There is little value to peer-review in Climate "Science". A bunch of your coffee drinking buddies evaluating your paper???......................Come on!

Peer review is far from perfect, but it is better than "publishing" on the web. I heard one guy say on here that cold climates (such as the arctic) occur because they are farther from the sun. Oh wait, that was you.

Actually, the funny part of the "dihydrogen monoxide" water prank was that no chemist would EVER call water by that name, so the people that did the prank were not very well versed in chemistry--perhaps they were slightly better than the people that signed the petition, or perhaps the people that signed the petition just did it so those nutjobs would go away.

And for those non-scientists that think peer review is a "rubber stamp" process, think again. A large fraction of papers get rejected in atmospheric science, probably about 40%

Do all sciences progress using only peer-reviewed studies? I thought some did not.

In any case, to say: "They were good enough to make us the most educationally, economically, politically, and militarily advanced nation in the world." is nonsense. Many of the papers that got you to that state were not peer-reviewed. For example, Newton, Einstein, Faraday etc. There are also examples you can find of complete gibberish passing peer review.

The idea seems to be that truly poor papers do not see light of day. Which used to have merit some years ago when you had to visit the library to put in a request for some copies of the papers you were interested in and then wait a week or so for anything to appear. Nowadays, you can find stacks of papers in an instant. I don't really see why any publically-funded research should not have the results freely available on-line to anyone.

We have seen evidence here of the various 97% papers that have passed peer-review. On closer examination the papers all have serious flaws. Even one scientists here recommended that we should ignore one of them.

The IPCC don't always use peer-reviewed papers. If memory serves, about 30% are from "grey literature" (in AR4) and they are the "gold standard" organization we are told.

Why not just publish everything and let the peer-reviewers, if needed at all, review the work after publishing. They could flag the paper as passed or failed but they could not be accused of censorship or cronyism as they are now in some fields. I don't think the reviewers enjoy their work especially as it arrives over and above their day job.

Publish and be damned, I say.

Unlike YA, where anyone can post whatever crap they want, peer review in science works quite well. An article must not only pass muster with the author(s), it must seem worth publishing to the editor and to the reviewers. The review process almost always results in improvement in the article. Perfect? No. But it's way ahead of whatever is in second place.

Yes, YA has peer review of a sort. The trouble is that 13-year-olds are able to express their opinions as if they were peers. Not that long ago, I received "best answer" for providing the only wrong answer in the bunch. Not my finest hour.

Well, there's a lot of depth in that single question Sage!

I think one of the issues is that our society is now incredibly specialised. No single person can be an expert in everything. So peer review isn't confined to science, it's part of how we generally do things in a modern society. If you go to a doctor or surgeon you can always go and get a second opinion. It'd be a very odd person who, after listening to a consultant cardiologist, would go and seek a second opinion on their diagnosis from the plumber living down the road. Similarly, you'd hope that the people examining aircraft in order to ascertain if they should receive FAA approval are, themselves, experts in aviation systems. Generally you have independent engineers watching the performance of components designed by corporate engineers. Or at least you'd hope that was the case!

So the point I'm making is this - I don't know what your job is but I'm pretty sure I have no experience in doing that job. You'd be annoyed if it was me coming in to assess your performance rather than, say, a co-worker or manager with years of experience in that sector. Similarly, I think it makes sense that scientists publish papers to be reviewed, criticised, and assessed by other scientists working in that field.

Does that mean the peer review process is perfect? Absolutely not. Like all systems in which people are involved, some reviewers do not apply 'due diligence' or are biased. There are ways of solving those problems. For example, I don't believe in anonymity either for those submitting papers or those reviewing them. It's very difficult to hide bias if everyone knows who's doing the reviewing or what their views currently are (based on their own publications). This would become clear with multiple reviewers - if one reviewer consistently had issues with papers on a certain topic, whereas other reviewers didn't, you'd start to wonder whether they were biased. In fact, I think reviewing papers should be placed under as much scrutiny as publishing papers. I'm not sure exactly how that would work, but the idea would be that if one were to review a paper, that review is publically available and like citations and impact factors and numbers of papers published, stats based on those reviews are also part of your scientific credentials.

