Bob Carter, Special to Financial Post
Government cash influences the process
The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has referred to its work as the gold standard, based on its oft-made claim that it only surveys work published in peer-reviewed professional research papers.
Interestingly, Albert Einstein’s famous 1905 paper on relativity was not peer-reviewed. It is therefore quite clear that peer-review is not a precondition for excellent, indeed epoch-making, scientific research.
So what is a peer-reviewed (also termed refereed) research paper?
Peer-review is a technique of quality control for scientific papers that emerged slowly through the 20th century, only achieving a dominant influence in science after the Second World War. The process works like this. A potential scientific author conducts research, writes a paper on his or her results and submits the paper to a professional journal that represents the specialist field of science in question.
The editor of the journal then scan-reads the paper. Based upon his knowledge of the contents of the paper, and of the activities of other scientists in the same research field, the editor selects (usually) two persons, termed referees, to whom he sends the draft manuscript of the paper for review.
Referees, who are unpaid, differ in the amount of time and effort that they devote to their task of review. At one extreme a referee will criticize and correct the writing of a paper in detail, including making comments on the scientific content; at the other extreme, a referee may merely skim-read a paper, ignoring obvious mistakes in writing style or grammar, and make some general comments to the editor about the scientific accuracy, or otherwise, of the draft paper.
Neither type of referee, nor those who lie between, pretend to check either the original data or the detailed statistical calculations (or, today, complex computer modelling) that often form the kernel of a piece of modern scientific research.
Each referee makes a recommendation to the editor as to whether the paper should be published (usually with corrections) or rejected, the editor making the final decision regarding publication based on this advice.
In essence, then, peer-review is a technique of editorial quality control. That a scientific paper has been peer-reviewed is absolutely no guarantee that the science it portrays is correct. Indeed, it is the very nature of scientific research that nearly all scientific papers require later emendation, or reinterpretation, in the light of new discoveries or understanding.
Scientific knowledge, then, is always in a state of flux. Much though bureaucrats and politicians may dislike the thought, there is simply no such thing as “settled science,” peer-reviewed or otherwise During the latter part of the 20th century, Western governments started channelling large amounts of research money into favoured scientific fields, prime among them global-warming research. This money has a corrupting influence, not least on the peer-review process.
Many scientific journals, including prestigious internationally acclaimed ones, have now become captured by insider groups of leading researchers in particular fields. Researchers who act as editors of journals then select referees from within a closed circle of scientists who work in the same field and share similar views.
The Climategate email leak in 2009 revealed for all to see that this cancerous process is at an advanced stage of development in climate science. A worldwide network of leading climate researchers were revealed to be actively influencing editors and referees to approve for publication only research that supported the IPCC’s alarmist view of global warming, and to prevent the publication of alternative or opposing views.
Backed by this malfeasant system, leading researchers who support the IPCC’s red-hot view of climate change endlessly promulgate their alarmist recommendations as “based only upon peer-reviewed research papers,” as if this were some guarantee of quality or accuracy.
Peer-review, of course, guarantees neither. What matters is not whether a scientific idea or article has been peer-reviewed but whether the science described is right, i.e. accords with empirical evidence.
So what about the much-trumpeted, claimed “gold standard"of strict use of peer review papers by the IPCC? Well, this has been completely exposed by Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise, who showed that an amazing 30% of the articles cited in the definitive Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC were from non-peer-reviewed sources, including such writings as student theses and environmental lobbyist reports.
Therefore, the repetition of the “we-only-use-peer-reviewed-information” mantra that is so favoured by lobbying and government-captive scientific organizations signals not just scientific immaturity but also a lack of confidence, or ability, to assess the scientific arguments about global warming on their own merits and against the empirical evidence.
Financial Post
Bob Carter is a palaeoclimatologist at James Cook University in Australia and Chief Science Advisor to the International Climate Science Coalition.
Go to page 38 for Wegman’s discussion on peer review of Mann’s papers. The alarmists have tried to discredit the report and have tried to trash Wegman. Mann never refers to it, preferring to say that the competing NAS report “exonerated” him completely. True the fix was in to get Mann out of the hole but even this report couldn’t find anything to defend in Mann’s work, except to say that Mann was probably right to say that the present global temperatures were greater than those assumed over the preceding 400 years. Convenient, since the little ice age occurred during that time.
