Then he adds the adds nothing new, as an excuse. As if all other papers advance their respective fields. I suspect the reviewer might be Phil Jones, who wrote of a McIntyre submission that it is 'not of interest to the readers of Nature', which was apparently enough for them to throw out a refutation of the hockey stick that received a positive review from the guy who wrote the book on principal components.
To quote from the article:
"The referee's report says that the paper "does not make any significant attempt at explaining or understanding the differences [in the data from the various reports], it rather puts out a very simplistic negative message giving at least the implicit impression of 'errors' being made within and between these assessments, e.g. by emphasising the overlap of authors on two of the three studies. What a paper with this message should have done instead is recognising and explaining a series of 'reasons' and 'causes' for the differences."
Scientific papers must add additional knowledge to the field. The reviewer's comments are typical of what happens in science - if a paper implies errors have been made, but makes no attempt to try to explain the reason or causes, then that does not add additional knowledge.
Reviewers may sound arrogant. That's because they are experts in their field and expect papers to conform to the standards they themselves have to follow when they publish papers. Incidentally, the reviewer is specific - in its current form. What that means is that reviewer is not happy with the content but has conceded there is something of merit but that the authors need to go back and have a rethink before resubmission.
The issue here isn't one of being right or wrong. The issue here is that a paper by someone skeptics are currently holding up as a poster-boy didn't get that paper published. Boo hoo! Happens all the time ... but it suits skeptics to now hold this fact up as 'evidence' of bias or worse. Why is your first reaction one of 'arrogant reviewers' rather than 'maybe the paper wasn't very good'?
The Negative impact would be towards the credibility of paper itself. The referee was afraid that the denier blogs would jump all over any appearance of error in the paper in an attack against science, and that therefore the journal should not publish a paper with errors or over-simplifications.
"Summarising, the simplistic comparison of ranges from AR4, AR5, and Otto et al, combined with the statement they they are inconsistent is less then helpful, actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of "errors" and worse from the climate sceptics media side."
The full comments are available, they are supportive of the paper if the author would fix the errors and over-simplifications.
As submitted, it was not a good paper, and had ERL published it the deniersphere would jump all it as bad research. So ERL rejects it with recommendations for changes, and the deniersphere wants to criticize ERL for NOT publishing a bad paper.
I hope that it doesn't come as too much of a shock to you that it costs money to publish a paper. Whereas publishing crap on the internet makes little difference, other than to your reputation, publishing crap in print means that there is no money to publish a worthy piece of research. Many papers could be worth publication if the author(s) would just take the time to get everything right. The peer review process is designed to insure that nobody gets into print without having crossed all the "Ts" and dotting all the "Is"
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Don't you think you should first read the paper submitted for peer-review before passing judgement?
Besides that, you are reading more into the referee's report than there actually is. All he states is that the paper ads nothing new to the science (and thus does not advance the science one iota) but only ads false claims where none were in the first place.
In Denierland that might pass off as science but not in the Real World, fortunately. For a paper to be publishable in a respectable journal it must be constructive (which it wasn't), error-free (which it was neither) and advance the scientific understanding of the scientific subject. And it is precisely this latter where Bengtsson again failed and what this referee was referring to.
Criticizing existing scientific work without offering alternative explanations (assuming for a moment that the criticism is consistent) is not science worthy to be published in a scientific journal. That's why you folks usually end up quoting op-eds, opinion pieces and most of all blog posts.
Sounds like peer review to me. I think people that have never published in peer reviewed journals don't really know what it's like. Papers rarely get accepted without major or minor revisions, and a LARGE fraction of papers are rejected--some rightfully, some wrongly.
Comments from reviewers often make people angry--very few of us enjoy criticism. I had two papers published last year and for one paper one of the reviewers was pretty much the last person in the world I wanted to review it (he doesn't like my work), but I worked through his comments and modified the paper and it was eventually accepted for publication. That's the way it works.
EDIT: You claimed
"...most peer-reviewed science papers and their conclusions prove to be wrong anyways"
What evidence do you have for this, other than your own fantasies?
Another EDIT: Do you even think before you say anything? I asked for evidence, and you just gave your opinion. You came up with exactly nothing to support your assertion. Then you go on to make one ignorant statement after about peer review. It's clear that you don't know a thing about it. As for me, I am not funded by the government to do research on climate, I paid my own page charges on my most recent paper, and it was ENTIRELY about water vapor, you fool--there was nothing at all about CO2 in the paper.
You really don't care whether what you say is correct or complete nonsense. You don't research anything you say--you just assume it's true because it popped into your head.
One More EDIT: You really need to stop lying. If you can't make an argument without misquoting people or using obviously wrong science, you should shut up. Do you really think it is ok to lie?
Deceit and deception are strongly negative towards a search for truth.
And we don't have the whole truth yet, but if the anti-science echo chamber doesn't wise up and move on to the next denier lie of the week, it may find more truth is outed than it had bargained for. There is a limit to how much asinine abuse intelligent people can tolerate from arrogant lying idiots, whether they tricked an old man or misunderstood him or both.
His paper was more aligned with denier crap than reality and it had errors They are not promoting denier positions
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2014/may/16/dispute-arises-over-rejected-climate-science-paper
" ... The referee concludes their report by saying "I have rated the potential impact in the field as high, but I have to emphasise that this would be a strongly negative impact, as it does not clarify anything but puts up the (false) claim of some big inconsistency, where no consistency was to be expected in the first place. And I can't see an honest attempt of constructive explanation in the manuscript. Thus I would strongly advise rejecting the manuscript in its current form." IOP Publishing is currently working on getting permission from the other referees of this paper to make all the reports available as soon as possible. ... "
HIGH POTENTIAL IMPACT? STRONGLY NEGATIVE? Negative against what? Climate science?
Classic peer-review arrogance IMO!
