ChrisB,

A conspiracy implies a conscious coordination of effort. We’re suggesting nothing of the kind. We just think that many climate scientists are biased and absolutely convinced of their position, and this plays into their funding, editing, and peer-reviewing decisions. Certain institutional incentives encourage this further. No conscious coordination is necessary for a systematic bias to appear.

Also, it’s not true that skeptics don’t get published in peer-reviewed journals. As I mentioned in a previous thread, skeptic means more than just anti-AGW. Also, there are papers published once in a while that may not be written by skeptics but do suggest alternative explanations. They have to be very very good, of course, to run the gauntlet. And carefully worded. Michaels and a couple of other climate scientists review climate science articles and news on their blow World Climate Report. You should check it out.

You keep putting words in my mouth, putting your spin on them. I’m not going to repeat myself again. Suffice to say there is an important difference between being reasonably sure of your position and not having even “a hint of doubt” (your words). The latter is unscientific, and the latter is what many “scientist”-activists evince in their media appearances and their policy proposals. If you want to reply with “well, that’s not their peer-reviewed research,” fine, but it is important that these so-called scientists themselves do not limit their beliefs about global warming by what they are able to publish in peer-reviewed journals. They appear to put nearly equal scientific weight on their extra-academic pronouncements. Again you give me trivial examples of questioning some assumptions and some aspects of their models, but I don’t deny this. I merely claim that many of the activists do not question their fundamental belief that global warming is mostly caused by humans and will be very very bad for us. It is very reasonable to doubt the latter. And the former is not, contrary to the rhetoric of some activists, equivalent to Holocaust Denial or a Flat Earth mentality.

Regarding anti-AGW peer-reviewed articles…what do you mean by that? Articles that explicitly set out to refute AGW theory? If so, then you may be right. But as I have said more than once, there are articles that raise doubt about AGW and even more that raise doubt about alarmism. I gave you a link. If you are too lazy to go read up on them, that is not my problem.

“Skeptical of global-warming alarmism? If we get into a debate about AGW again, I’d like you to produce five examples of the term “skepticism” used in the media in an AGW context specifically to denote the alarmism around AGW exclusive of the theory itself.

That isn’t even a straw man. It’s a straw giraffe with bells on it!”

I don’t follow you here. What do you mean?

Are you denying that activists lump together all skeptics (including both anti-AGW skeptics and skeptics of alarmism) into one group? It seems pretty clear to me that they do. For one thing, they don’t explicitly differentiate. They just call someone a skeptic, a skeptic on global warming.

You seem to want me to prove, by producing 5 examples, that the media recognizes skeptics of GW alarmism apart from skeptics of AGW, but that is precisely what I am saying they do not do. And I think this lack of differentiation is a problem. Activists have successfully spun all critics of their position as skeptics of global warming in general. I keep bringing up Wikipedia because I have run into this problem there as well. Scientists like Michaels are simply dubbed skeptics of global warming, when “skeptic of global warming” is usually used to mean “denier of AGW.” But he doesn’t deny AGW. Yet he is treated as badly and dismissed as readily.

Suggestion for improving peer review: I don’t know how practical or feasible this is, but I thought I would put the suggestion out there:

Require that editors randomly assign reviewers rather than choosing them personally. This could possibly be done by having reviewers state their areas of specialization and competence, entering these into a database, and assigning the article for review randomly to three reviewers in the appropriate category.

Observation on rigorousness of peer-reviewed science articles in various disciplines:

I find it interesting that in political science the typical standard for publication is results that achieve the 95% confidence level of being statistically significant. I think this is true of economics as well (correct me if I am wrong). I don’t know if it is true of the natural sciences in general, but I assume that it is (again, correct me if I am wrong). In which case, I find it odd that in both the climate science literature and the second-hand tobacco smoke literature, to my knowledge, the standard is a significantly lower 90% (so I have heard; again, correct me if I am wrong). Now, maybe these two fields are not unusual in this. Feel free to correct me if this is the case. There may be some innocuous and reasonable explanation for it. But if these two disciplines are unusual in this, then it is odd…isn’t it? This is a serious observation, not some underhanded attempt to undermine the legitimacy of climate science; I’m open to being corrected if I am mistaken.

There are plenty of peer-reviewed papers skeptical of AGW,

500 Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of “Man-Made” Global Warming