I do think there is a danger of 'groupthink' in science, like every other area of human endeavour. History has shown issues time after time. A good example is dark matter. In the 1920s, people started plotting the rotation curves of galaxies showing how fast stars were moving as a function of distance from the centre of a galaxy. Those curves showed there wasn't enough matter to keep those stars from been flung off into space. The results were ignored. More data appeared in the 1950s. And was ignored. Even more data appeared in the 1960s. And was ignored. It was only in the 60s/70s when specific astronomers with the 'right' reputation produced (the same) graph that people started to take note. I think scientists need to ask themselves how that situation can arise and whether it can happen again.

So, peer reviewed papers make sense as the means by which scientists communicate their findings and conclusions. But the process needs a serious overhaul. It also needs to be opened up to allow scrutiny, and they days of people having to pay to access a paper need to die quickly. Publishers shouldn't make money out of science - particularly when those scientists are publically funded. Fortunately many universities are now archiving papers produced by their staff for free public access. That's a step in the right direction.

Most peer-review will look at the wrting of the paper, question assumptions and look for logical inconsistencies. They do not try to reproduce the results. If a paper is popular or debated enough in that field, other people will try to reproduce the results and publish their findings. The inherent problem is that it is difficult to find if the results from a paper have been validated and even more difficult to find if contradictory results have been published.

The value of the peer review is that so much information can be published.

Take the FDA as a counter-example. They thoroughly review everything from the data collection to reproducing the results. It is an extremely thorough review and you can be assured that the results that have passed FDA inspection are accurate and correct. Of course, it takes the FDA a ton of funding and a ton of time to accomplish this feat. It would be entirely impossible to use this process in much of academia.

So if you are using peer-reviewed work, you need to be skeptical and have an eye for noticing the difference between claims that have been shown by the articles and those that have not. Further, you need to have a general knowledge of the other literature in existence.

Take, for example, England's climate. There is one article saying that AGW is going to cause flooding and another that says AGW is going to cause droughts. You will consistently find opposing views in the literature. You have to know how to approach these opposing views and take them as areas of uncertainty. What you shouldn't do, is exactly what the warmers constantly do. If there is a flood in Europe, they pull out one article and claim success. If in 3 years, there is a drought, they pull out the other article and claim success. The two normal years in between, they look somewhere esle for a problem.

Doing this, you are no longer performing science. You are instead performing psychic readings.

You are kidding I hope; Peer reviewed papers are how scientists share experiments and results worldwide. These papers give other scientists the opportunity to question the validity of the claim and learn from each other

not to be confused with all the hype behind so called peer papers on internet bogs and denier web sites

This is a fairly straightforward presentation of the peer process

It depends on the evidence, there is none for the existence of any of the gods, there is near full agreement on AGW.

"Based on more than 2000 peer-reviewed publications, the number of authors from November, 2012 to December, 2013 who explicitly deny global warming (that is, who propose a fundamentally different reason for temperature rise than anthropogenic CO2). The number is exactly one." [1]

You are lying again, you know that consensus does work, else you wouldn't have claimed that "you are winning the debate"... (even when your contribution to the debate is not based on the science)

When done honestly and in depth it can have real value and has been demonstrated dramatically advance science .

However with politically charged issues like climate change the process appears to have little to no scientific value at all.

Depends on which conspiracy theory or set of conspiracy theories about science you subscribe to.

Check back later here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...

You may even be allowed to post your personal favorite theory there. See under the additional details there.

Oka, Sagebrain: I'll dumb down it to YOUR level. For deniers who flunked math and science in school, it depends. Since you are one of them, it DEPENDS FOR YOU. And this was your "question," as you may recall. Think about it, if that is not too strenuous a task. This might help you think about which form of math denial you prefer: