Bias in the Peer Review Process: A Cautionary and Personal Account

by Ross McKitrick 


This article appears in the book:

Michaels, Patrick J., 2011: Climate Coup: Global Warming’s Invasion of Our Government and Our Lives. Cato Institute. ISBN: 978-1-935308447

The second chapter in this volume goes to the core of what we consider to be the canon of science, which is the peer reviewed, refereed scientific literature. McKitrick’s and my trials and tribulations over journal publication are similar to those experienced by many other colleagues. Unfortunately, the Climategate e-mails revealed that indeed there has been systematic pressure on journal editors to reject manuscripts not toeing the line about disastrous climate change. Even more unfortunate, my experience and that of others are that the post Climategate environment has made this situation worse, not better. It is now virtually impossible to publish anything against the alarmist grain. The piles of unpublished manuscripts sitting on active scientists’ desks are growing into gargantuan proportions. Surely, one day, there will be an incentive and an initiative to put them in the public domain probably after people realize the enormous costs that will accrue in futile attempts to stop planetary warming.

One interpretation of the infiltration of global warming into so many aspects of our political life is that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by claiming to be the ‘‘consensus of scientists,’’ is actually defining a ‘‘paradigm’’ in the sense of the late historian of science Thomas Kuhn. To Kuhn, paradigms are overarching logical structures, and the work of ‘‘normal science’’ is the care and feeding of paradigms with data and research findings that confirm that indeed the paradigm is a correct representation of scientific reality.

Kuhn notes that paradigms are very resistant to change, despite data or experiments that don’t ‘‘fit.’’ In his 1962 classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he states:

‘‘In science, . . . novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation. Initially, only the anticipated and usual are experienced even under circumstances where anomaly is later to be observed.1

Consequently, I wasn’t very surprised when the IPCC dismissed, without appropriate logic or citation, findings about systematic errors in global temperature records that Ross McKitrick and I had published in the peer reviewed literature. Nor was I surprised at how resistant the scientific community was to publishing those results or important follow on work.

This is the story of those difficulties with the IPCC and with the keepers of the paradigm. It is a story of how the core of the science literature is becoming one dimensional. How much this has to do with the grief caused to editors by the Climategate gang will never be known; it’s equally possible that the responsible editors were quite sympathetic with the authors of the emails and simply wanted to demonstrate their fealty by excluding work that the Climatgaters wouldn’t like from their journals.

This is a problem with profound consequences. The abject difficulty of publishing virtually anything that concludes that warming is likely to be lower than the current mean projections of the IPCC is creating a remarkable bias in climate science. Unfortunately, policymakers and the political class cannot see what is happening because the absence of these publications gives the appearance of unanimity of science that is hardly there.

—PJM

Read more here:

http://rossmckitrick.weebly.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/gatekeeping_chapter.pdf

 Don’t Look Now, But C02 Output Is Falling

Environment: Two years ago, greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. fell to their lowest levels since 1995. The list of reasons carbon dioxide emissions should not be regulated continues to grow.

The Environmental Protection Agency's data show that emissions of what are considered the six main greenhouses gases fell 6.1% in 2009 from their 2008 levels.

Yes, levels increased by 7.3% from 1990 to 2009. But the average annual rate of increase since 1990 has been a mere 0.4%, a data point that doesn't seem worthy of the high-intensity hysteria that's been spread by the alarmists.

In the same year greenhouse emissions fell, the EPA, which should be an acronym for Eternally Panicked and Alarmed, determined "that climate change caused by emissions of greenhouse gases threatens the public's health and the environment." Regarding politics to be more important than science, it has taken it upon itself to regulate carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."

"Climate change is happening now," the EPA has claimed, "and humans are contributing to it."

This is the same EPA, it was revealed in congressional testimony last week, that ignores the negative impact its regulations have on jobs, even though an executive order requires EPA rule makers to protect job creation. And it's the same EPA that plans to regulate CO2 without congressional approval.

If the agency is so keen on regulating carbon dioxide, maybe it should turn its attention to China, which has surpassed the U.S. in CO2 emissions. While U.S. greenhouse gas emissions increased 7.3% from 1990 to 2009, China's carbon dioxide emissions have soared roughly 175% since 1999. If CO2 emissions must be cut, then China is where the cutting has to start.

If not, it doesn't matter what the U.S. does. For every part per million of carbon dioxide that Americans cut, China, and its ever-burgeoning population and growing economy, will be pumping out even more.

Fortunately, there's no reason for any nation to cut its carbon dioxide emissions. CO2 is not a pollutant in the usual sense. It is, in the words of John R. Christy, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Alabama, "a plant food."

"The green world we see around us would disappear if not for atmospheric CO2," Christy says.

"These plants largely evolved at a time when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was many times what it is today," he adds. "Indeed, numerous studies indicate the present biosphere is being invigorated by the human-induced rise of CO2."

It is because of its presence in everything from breathing to driving to manufacturing to reading at home under the lights that CO2 makes a strong leverage point for those who want bureaucratic control over the rest of us, says Richard S. Lindzen, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

And if CO2 continues to fall, or remains nearly flat, what will the alarmists do? Will environmentalists find a new bogeyman? They will. But they better hurry. The time they have left to demonize CO2 is running short.

Source:

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/569632/201104191841/A-Green-World-Needs-Its-CO2.htm

The Climate Refugee Hoax

Junk Science: Five years ago, the U.N. predicted that by 2010 some 50 million people would be fleeing climate change, rising seas, mega-hurricanes and so on. Instead, no islands have sunk and their populations are booming.

It's been said that when you make a prediction and provide a date, never give a number, and if you give a number, never provide a date. That way you can always claim to be right, even when you are wrong, and that it just hasn't happened yet.

The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) made that mistake in 2005 when it produced a map showing areas to be impacted by the effects of climate change. These areas would produce 50 million "climate refugees" driven out by rising sea levels, increased frequency and ferocity of hurricanes, disruptions in food production, etc.

As related by blogger Gavin Atkins, who unearthed the forgotten prophecy of doom, some of these areas have conducted censuses and if they are facing any problems at all, it's caused by their rapid and sustained population growth. If anybody is leaving any of the danger zones, it's because they are getting too crowded.

For example, the latest census report shows that the population of the Solomon Islands near Australia has passed a half-million, up 100,009 in the last decade. The Seychelles, in the Indian Ocean, has seen its population rise from 81,755 in 2002 to 88,311.

The Bahamas, a favorite vacation spot for those rich capitalists plundering the earth, has added more than 50,000 people. China's six fastest-growing cities are in the middle of one of UNEP's climate change-affected danger zones, as are many U.S. coastal cities. At last report there was no mass migration inland. Apparently these endangered populations didn't get the memo.

In 2005, Britain's Guardian reported the refugee prediction by Janos Bogardi of the Institute for Environment and Human Security at the United Nations University in Bonn. He spoke of "well-founded fears that the number of people fleeing untenable environmental conditions may grow exponentially as the world experiences the effects of climate change." Well-founded?

The article noted that New Zealand had agreed to accept the 11,600 inhabitants of the low-lying Pacific island state Tuvalu if rising sea levels swamp the country. At last report, Tuvalu is alive and well and above water.

Apocalyptic changes forecast by climate change alarmists, according to Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Morner, former head of the International Commission on Sea Level Change, are not in the cards. Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10 cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10 cm."

Source:

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/569069/201104131900/The-Climate-Refugee-Hoax.aspx

Prof. Dr. Vincent Courtillot 

Scientifically Exposing The Problems With IPCC Science

http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/">