Diplomats at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Conference in Rio de Janeiro next week will consider proposals that would levy taxes on American families and energy industries in order to support international efforts to combat global warming, according to a draft agenda for the conference.
“We recognize that subsidies for non-renewable energy development should be eliminated and replaced with a global tax on the production of energy from non-renewable energy sources,” the UN draft agenda, amended by non-governmental organizations at the invitation of the UN, says. “The income of this tax should be allocated to renewable energy development.” The draft agenda was obtained by the Center for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a group skeptical of the UN’s position on global warming.
President Obama has adopted similar policy positions in his discussions of energy and tax policy over recent months. “I am writing to urge you to take immediate action to eliminate unwarranted tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, and to use those dollars to invest in clean energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Obama said in an April 26 letter to top-ranking members of the House and Senate.
Another proposal would spread the cost of investing in other countries throughout society. “We call for the fulfilment of all official development assistance commitments, including the commitments by many developed countries to achieve the target of 0.7 per cent of gross national product for official development assistance to developing countries by 2015,” the draft says. The proposal would provide “a target of .015 to .020 percent of gross national product for official development assistance to least developed countries.” That plan would cost $1,325 for an American family of four, according to CFACT.
“Rio+20 is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to make real progress towards the sustainable economy of the future,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said at a press conference last week."We aspire to nothing less than a global movement for generational change.” The draft agenda notes that “views represented in this document do not necessarily represent the views of the Secretariat, who only aggregated the submissions.”
CFACT reported in December that negotiators at the UN conference on climate change in Durban, South Africa, discussed the future implementation of “a new tax on every foreign currency transaction in the world,” that would disproportionately fall on the United States because “transactions within the Eurozone won’t have to pay this new tax.”
This tax would help pay for the Green Climate Fund, “which will eventually gather and disburse finance amounting to $100bn (£64bn) per year to help poor countries develop cleanly and adapt to climate impacts,” according to the BBC.
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Battle against Obama’s war on coal
By Phil Kerpen
As I wrote here on Fox News Opinion, the states in the Eastern region are headed for a significant spike in electricity prices thanks to Obama’s disastrous regulations, foremost among them Utility MACT. The Midwest, even more heavily reliant on coal-fired power plants, will be hit even harder. A reprieve could come in the form of Senator Jim Inhofe’s S.J. Res 37, which would overturn Obama’s most expensive anti-coal regulations.
Indeed, with the vote on the Inhofe Resolution coming any day, Democrats are deeply concerned that a centerpiece of President Obama’s regulatory War on Coal is about to go down in flames. The only apparent way Democrats can prevent that outcome is by having multiple vulnerable in-cycle Democrats join Obama’s War on Coal, against their own political interests.
The only Senate Republican who has publicly sided with Obama in support of the disastrous Utility MACT regulation that would cripple coal-fired power plants and therefore imperil our fragile economic recovery is Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander, and he has been exposed to his constituents in a hard-hitting TV ad being run by my group, American Commitment.
The outcome of the vote, which is not subject to filibuster, is on a razor’s edge. But Senator Alexander, who is under the mistaken impression that this economically devastating regulation will make his mountain retreat slightly more picturesque, refuses to back down.
Instead, according to sources on Capitol Hill, Alexander is poised to make a desperate attempt to get himself off the hook politically, thwart Inhofe’s resolution and give Obama’s War on Coal a green light.
The ploy he plans to use is a phony amendment, reportedly being offered with Arkansas’s Mark Pryor that would extend the timeline for the Utility MACT rule from four years to six.
The amendment would not and could not pass the Senate, because it will surely be filibustered by California Democrat Barbara Boxer.
Inhofe’s resolution needs 50 votes and has a good chance of getting there; the phony Alexander amendment will need 60 and almost certainly be dead-on-arrival. Even if by some miracle it could pass, the Alexander amendment would accomplish little - delaying a disastrous rule is hardly a victory, and most plants will close rather than attempt expensive retrofits no matter how many years they are given.
