Bishop Hill Blog

Roy Spencer has penned some further thoughts on the campaign being waged by the Team and he is worried:

We simply cannot compete with a good-ole-boy, group think, circle-the-wagons peer review process which has been rewarded with billions of research dollars to support certain policy outcomes.

It is obvious to many people what is going on behind the scenes. The next IPCC report (AR5) is now in preparation, and there is a bust-gut effort going on to make sure that either (1) no scientific papers get published which could get in the way of the IPCC’s politically-motivated goals, or (2) any critical papers that DO get published are discredited with any and all means available.

And it’s hard to disagree with these ideas; the stench of corruption from climatology is quite overpowering. However, the conclusion that the battle is in danger of being lost, I’m not so sure about. I still wonder if the Team haven’t gone too far this time.

I suggested on Twitter over the weekend that the Remote Sensing affair demonstrated that the peer review process in climatology is now so corrupt that even if the IPCC was staffed by angels there would be no chance of a balanced assessment of the science: even-handed reviews can’t create balanced assessments of the sham that is climate science. Richard Betts begged to differ, saying that there was only a perception of bias, and one that didn’t reflect reality.

It’s a possibility I suppose. We might assume that:

- when the Team said they would get rid of von Storch and he subsequently resigned this was just a coincidence

- when the Team discussed getting rid of Saiers and he was subsequently removed from responsibility for the McIntyre/McKitrick paper, this was just a coincidence too

- the non-appearance of McKitrick and Michaels’ paper in AR4 drafts was not connected to Jones’ suggestion that he would keep it out of the review

- Wagner’s resignation was a reasonable response to a blog post at Real Climate etc.

But, you know, I’m just not sure how many coincidences like this we can be expected to bear.

The thing is that even if Richard is right and there isn’t much of a problem in the peer reviewed literature, there is still the problem that peer review and the IPCC not only need to be even-handed, but they need to be seen to be even-handed. With the Remote Sensing affair, that possibility is now long gone. Who is going to believe a word of AR5 now?