Quote Originally Posted by mcatdog
I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!
You can't argue that "jargon" is responsible for a statement like that. In any case, the person who wrote that just resigned today so hopefully it'll be a non-issue from here on out.
Yeah that does appear to be a damning statement.

However, it is also quote-mined, not devoid of ambiguities, and in need of context to provide adequate understanding of what he meant. That's why reasonable people are not going crazy, yet unreasonable people are. I mean isn't it entirely possible that the line was tongue-in-cheek? I'm not sure if that's actually been ruled out.

But anyways, this type of thing is standard, and we're seeing the peer-review process working at its finest. If this is a conspiracy, it's not the first, and like they few other scientist conspiracies in history, the real impact will likely be very minor.

Piltdown Man was a conspiracy. 100% legitimate conspiracy, yet the peer-review process worked correctly and eventually weeded it out. In fact, Piltdown Man wasn't really even getting much attention from scientists in the first place because it didn't fit the fossil record one bit

See that's the thing. If climategate is a real conspiracy, then in what way is a conspiracy? If the data is highly skewed then the entire scientific community would hear about it and start looking into it, and if it didn't make sense in relation to all other data, it would be put on the back burner or so to speak, which is what happened with Piltdown Man. Then eventually the truth would likely get weeded out, then it would be classified as a hoax, yet there wouldn't be much problems because it was already considered an ambiguous anomaly and didn't attribute anything to standard scientific discovery. Which is exactly what happened with Piltdown Man.

This is why I don't care about the opinions of those who are not entrenched within the peer-review process itself. Because they actually understand that if climategate was a fraud, if it was a big fraud it would be obvious because the results would be insane, and if it was a little fraud it wouldn't really change anything since the results would have to agree with other independent sources.

Lay people do not understand this, and they need to shut the hell up. It's like me telling UG how to teach his classes. I don't fucking know how because I don't know anything about teaching classes, but for some weird reason every yahoo on the planet thinks they know everything about anything related to scientific and political issues

Which reminds me in a recent interview, Fedor Emelianenko said that before a fight he often gets calls from people he knows who give him advice. During the interview, he smirked at this like it was a bunch of dummies pretending like they understood his profession better than he did.

But anyways, I know you know all or most of this. I just want to make the point that this isn't logistically adding up to some kind of big internal problem. It his, however, a huge PR problem

P.S. Would like to add that the peer-review is working quite well. Like you said, the guy who wrote that text has already resigned (even though he could be easily justified). That's a very important aspect of the peer-review. It is, as it should be, one strike and you're out. Which is waaaaaaaaaaaay more than can be said for just about any other profession. Not to mention that people on the deniers side get special privileges, whereas those on the scientists side do not. If this wasn't the case then people like Sanford and Ensign would have been fired a long time ago, but miraculously they're not because they're on the right team