After West Virginia, no state has been hit harder by Obama’s War on Coal than Kentucky. It’s time for Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell to enforce some party discipline and explain to Alexander that this vote and this issue are far too important economically for phony political amendments and games. Does he really want to pave the way for Obama to accomplish his goal of making electric prices “necessarily skyrocket” and make it so that “you can build a coal plant...but it will bankrupt you”?
If Alexander does offer the amendment, neither he nor anyone who votes for it should be let off the hook. Constituents should make clear that, regardless of any sham amendments that might be offered, senators will be held accountable for how they vote on the only real vehicle that can put the brakes on the War on Coal: the Inhofe Resolution.
Read more.
See what MACT is all about in this Forbes article by Marlo Lewis.
In advance of the rule’s start date, more than 25,000 megawatts of affordable coal generation will be retired due to the EPA’s air rules for electric power plants. That’s enough lost generation to furnish electricity for more than 22 million households. Tens of thousands of workers could lose their jobs and millions of consumers will be paying higher electricity bills as a result of the EPA’s overbearing regulations.
Well, another week brings more bad news for jobs, affordable energy, and the basic need for a reliable electric supply to support economic development. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which oversees America’s electric grid, now projects that interruptions in electric service may occur in both Southern California and Texas this summer. In addition, New England is subject to proactive measures in an attempt to maintain reliable electric service in that region. Now is NOT the time to turn off more generation when we are already running short.
UPDATE: GREAT NEWS. This afternoon the NC Senate voted FOR the amazing SLR bill HB-819: 35 to 12. Several Democrats sided with the Republicans. The NC House will vote in the next day or so.
By John Droz Jr., Master Resource
What’s been happening recently in North Carolina (NC) is a microcosm of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) story: politics versus science, ad-hominems versus journalism, evangelists versus pragmatists, etc.
The contentiousness is over one of the main AGW battlefields: sea-level rise (SLR). North Carolina happens to have a large amount of coastline and has become the U.S. epicenter for this issue.
Background
The brief version is that this began several years ago when a state agency, the Coastal Resources Commission (CRC), selected a 20 plus/minus member “science panel” to do a scientific assessment of the NC SLR situation through 2100. This could have been a very useful project if there had been balance in the personnel selections, and the panel’s assessment adhered to scientific standards. Regrettably, neither happened and the project soon jumped the rails, landing in the political agenda ditch.
In their 2010 report, the panel concluded that NC should expect a 39-inch SLR by 2100. Their case was built around a 2007 paper by Stefan Rahmstorf, and was not encumbered by a single reference to a perspective different from Rahmstorf’s. Shortly after the report was released, state agencies started making the rounds of North Carolina coastal communities, putting them on notice that they would need to make BIG changes (elevating roads and bridges, re-zoning property, changing flood maps for insurance purposes, etc.).
My Involvement
As an independent scientist, I was solicited by my coastal county to provide a scientific perspective on this report. Even though I wasn’t a SLR expert, I could clearly see that this document was a classic case of Confirmation Bias, as it violated several scientific standards. But to get into the technical specifics I solicited the inputs of about 40 international SLR experts (oceanographers, etc.).
I compiled and edited their responses to the CRC panel’s report into what I called a Critique. This 33-page document discussed how real science works, and then went through the 16-page CRC document, essentially line-by-line. In doing so numerous specious claims, unsupported assumptions, and questionable models were pointed out. It wasn’t pretty.
It was during this time that I was solicited to work with a small coastal organization called NC-20 (there are 20 NC coastal counties). Since they were interested in promoting science-based solutions (my agenda) for NC coastal issues, I agreed to be their Science Advisor and a board member (both non-paying, volunteer positions).
Initially we had hopes that the CRC panel’s report could be fixed, so we met with the head of the CRC, explained our concerns, and handed the Critique to him. He appeared to be receptive, and we were optimistic that this important matter could be straightened out. That proved to be an illusion, as none of the CRC panel members ever contacted us about fixing any of their mistakes, or about doing a more balanced assessment. Shame on them.
We subsequently asked that the Critique be posted on CRC’s SLR webpage, but they refused to do so. So much for presenting the facts to NC citizens.
