Dan Calabrese

It’s sort of funny now to think that, for so long, so many skeptics of anthropogenic global warming were cowed by the insistence of global warmists that the science was beyond question because it was “peer reviewed.”

Peer review that actually works.

What does that mean, exactly? The very fact that you weren’t sure sort of hinted that you shouldn’t be asking the question, didn’t it? This must be something scientists understand. It must be very a system chock full of controls and protections in favor of the integrity of the system.

Everyone reviews everyone else’s work. Everyone gives an honest appraisal, one presumes, because a) we respect each other and we’re just trying to get the facts right here; and b) we respect the science.

Scientists, after all, are not like politicians. They don’t have any agenda other than the facts. This was the premise.

Too bad it was all crap.

As the now-public e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia demonstrate, climate scientists are far from the blameless, agendaless truth-seekers that global warmists want us to think they are. Quite to the contrary, they protect their agendas with ferocity. And hey, if you worked for the CRU, wouldn’t you do the same? If AGW is a bunch of crap, who needs the CRU? Their funding will be eliminated and they’ll have to go find jobs in the private sector.

It makes perfect sense, therefore, that they conspired to prevent their critics from getting published, and demanded that one publication get rid of a “troublesome editor” who was willing to hear other points of view.

That’s why you can trust the integrity of scientific “peers” to honestly review each other’s work about as much as you can trust pickup basketball players to implement a “call your own fouls” system.

In fact, the latter system undoubtedly has more integrity than that of scientific peer review.

In pickup basketball, the players know the rules, but just like officials in the NBA, there are times when you call the game tightly and others when you “let ‘em play.” If you’re empowered to call your own fouls, and you start crying about every ticky-tack incident of contact on the court, you’re going to quickly lose the respect of both your opponents and your teammates. You save your right to call your own fouls for when the transgression is really flagrant.

Granted, this is far from a to-the-letter enforcement of the rules of basketball, but it’s a general understanding that all the players can live with, and it makes it possible for the players in a game with no referees to more-or-less equitably govern themselves.

If you let a foul go, perhaps because you hope to get away with the same thing the next time you’re on defense, at least everyone understands that’s what’s going on.

In the science of AGW, the call-your-own-fouls system is nowhere near that honest or equitable. As the East Anglia e-mails show, the calling of fouls was rigged in favor of one team – the global warmists. Their throwing out, hiding or misrepresenting of data was not called out by their “peers,” whereas the “peers” on the other side of the issue were not even allowed into the game.

Besides, unlike pickup basketball, science is supposed to get the facts right – really right – not just couch them in a way everyone can live with.

I will say this, though. The inherent corruption of the scientific call-your-own-fouls system may help explain why so many on the left distrust free markets. If this is what they do when they’re left to their own devices, with no authority looking over their shoulder enforcing the rules, no wonder they think capitalism is just more of the same on a broader scale.

Of course, they don’t really understand the risk-and-reward principles that make free markets self-regulating. It just seems unfair to them, which is why they seek any excuse – including the nonsense of anthropogenic global warming – to replace it with a command-and-control system.

They want the government to be the economic referee, because they figure no one can be trusted to call their own fouls. Because they can’t.

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