Peer review and how sceptics are frozen out: the Antarctic example

Mr Bolt: From the latest Spectator, a gotcha on the corruption peer-review process that the Climategate emails suggested but which Nicholas Lewis and Matt Ridley now demonstrate. Spectator editor Nelson Fraser sums up (the Lewis/Ridley article is behind a pay wall): In January 2009, Nature magazine ran a cover story … conveying dramatic news about Antarctica: that most of it had warmed significantly over the last half-century. For years, the data from this frozen continent - with 90 percent of the world’s ice mass - had stubbornly refused to corroborate the global warming narrative. So the study, led by Eric Steig of the University of Washington, was treated as a bit of a scoop. It reverberated around the world. Gavin Schmidt, from the RealClimate blog, declared that Antarctica had silenced the sceptics. Mission, it seemed, was accomplished: Antarctica was no longer an embarrassment to the global warming narrative. He spoke too soon. The indefatigable Steve McIntyre started to scrutinise his followings along with Nicholas Lewis. They found several flaws: Steig et al had used too few data sequences to speak for an entire continent, and had processed the data in a very questionable way. But when they wanted to correct him, in another journal, they quickly ran into an inconvenient truth about global warming: the high priests do not like refutation. To have their critique (initial submission here, final version here) of Steig’s work published, they needed to assuage the many demands of an anonymous ‘Reviewer A’ - whom they later found out to be Steig himself. Lewis and Matt Ridley have joined forces to tell the story in the cover issue of this week’s Spectator. It’s another powerful, and depressing tale of the woeful state of climate science My initial post on this  in 2009, when Steig’s work started to fall apart, explains some of the problems McIntyre uncovered.. (Via Watts Up With That.)