Bias in the Peer Review Process: A Cautionary and Personal Account
by Ross McKitrick
This article appears in the book:
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 The piles of unpublished manuscripts sitting on active scientists’ desks are growing into gargantuan proportions.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
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