"The preponderance of scientific evidence and opinion is that Climate Change is a very real challenge."And so it is. The preponderance of that evidence however is opinion. The leaked emails out of CRU are the tip of the iceberg. The data is tampered with and then destroyed. The peer review process is faulty and exploited by powerful organizations and people.
Imagine yourself the expert of experts sitting on a grand panel of your peers. Will you support a paper that invalidates your own expertise and more importantly your funding? Of course not. Its not in their interest or the interest of world, they will say to themselves. They won't even look at the data. Look up the resistance Alfred Wegener met with after discovering continental drift. Peer review is garbage. You only get more of the same.
The choice then is either to ensure that skeptical research gets enough funding to undeniably push past the bias in the climate community or to institute an open scientific audit mechanism.
Stephen McIntyre can't do it all himself. He needs students and a budget. No paper in any discipline should get published without being audited by an external entity. We should probably do both, but the second option is the important one.
Over the last two weeks we've seen how bad science can have a huge financial impact. Every financial statement of a publicly traded company is audited so that shareholders are less vulnerable to fraud. It doesn't mean all accountants are crooks. Its just standard practice. The time has come to insist on the same rigor in the scientific process. Science should be objective and impartial. If an auditor would comb the data before any paper would be published then I think Science will drift back to its core pursuit of truth over activism and advocacy.
