It makes a difference to your own Appeal to Authority argument, because if they’re not a science journal why should it matter if they’re peer-reviewed at all or which panel of experts likes what they publish? Even if they WERE a science journal, you are in effect just validating the arguments being used against you–and effectively re-validating all the peer-reviewed research of the mainstream community that stands in opposition to E&E. Since they can’t both be right, and since pretty much nobody has direct access to the raw data and results of *any* of these articles, once you have validated the peer-review process most of your audience will back the strongest horse, as it were. So, thanks.

SEE ALSO: self-styled “skeptics” gushing over the academic bonafides of Fred Singer and the thousands of footnotes printed by Bjorn Lomborg. They don’t deny the worth of the meritocratic academic status-quo, far from it: they want it all for themselves, but by and large haven’t earned it and so are trying to fake it.

Check out

Roy Spencer: And all this time, we thought you were a scientist. Weird.
http://climateforce.wordpress.com/2011/07/07/roy-spencer-and-all-this-time-we-thought-you-were-a-scientist-weird/

There are some scientific topics that are difficult, but climate science isn’t one of them – at least, not the way these guys do it. I’m guessing from the way you said that you don’t know much climate science, or you’d be a lot less impressed. A dozen or so people in the world able to understand it?! They couldn’t even get the location of Paris, France right.

I’m not making any accusations of conspiracy, either. This seems to follow from the expert-based belief system – that the only possible explanation for all the experts getting it wrong is some sort of organised conspiracy. A far simpler explanation is that they all did exactly what you’ve just done – trusted the experts.

A theory becomes accepted without being properly examined, everybody learns it as the accepted theory, and everybody assumes somebody else must have checked it – so they don’t need to. The longer it goes on, the harder it is for anyone to believe it could be wrong, and so the less likely it is anyone will check. Past a certain threshold, the accepted narrative becomes self-sustaining, and immune to challenge even when somebody does eventually try to confirm it. Nobody can believe so many could have got it wrong. It’s happened time and time again – no conspiracy required, just humans being human. That’s why science abandoned authority arguments in the first place.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/04/a-peer-reviewed-admission-that-global-surface-temperatures-did-not-rise-dr-david-whitehouse-on-the-pnas-paper-kaufmann-et-al-2011/

64. Nullius in Verba Says:
July 5th, 2011 at 2:08 pm
#63,
This is a fairly standard tactic – having lost on the “peer-reviewed” criterion, additional criteria are introduced to distinguish between “respectable” and “non-respectable” peer-reviewed journals – the definition apparently being whether they keep out sceptical papers or not. By this means, sceptics cannot get published in respectable journals by definition, since any journal that would publish them is ipso facto disreputable. (“Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”) There’s nothing wrong or different about the peer-review at E&E, except that the editors aren’t ardent warmists.
Any journal that would publish MBH98/99 effectively unchecked – with a catalogue of basic errors pages long – is clearly not applying any special quality standard compared to ones like E&E.
“but it doesn’t make them worth anything as far as acceptance in the portion of the scientific community that actually matters is concerned.”
The part of the scientific community that actually “matters”?! You mean, the part that believes in AGW, that sits on committees making pronouncements, that advises politicians, that gives media interviews. You mean the part that matter politically. As far as the science goes, none of it matters. All that matters is the evidence – whether the paper is correct or not. As soon as you start dividing the scientific community up into “respectable” and “non-respectable”, the same way you just did the journals, you’ve lost touch completely with evidence-based scientific standards are into the domain of academic politics.

You can not be serious telling me that a bunch of neoclassical economists or petroleum geologists are qualified to judge the merits of climatology papers. Because this is just what you just said. They may be experts in their areas (the pseudoscientific nature of most of economics aside), but they have no clue of the specifics of climatology research. This applies even to extremely narrow subfields in certain broader discipline. Math is the most dramatic example where it is not rare for only a dozen or so people in the whole world to be able to understand a paper, but the observation applies for all of science. Typically only a small group of people are qualified to review any given technical paper. That’s not because that small group of people are consciously participating in some secret cabal that aims to deceive everyone else, it is because the science is very complex and the geeky technical details that few people know matter a lot. The accusation of conspiracy is absolutely ridiculous anyway, because for it to be true, it would have to have encompassed scientists from all over the world during the Cold War era when the foundations of the science were laid. I find that quite hard to believe.

No, it’s a journal about energy and environmental policy – not that that makes any difference. The peer-reviewers were selected appropriately for the subject. And Sonja was discounting any claims of authority – precisely what every journal’s position should be. Science progresses not by consensus but by trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

The editor of E&E has publicly admitted that it is not a science journal at all and they do not claim their information is actually right.

