I won’t delve deep into the science behind so called man-made Global Warming. Suffice to say what my statistics professor once said “Given a small enough data sample you can prove anything”. Statistics from the so called Climategate Scandal (not to mention observations from NOAA weather balloons and IR data from satellites) is what finally pinned the bad science behind man-made Global Warming, but I digress.
The backstage politics are what I was referring to. For over a decade the editors of the major scientific publications have willingly censored any criticism of the “officially approved” model. Accademic credentials didn’t matter: widely respected statistics professors and climatologists had their works turned down for not embracing the dogma or even not embracing it with enough enthusiasm. It never happened before, or at least not a scale as seen in the last decade. This heavy handed censorship is what made many (myself included) very suspicious: wrong theories and models are regularly printed and confuted. That’s what peer review is there for. The scientific community tossed ungodly amount of money and untold manpowers hours to investigate the Pons/Fleischmann claims of “cold fusion” in a Pd(Pt)/H2 system and nobody objected. Science is all about trial and error and debate. However the editors had one very, very big problem: the Internet. In recent times you don’t need to publish a paper on Nature or another paper journal for it to be “official”: you can put it on the Internet and make it freely available. There’s now even a formal system to quote Internet articles which is accepted (albeit grudigingly) academically. That’s how people became aware their doubts and second thoughts were shared by many of their peers. The small problem became a huge problem in the wake of the Climategate Scandal: contrary to popular opinions the real “smoking gun” were not the emails but the statistic models, heavily based on data “cherry picking”. These models had never been made wholly available before, a huge no-no in peer review on which editors willingly turned a blind eye. As an Australian statistics professor tasked with examining the data said “Forget the smoking gun; this is a whole WMD arsenal with fingerprints all over it”. How did the aforementioned editors reacted? They ignored the whole scandal, though their reputation suffered and Internet publishing is now threatening their previously unassailable position. Here one thing must be said: scientific publishing is not a free market, or at least it wasn’t until very recently: it’s owned lock, stock and barrel by a small number of hugely influential companies among which Elsevier is the most (in)famous. Famous because they own pretty much 80% of the market and infamous for the outrageous prices they charge. When you have such a concetrantion of power… well you know the drill.