By Patrick Michaels, Forbes

Publishing in the scientific literature is supposed to be tough.  Submit a manuscript to a reputable journal and it will go through “peer review,” where your equals criticize your work, send their comments to a journal editor and then the editor will decide whether to accept your submission, reject it outright, or something in between.

In order to limit any bias caused by personal or philosophical animosity, the editor should remove your name from the paper and send it to other experts who have no apparent conflict of interest in reviewing your work.  You and the reviewers should not know who each other are. This is called a “double blind” peer review.

Well, this is “the way it is supposed to be.” But in the intellectually inbred, filthy-rich world of climate science, where billions of dollars of government research money support trillions of dollars of government policy, peer review has become anything but that.

There is simply no “double blindness.” For reasons that remain mysterious, all the major climate journals leave the authors’ names on the manuscripts sent out for review.

Economists, psychologists and historians of science all tell us (and I am inclined to believe them) that we act within our rational self-interest. Removing the double-blind restriction in such an environment is an invitation for science abuse.

What about if my professional advancement is dependent upon climate change monies (which applies to just about every academic or government climatologist)? I’m liable to really like a paper that says this is a horrible and important problem, and likely to rail against an author who says it’s probably a bit overblown.  May God have mercy on any manuscript that mentions the rather large elephant in the room, which is that we probably can’t do much about it anyway.

Such “confirmation bias” has been noted and studied for years, but the response of science in general - and atmospheric science in particular - has only been to make things worse.

Peer review has become “pal review.” Send a paper to one of the very many journals published by the American Geophysical Union - the world’s largest publisher of academic climate science - and you can suggest five reviewers.  The editor doesn’t have to take your advice, but he’s more likely to if you bought him dinner at the last AGU meeting, isn’t he? That is, of course, unless journal editors are somehow different than government officials, congressmen, or you.

Or, if you get wind that someone is about to publish something threatening your gravy train, maybe you can cajole the editor to keep it out of print for a year while you prepare a counter-manuscript.

That’s what the “Climategate” gang did with the International Journal of Climatology whn University of Rochester’s David Douglass submitted a paper.  His work showed that a large warming at high altitudes in the tropics - one of the major ways in which the enhanced greenhouse effect is supposed to change the climate - isn’t happening. For the gory details, click here.  The story on this one is still unfolding as the journal has declined to publish a sequel to the counter-manuscript.

Or you could simply ignore manuscripts sent to you that find problems with temperature histories.

But there has to be a gold standard somewhere, right?  Perhaps the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)?

Dream on. If you are a member of the National Academy, you can submit four manuscripts a year, called “contributed papers” as long as you do the “peer review” yourself!  That’s right: you send your manuscript to two of your friends, and then mail your paper along with their comments.  Again, pal review.

The PNAS editor then rubber-stamps the results.  In fact, the editor probably goes through quite a few rubber stamps a year, given that only 15 of the 800-odd contributed papers submitted in the last year were rejected.  For comparative purposes, Nature would have accepted only about 50 out of that number.

A recent paper submitted to PNAS by National Academy member Richard Lindzen was afforded special treatment.  The editor insisted that it be held to a different standard of review because of its “political implications.” Lindzen’s research found that carbon dioxide warming is likely to be much lower than what is being calculated by current climate models.

So what about the legion of alarmist papers from NASA firebrand James Hansen that PNAS publishes via pal review?  Don’t they have “political implications” too?  In the mind of our National Academy, apparently some political implications are more equal than others.

There’s a lot of confirmation bias working in Hansen’s favor, because it’s back to the back of the plane for ham-and-egger climate scientists if Lindzen is right. That’s where the “political implications” get personal.

There’s a lot more to this story. Lindzen eventually published his paper - which actually benefited from a real review - in an obscure journal.  But the next time you think that peer review is unbiased, think of confirmation bias, pal review and Climategate, and try to figure a way out of the mess that climate science has gotten itself into.

Patrick J. Michaels is Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute and author and editor of “Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of our Government and our Lives.”

Peter Vis, the chief of staff of EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard, has broken with protocol to warn that the European Commission’s draft Energy Efficiency Directive could “undermine” the bloc’s carbon market. It is extremely rare for Commission officials to comment on draft EU laws. Post.

But staff in the climate department are privately fuming that new efficiency regulations, due on 22 June, would apply not just to buildings and vehicles, but industrial sectors already covered by the EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS), which puts a price on carbon by placing a limit on CO2 emissions.

Such a duplication could depress carbon prices, as efficiency measures cancel out the need for pollution permits, leading to a market glut.

“More than half of those measures [in the draft] target the installations covered by the emissions trading scheme (ETS),” Vis told a conference organised by the German Marshall Fund of the US in Brussels.