On the positive side of things, due to our objections, the state did (temporarily anyway) back off from the rules and regulations that they had threatened coastal communities with. [BTW NC-20 is NOT disputing that there will be SLR. The amount of NC SLR is unknown, so a genuine scientific assessment of the NC SLR situation should be undertaken. What such an assessment entails is explained in the Critique’s Part 1.]
By all appearances, it seems the CRC assumed that the prestige of their science panel would win the day against the NC-20 upstarts. To help assure that outcome, they engaged in an intensive PR campaign to pervert this into a science versus real estate developers issue (with them representing the science side, of course!). Here’s a sample of several articles that appeared, and another.
More Confusion
It was during this time that a CRC Panel member wrote me saying that they agreed with the Critique, and apologized for signing off on the Panel’s report! The member stated that the Panel was driven by a few activists, and that everyone else simply went along. This was no surprise, but that an individual had the good conscience to apologize was refreshing.
Anyway, the CRC panel’s disinformation campaign didn’t work, as we didn’t go away. Further, almost everyone who actually read the Critique ended up being on our side. One legislator who liked it asked us to make a presentation to interested state legislators in November 2011. We took that opportunity and it was well received (see my part).
Not long after that the CRC panel changed their tactics. Their new plan was to issue an Addendum to their 2010 report, and then claim that all of our concerns were answered. If only that were the case! Their nine-page document was prepared after zero contact with us - which tells you all you need to know about the sincerity that they had in any scientific resolution.
My response was to follow the successful earlier pattern, so I passed it on to my network of international SLR experts for their commentary. Again they were forthcoming, so I was able to compile and edit a detailed 18-page response that I called a Commentary. We again sent this directly to CRC, asked them to put it on their SLR website - but posted it ourselves on our own site. [We received no response from CRC, and they have yet to post our document.]
A Victory
What happened next was a BIG surprise. We were notified that state legislators were as exasperated as we were with the politicalization of these technical issues - and that they were going to introduce legislation to stop the agenda promoters! Wow.
In this case, SLR legislation was drafted by a staffer who has a PhD in oceanography. The main point of the document was that future SLR projections must be made based on extrapolating prior empirical data. In other words, state agencies would not be allowed to create policies that were based on speculations about some possible acceleration!
As a scientist, I’m always concerned about legislating technical matters. In this case, though, the evidence is quite clear that certain NC agencies have no genuine interest in real science. So what to do? Defunding them is a possibility, but that might be throwing the baby out with the bath water. Replacing the agency’s problem people is another option, but the logistics for that weren’t practical. So putting some constraints on these dogmatists has some merit.
...and Backlash
Not surprisingly, the backlash was immediate. These evangelists are used to getting their way, and for legislators to actually stand up against their religion was an unexpected development.
In their anguish they lashed out to anyone they could blame for this roadblock in their crusade - including yours truly. There were numerous rants (some national) lamenting how “good science” was being thwarted by ignorant legislators. Even the Colbert Report had fun with it.
Of course, the reality that the legislators were actually trying to protect North Carolina citizens from promoters masquerading their agendas as science, was rarely reported. Such are the times we are living in, where talk is cheap, and few understand what science really is.
What’s worse is that thousands of scientists are off the reservation, and have no interest in adhering to scientific principles or procedures. The solution (in my opinion) is that such renegades should have their degrees revoked, just as a priest is defrocked for violating his vows.
In any case, here is the latest version of NC SLR bill (H819 v3). Last Friday, there was a brief committee hearing (see interesting video) where this measure was discussed and voted on. It passed unanimously. If you have suggestions on improving this bill, please contact me.
What’s Next?
As I understand it, the NC legislators may be voting on this measure this week. I am hoping that they will not be dissuaded from their worthy objective. I wrote this (word-limited-and-edited) op-ed to respond to some of the misinformation.
Some predict that this measure will pass the legislature and then be vetoed by our lame-duck Governor. As an optimist, I’m hoping that since the Governor no longer needs to cater to the green constituency, that instead she can send a message that real science should be the basis of the state’s technical policies. That would give her legacy a major positive boost.