetical selection to create ‘new’ dog breeds, up to introducing foreign species in order to counter certain undesired natural occurences.
It is not hard proof I am asking for, I am not as dumb as to expect this, I am asking for PROPER peer review and a separation of politics from scientific studies. An example of how politics governs scientific research is this:
The infamous temperature hockey stick curve, the leading
symbol of the IPCC report in 2001, was created to show that
the global average temperature in the 1990s was unusual and
the highest in the past 1,000 years. The Medieval Warming
(the years 950 to 1300), well documented in the former IPCC
reports, disappeared from this hockey stick curve, as did the
earlier Roman Warm Period (200 B.C. to 600 A.D.), the
Holocene Warm Period (8,000 to 5,000 years before the pres-
ent), and the deep cooling of the Little Ice Age (the years 1350
to 1850)—Figure 6.
The fraudulence of this hockey stick curve was documented
by Legates 2002, Legates 2003, McIntyre and McKitrick 2003
Soon 2003, Soon and Baliunas 2003, and Soon et al. 2003.
But criticism of the IPCC 2001 hockey stick curve of tempera-
ture appeared to be a mine field: The six editors of the journal
Climate Researchwho dared to publish the Soon and Baliunas
2003 paper were fired by the publisher.
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Agendas
Solarpower wrote:
But, what happens when the peer reviewing your paper is evidently antagonistic towards you? (as has been your own experience.)
Actually, I have never had that experience. If you will re-read my post 'Akasofu Redux' you will see my experience was NOT in the context of getting a paper peer reviewed, but of Akasofu making a nuisance of himself at a seminar I was giving. The papers were ALREADY published!
In other words, Prof. A was disputing the very basis for publication. Some years later, he and cohorts did come up with their own paper, 'A Dynamo Theory of Solar Flares' - but it was laughable in that it applied so many auroral mechanisms to solar events.
Now, though I have never ever had a referee "antagonistic" toward a paper I prepared, I have had at least one complain, about this, that and the other. What I did then was revise the paper to the criteria the ref wanted. Some months later it was published. I suspect 90% of this mewling and whining by contrarians is because they aren't prepared to do the necessary revisions required to get their work in a mainline journal.
I guess you seek a more friendly peer, one more likely to grant credence to the majority of your conclusions, no?
Sorry, no - doesn't work! You get an unnamed referee and all the journals I have published in make it clear from the outset YOU don't get to pick and choose who will review it.
However, if conference papers are being produced, there will sometimes be the opportunity to suggest possible referees. That doesn't mean you will get them by any means!
By this, I am suggesting the peer review system is itself flawed since the IPCC set out with a clear POLITICAL agenda, not a scientific agenda
That's preposterous. What you are saying in effect is that DOZENS of journals that deal with climate science or paleo-climate studies are flawed in their respective peer reviews. That's nonsense, and you haven't one iota of evidence to support it.
Journals have to comply with very specific and rigorous standards, all set by overseeing organizations that publish them. For example, the American Astronomical Society oversees the editing, etc. of The Astrophysical Journal. They do not simply nix proffered papers because a submitter belongs to a political ideology, nor do they accept them. The papers must be based on solid science. As George Monbiot noted in the Physics Today piece I quoted, the IPCC has the most solid science behind it.
What has happened, as Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton noted in the same article, is that the science is hardening as many more inputs enter and the conclusions of the SCIENCE are causing a meltdown in political circles, because governments like the capitalist US of A do not wish to deal with the economic consequences the the scientific conclusions point the need for. So you have it exactly back asswards.
All the climate and atmospheric scientists I have known the past twenty years, would be mightily insulted if someone asserted they worked from a political "agenda". They are not. However, all are -were painfully aware of how their conclusions and scientific findings can arouse ire.
It is in the nature of humans. When conclusions emerge that point to the need for painful change, humans don't want to do it. A nation addicted to cheap oil and profits over people, and an economy-finance dominant mindset (over protecting resources and preservation of the planet) will ALWAYS find fault with findings that point to the need to cut back, or conserve or change methodologies.
But here's something further for you to consider: WHY is it so many businesses now are behind the IPCC thrust? Even oil companies, like British Petroleum, are changing their tune. Ask yourself that before you concoct or come back with more of these conspiracy theories.
Lastly, I never said I was "wasting my time", I said I had to attend to other priorities and those have deadlines, unlke posting to blogs and such. If you still aren't satisfied with the responses given, I can't help that. We agree to differ, what more can I say?