Instead they self-identify–with what seems like pride!–as a FoxNewsian “other side” that deserves to be heard, as befits the postmodernist affirmative-action trappings of entitlement that comprise 99+% of climate “skepticism.”

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=407763

This is a fairly standard tactic – having lost on the “peer-reviewed” criterion, additional criteria are introduced to distinguish between “respectable” and “non-respectable” peer-reviewed journals – the definition apparently being whether they keep out sceptical papers or not. By this means, sceptics cannot get published in respectable journals by definition, since any journal that would publish them is ipso facto disreputable. (“Kevin and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”) There’s nothing wrong or different about the peer-review at E&E, except that the editors aren’t ardent warmists.

Any journal that would publish MBH98/99 effectively unchecked – with a catalogue of basic errors pages long – is clearly not applying any special quality standard compared to ones like E&E.

“but it doesn’t make them worth anything as far as acceptance in the portion of the scientific community that actually matters is concerned.”

The part of the scientific community that actually “matters”?! You mean, the part that believes in AGW, that sits on committees making pronouncements, that advises politicians, that gives media interviews. You mean the part that matter politically. As far as the science goes, none of it matters. All that matters is the evidence – whether the paper is correct or not. As soon as you start dividing the scientific community up into “respectable” and “non-respectable”, the same way you just did the journals, you’ve lost touch completely with evidence-based scientific standards are into the domain of academic politics.

It’s OK, I’m not expecting you to accept any of this. Once you buy into the system, views from outside it are not considered worth listening to. Reputation, prestige, authority, respect, publication counts, citation counts, committees, control of funds, access, contacts, tenure, career – the whole merry-go-round. This is what “Science” comes to mean, and nothing else matters.

60. Nullius in Verba Says:
July 4th, 2011 at 2:20 pm
#58,
It wasn’t intended as a Gish gallop, and you wasn’t expected to do anything against it. The question proposed that sceptics ought to have been able to get published initially, and asked where those papers were. I answered the question – no more. (I suspect the rhetorical intent was based on the belief that there weren’t any, implying that even without publication bias sceptics still couldn’t get published.) The only point I expect you to read into this is that peer-reviewed sceptical papers do exist.
I have repeatedly argued here against the practice of citing peer-reviewed science without explaining or understanding the contents – a form of Argument from Authority – and directing people into the maze of literature (like saying “go read the IPCC reports”) instead of answering their questions – which is argument by obscurity. Neither is a form of argument I would want to use myself.

Peer-review is by no means perfect, and whoever takes everything that’s passed it as truth set in stone, doesn’t understand how the process works. But it does help to weed out the thoroughly incompetent outright crazy stuff that absolutely should have never been published. A lot of the climate denial stuff falls exactly into that category.

That peer-review on its own is not a criteria for anything is actually very well demonstrated by the papers you linked to. Every bozo can set up a journal with his buddies and call it peer-reviewed, but that doesn’t make it worth anything. That list contained several such journals, Energy & Environment being the most blatant example, but there were a lot of papers in economics journals, in various petroleum geology journals, etc., all fields that either have nothing to do with climate or have very strong ideological/economical incentives to be against the idea of global warming. Or both. So yes, they may be peer-reviewed in the technical sense but it doesn’t make them worth anything as far as acceptance in the portion of the scientific community that actually matters is concerned. Of the rest of the papers that were published in respectable places the vast majority do not actually contradict AGW, it is just that they are spun this way by whoever compiled that list, in exactly the same manner that the typical creationist will use a perfectly legitimate biological paper to claim that it proves evolution wrong when the authors neither had any intention to do so nor do they think it does that in any way

It is exactly the same situation with the various lists of thousands dissenting “scientists” – when you look at the list, it turns out that many aren’t scientists at all and of those who are, the vast majority are in fields that have nothing to do with the subject.

I don’t vouch for the correctness of those papers, I disagree in general with journal peer review as any kind of mark of high quality or authoritative science, I don’t expect anyone to accept any conclusions without thorough examination of the evidence, and I certainly don’t expect anyone to answer a list of 900 scientific papers in a blog comment! I’m not unreasonable.
We were talking about whether sceptics could gather their own data and get it published (and whether they would be declared most famous scientist in the world if they did). On that point, I think the link is legitimate.
Does that help to clarify?

I still maintain that the sceptics haven’t been able to do so. And I was specifically referring to the period of the until the 1990s when most of the basic research on the subject that laid the foundation was done and when the publication and funding bias that exists (rightfully so) now didn’t exist and when the issue wasn’t so politicized.