Comments on: Climategate: Is Peer-Review in Need of Change?

By: Varied Critics Assail Official Probing Climate Scientist - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

Fri, 07 May 2010 13:44:40 +0000

[...] is more remarkable to see Paul “Chip” Knappenberger join in. Knappenberger is a colleague of Patrick J. Michaels, the libertarian climate scientist [...]

By: Hostile witnesses on Climategate « Theology Geek NZ

Hostile witnesses on Climategate « Theology Geek NZ — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 04:44:23 +0000

[...] Chip Knappenberger As it now stands, a bias can exist in the current system. That it does exist is evident in the Climategate emails. By all appearances, it seems that some scientists are interested in keeping certain research (and particular researchers) out of the peer-review literature (and national and international assessments derived there from). While undoubtedly these scientists feel that they are acting in the best interest of science by trying to prevent too much backsliding and thereby keeping things moving forward efficiently, the way that they are apparently going about it is far from acceptable. [...]

By: Jon Carl Johnston

Jon Carl Johnston — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:06:34 +0000

The polar ice caps are melting for several reasons. The
most evident and still easiest to stop, is the huge
amount of kinetic energy sent into those waters by
the Ice Breaker Ships, Tankers, and Freighters we
allow to disturb those waters. Like a glass of ice
cubes being swirled around inside a glass of water,
the kinetic energy is melting the ice. Until we put
the glass back into the freezer, solidification will
not occur in our next ten generations (300 years).
The bad habits of our shipping and government
operations is the problem at it’s heart. The simple
corruption of the spirit of man will be all our down-
falls, and the decline of most species on planet
earth as we know it, including Homo Sapien sapien.
There is only a few other options, not worth trying
and too expensive to push at this late hour in the
timeline. The challenge is to cut through the egos
and pride, the paperwork and politics, and come
down on anyone transporting through Polar Seas.
These huge egg-beaters stir up the H2O so much,
the wakes go out for many miles to melt the ice.
Allowing them to continue is a method of madness.
Apply all the scientific theory you want, but open
your eyes first and apply common sense to the most
obvious lesson in high school science class: Apply
energy, raise the temperature, change the mass to
a different form.
Are you paying attention?
Go and see for yourself. The wakes are self evident,
if you’ll only “test the waters”.

By: Walter Sobchak

Walter Sobchak — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 06:13:14 +0000

Scientific Peer-Review is a Lightweight Process
Posted by Shannon Love on November 30th, 2009
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/10481.html

Excellent post. Shannon concludes:

Why then do we use peer review? Simple, publishing glaringly flawed papers or being seen as taking sides in a scientific dispute destroys journals both professionally and economically. Peer review protects the journals and the careers of the people who staff them.

***

Replication and proven predictive power, not the opinions of peers, test science assertions. Those iron objective tests separate science from all other disciplines. In the long run, scientific peers are always wrong. Science does not advance by consensus, it advances by the repeated destruction of each generation’s existing consensus.

If the strongest defense someone can muster for a paper’s conclusions is that “it has been peer reviewed,” that is a dead giveaway that the paper itself is very, very weak. Basing policy on scientific studies that have been merely peer reviewed is just flat insane.

By: Joe

Joe — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:00:31 +0000

” Climategate: Is Peer-Review in Need of Change?”

Indeed, the Climate Science has been thoroughly reviewed and by that British Peer of the Realm, Lord Monckton – but unfortunately that wasn’t part of the peer-review-process – and the process of keeping him and like minded inquisitors, and among them some very emminent scientists, out of it – is what’s brought it to this.

By: Lance McKee

Lance McKee — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:40:18 +0000

Begin by making data open and available: All the technology standards (See Open Geospatial Consortium: http://www.opengeospatial.org) are in place to build open systems that enable live and stored geospatial data (data with a location component) to be efficiently discovered, assessed, accessed, reused, etc. Then provide consensus-derived documentation of studies for the scientific record.

By: FT.com | FT Energy Source | Climategate and suspicion of science

FT.com | FT Energy Source | Climategate and suspicion of science — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:02:02 +0000

[...] be trusted. Quite a few blogs, such as Chip Knappenberger at Master Resource blog, suggest that the whole peer review process might be at fault. Certainly a large proportion of people are suspicious of mainstream science – [...]

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 02:51:11 +0000

I thought that Michaels and Balling’s suggestion in the last chapter of Climate of Extremes sounded like a good idea.

By: Gary

Gary — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 01:02:21 +0000

Chip,

Very thoughtful post you’ve written. I think the peer review process can benefit from the demonstrated effectiveness of two phenomena: crowd-sourcing and the way honey bees make decisions (see http://www.ece.osu.edu/~passino/PapersToPost/GrpDecMakHoneyBees-AmSci.pdf). Both use the collective wisdom of many individuals who participate to their level of ability and the value of the information they produce (rather than the producer’s “credentials”) is judged by others. The process is both egalitarian and efficient.

Of course there are lots of details to be worked out in terms of professional credit, priority of discovery, and other concerns now handled by the slow process of publication, but these don’t seem insurmountable and the professional societies might be the logical starting place for establishing the new paradigm in “peer” review. The whole topic is worthy of scholarly effort. It’s clear that the current process can be co-opted rather easily and needless scandal seems to be the only way to correct it.

By: Sabin Colton

Sabin Colton — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:10:22 +0000

The only problem I have with peer-review is when a field or topic is small or has only a small number of established researchers in the reviewer pool. I was in lipid research years ago and had problems with one reviewer. All of our papers were sent to him because he was the best there was outside of our lab; he was also our major competition, or that was the way he saw it. Generally, criticism was not a problem, but he would sit on our papers for months and slow down publication to a crawl. A few times we had to appeal to the journal involved for them to demand the return of the paper with the reviewer’s comments or publish anyhow without that individual’s input. It was rather frustrating, but out of our control – as it should be. I would not change this system, but the journals were generally willing to listen to well couched complaints from authors.