“We have got two policy approaches knocking up against each other and that isn’t helpful.”

Carbon prices at risk of free-fall

Vis was speaking a day after five European energy companies warned that the draft directive risked a “tremendous decline” in carbon market prices.

“We’re big supporters of energy efficiency,” he said, “but we have to be careful not to undermine a system that is in place now – the ETS – which is a global leader”.

Two internal EU studies contained in an impact assessment predict carbon prices falling from €25 a tonne to either €14 a tonne, or close to zero, as a result of the efficiency drive.

That would dent budgeted revenues for low-carbon investment across the EU in the third phase of the ETS, which runs from 2013-2020.

Henry Derwent, president of the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), told EurActiv: “For a European climate policy which has been focused on achieving [carbon] prices high enough to drive investment to deliberately undermine and reduce that price seems quite extraordinary.”

Hedegaard has previously suggested that a corresponding number of “set aside” carbon permits could be removed from auction in the third phase of the ETS between 2013-20 to compensate for any carbon price shortfall. Vis described this as a “flanking measure”.

Policy dissonance

Meanwhile, market analysts have been shocked by the policy dissonance revealed in the latest spat.

Derwent bemoaned what he called “an extraordinary lack of understanding or faith” in the ETS by the architects of the efficiency directive.

Some analysts claim that EU climate policy has been increasingly influenced by energy-intensive firms, which have favoured low carbon prices, since the economic crisis began.

Vis stressed that the Commission’s environment department supported a free-market approach to reducing carbon emissions.

In a veiled reference to the EU’s energy commissioner, Günther Oettinger, he said: “Of course there are sometimes policymakers who say ‘let’s legislate and make it command and control and then we’ll be sure that they’re going to do it’.”

“But you can have an interaction which is less than happy between a regulatory approach and a market-based approach,” he added.

EurActiv understands that the final text of the efficiency directive is still being intensely negotiated behind closed doors by the commissioners’ staff in Brussels.

An official close to Hedegaard denied speculation that the problem occurred because Commissioner Oettinger had tried to shackle the ETS. “I don’t think there has been bad faith here,” he told EurActiv. “What we need to do is keep co-ordinating [between] ourselves.”

At a meeting of energy ministers in Luxembourg on 10 June, EU member states rejected one other key element of the draft directive: a binding 3% target for public building renovations that would have made schools and libraries more energy efficient. Portugal blamed the economic crisis for the proposal’s failure.

By Jim Hollingsworth

A bill to repeal the banning of ordinary incandescent light bulbs is bottled up in a congressional committee despite Americans’ apparent distaste for the more expensive bulbs that would replace them.

The 100-watt incandescent bulb is scheduled to be outlawed in January 2012, the 75-watt bulb will disappear in January 2013, and the 60-watt and 40-watt bulbs in January 2014.

The bill banning the bulbs - which use more energy than newer bulbs - was introduced in 2007 by then Rep. Jane Harman, a California Democrat, and Rep. Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican, and signed by President George W. Bush in December 2007.

Upton is now chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and while lobbying Republicans for the post he vowed to repeal the section of the 2007 bill that bans incandescent bulbs.

“We have heard the grass roots loud and clear, and will have a hearing early next Congress,” he said in December. “The last thing we wanted to do was infringe upon personal liberties, and this has been a good lesson that Congress does not always know best.”

In January, Texas Republican Rep. Joe Barton proposed the Better Use of Light Bulb (BULB) act, which would cancel the phase-out of incandescent bulbs. The bill has 62 co-sponsors, 61 of them Republicans, and a companion bill in the Senate has 28 co-sponsors.

But Upton’s committee has not yet held a hearing on the bill, and “House Republican leadership has evinced no interest in bringing the Barton bill to the floor,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes in RealClearMarkets. “Calls to repeal the incandescent light bulb ban are coming from consumers, who prefer incandescent lamps.”

“Chairman Upton,” she adds, “how about voting Mr. Barton’s bill out of committee and sending it to the House floor?”

Once incandescent bulbs vanish, Americans will have to purchase either compact fluorescent bulbs - known as CFLs - halogens, or light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

All three cost significantly more than incandescent bulbs, although they last longer. Many people don’t like the light cast by CFLs - the cheapest of the three - and they must be disposed of at special recycling centers because they contain mercury. They also pose a danger if broken in the home.

Another factor to consider: Incandescent bulbs are made in the United States, while almost all CFLs are made in China, according to Furchtgott-Roth.

She concludes: “Consumers should be free, in my opinion, to choose the light bulbs they prefer. If Congress believes that consumers should conserve energy, it can impose a tax on the model bulbs whose use it would discourage, or on electricity in general.”