The Winnipeg Free Press notes that chief climate book-cooker Phil Jones has announced he´s stepping down. It then comes out swinging in defense of the true scientific spirit, let the carbon footprints fall where they may:

“Many skeptics have had their doubts about the climate data championed by the IPCC and the CRU, but one of them, Steve McIntyre, a retired mathematician and policy analyst, decided to do something about it. McIntyre has been indefatigable in his efforts to get the raw data and computer codes from the climate science community so he could check whether or not their work was straight.

But the climate scientists at CRU and elsewhere have denied McIntyre’s information requests for years. Phil Jones, the head of the climate-change body at CRU, even emailed he’d destroy the data rather than let McIntyre have it. Jones has announced he is stepping down from his post….

… a tribe of incestuous climate scientists may have actively conspired to undermine the peer-review process.

The climate-change industry, along with people like Al Gore, has slammed skeptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. What the Climategate documents reveal is that this small group of scientists, who often peer-review each other’s work as well as skeptical articles, have discussed ways of keeping findings they don’t like out of the peer-reviewed literature as well as the IPCC reports, even if it required trying to oust editors, boycott certain journals, or to reclassifying a prestigious journal that publishes skeptical articles as a fringe journal unworthy of consideration. They also discuss their specific intention to exclude contrary findings from the IPCC reports, even if they have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!

Science is vitally important for the operation of a highly technological society, and that science must be open, transparent and must adhere to the scientific method. The institution of science has no place in it for hiding data, hiding data-processing, shaping data to conform to pre-existing beliefs, undermining the peer-review process, cherry-picking reports in order to slant political IPCC reports or slandering critics by comparing them with flat-Earthers, moon-landing conspiracy theorists or holocaust deniers. Let the Climategate hearings begin.”

My Comment:

I hope this will make the lay public much more skeptical of the much touted academic process called “peer review.” Peer review, in the hands of corrupt and unscrupulous “scientists,” turns out to be nothing much more than a PR gimmick to enhance the authority of certain points of view.

Of course, anyone who´s spent any time at all in academia already knows this.  Graduate students quickly find out that dissertations are written not because of any intrinsic scholarly merit in the project, but because professor x can get grant y, which will let student z graduate and perhaps get a foot into the tenure system at university abc, where professor x´s old buddy j needs someone else to support his agenda. And so on. The process, because it involves grubbing for money more than following the inherent worthiness of a project, naturally promotes the most political and street-smart operatives rather than the most scientifically gifted or creative researchers.

When academic work is driven by government funding, the end product is not science but propaganda for government programs. What a shock.