Lindzen-Choi ‘Special Treatment’: Is Peer Review Biased Against Nonalarmist Climate Science?
Chip Knappenberger
June 9, 2011
[Editor’s note: The following material was supplied to us by Dr. Richard Lindzen as an example of how research that counters climate-change alarm receives special treatment in the scientific publication process as compared with results that reinforce the consensus view. In this case, Lindzen's submission to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was subjected to unusual procedures and eventually rejected (in a rare move), only to be accepted for publication in the Asian Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.I, too, have firsthand knowledge about receiving special treatment. Ross McKitrick has documented similar experiences, as have John Christy and David Douglass and Roy Spencer, and I am sure others. The unfortunate side-effect of this differential treatment is that a self-generating consensus slows the forward progress of scientific knowledge—a situation well-described by Thomas Kuhn is his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. –Chip Knappenberger]
“If one reads [our new] paper, one sees that it is hardly likely to represent the last word on the matter. One is working with data that is far from what one might wish for. Moreover, the complexity of the situation tends to defeat simple analyses. Nonetheless, certain things are clear: models are at great variance with observations, the simple regressions between outgoing radiation and surface temperature will severely misrepresent climate sensitivity, and the observations suggest negative rather than positive feedbacks.”
- Richard S. Lindzen
(MasterResource)
Interesting about peer-review is that the experts reviewing have no idea when new science and technology is introduced if it is correct or not as the only expert then is the person studying that field.
Literally have to reduce everything to the grade 2 level and many times they still do not get it as it may interfere with their own traditional teachings.
Our forefathers did us a dis-service by generating generalized science into unbreakable LAWS of science.
Peer Review is an important component of what constitutes “science’. No peer review…no science. Having said that I have to say that it has been my experience that PhD’s are unwilling to be the rock in the current. I often compare them to career officers in the military. Give them an assignment, outline the goals and state the parameters and they will get the job done. But to be a heterodox in the military and to get promoted in the military is impossible. Check out Col John Boyd’s story. The same is true with PhD’s. Show me a doctoral candidate who tells his professors that everything they believe is horsepucky and I will show you an ex-PhD candidate.
A life time of going along to get along is very difficult to break, and once one is breathing the rarified atmosphere of his contemporaries it may be impossible. In point of fact….it is impossible for most of them.
Peer review in its current state makes the term scientific integrity an oxymoron.
I have to agree with you and add…
If a new science is introduced strictly on mechanics, this will loose the peer-reviewer as they were not educated in that area. Science has failed to look at the mechanical component of circular motion and the importance of the different torques and drivers that generate the energy our planet and sun has.
That’s okay as science is slowly imploding from their own reckless abandon of anyone that does not conform to the current LAWS of science. Generalized LAWS with failures of incorporating the distant past when the planets parameters were different.