This explains a lot about Texas

Link to grist story here.

Interesting article on peer review

The CS Monitor had an interesting article on peer review.

My view is that peer review is a highly effective filter. But one should not expect too much from it. While it stops most errors from being published, it cannot catch every problem. Reviewers occasionally fail to notice an obvious mistake, and there are some types of error that reviewers usually cannot catch. They cannot tell if the author misread observations of an instrument, or wrote a number down wrong, or if chemical samples used in an experiment were contaminated. Moreover, peer review often cannot identify clever fraud, such as the rare cases where the scientific work being reported was not really done at all.

But peer review is only the first of many levels of testing and quality control applied to scientific claims. When an important or novel claim is published in a journal, other scientists test the result by trying to replicate it, often using different data sets, experimental designs, or analytic techniques. While one scientist might make a mistake, do a sloppy experiment, or misinterpret their results (and peer reviewers might fail to catch it), it is unlikely that several independent groups will make the same mistake. Consequently, as other scientists repeat an observation, or examine a question using different approaches and get the same answer, the community increasingly comes to accept the claim as correct.

Peer review is also important for evaluating proposals to funding agencies as well as for things like tenure and promotion. It seems difficult to imagine how an alternative system for those things would work. I suspect that changes in the peer review system will eventually occur as our ways of communicating changes, but those changes will be slow.

More polling data on climate change

Link to grist story here.

For those that read The Onion

You'll enjoy this.

Front page in today's WSJ

A front page story in today's Wall Street Journal (I don't have a link, sorry) begins:

The global warming debate is shifting from science to economics.

For years, the fight over the Earth's rising temperature has been mostly over what's causing it: fossil-fuel emissions or natural factors beyond man's control. Now, some of the country's biggest industrial companies are acknowledging that fossil fuels are a major culprit whose emissions should be cut significantly over time.

...

The broadening, if incomplete, consensus that fossil fuels are at least a big part of the global-warming problem signals real change in the environmental debate. The biggest question going forward no longer is whether fossil fuel emissions should be curbed. It's who will foot the bill for the cleanup --- and that battle is heating up.

I sincerely hope that the WSJ editorial page reads this article.

We are now experiencing a tectonic shift in the political landscape on the issue of climate change. The skeptics are disappearing --- both in numbers and in influence. At the same time, the debate is shifting from "should we do something" to "what should we do?"

Another op-ed on climate change and Texas

Link to grist story here.

Climate change with Al Gore, II

For those interested in Al Gore's climate project training (which I blogged about here), here are news stories of Climate Project Presenters:

Miss Rhode Island spreads the word

Wisconsin resident and businessman

Grammy-winner Kathy Mattea gives presentation in Utah

Oregon's Secretary of State presents across the State

Canadian banker reaches investment community

Cincinnati's climate messenger

Allentown messenger

New Yorkers head to Nashville to become messengers

Fort Smith Arkansas messenger

Should we burn climate skeptics at the stake?

Link to grist story here.

Capitol Hill briefing on science and politics

Link to grist story here.

Climate change with Al Gore

Link to grist story here.

Least surprising headlines of the day

ExxonMobil paid to mislead public Article here

ExxonMobil cultivates global warming doubt Article here

My problem with Revkin's article

Link to grist story here.

Overestimating the cost of emissions reductions

Link to grist story here.

Video podcasts on climate change

Link to grist story here.

Have we oversold climate science?

Link to grist story here.

What does 'politicization of science' mean to you?

Link to grist story here.

Nature ends public peer-review trial

According to this story, Nature is scrapping its attempt to open up the peer review system.

As the article says,

In the Nature experiment, authors whose manuscripts were selected for traditional peer review could also opt to have them simultaneously posted on the Internet for feedback by rank-and-file scientists. Journal editors then weighed both sides when deciding whether a paper gets published.

The experiment generated high online traffic, about 5,600 page views a week, according to Nature. But it was ultimately canceled because few authors participated and many of the online comments were nothing more than "nice work."

My experience with open peer review (through the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics) is similar. While it seems like a good idea, few articles get any public comments. I suspect this is true for a few reasons. First, it can be dangerous to make negative comments without anonymity (and on ACP comments must be attributed) --- which is why most journals implement anonymous reviewers. Second, it takes a lot of time to write a comment, and most people are simply too busy. Another reason the Nature experiment failed was that they did a terrible job publicizing it.

As a dedicated blogger, I see great value in an open comment system and I suspect that some kind of open system will eventually be adopted. However, I don't think any journal has yet stumbled upon the winning model.

New polling data on global warming ...

Link to grist story here.

Top 10 climate stories of 2006, part II

Link to grist story here.

Top 10 climate stories of 2006, part I

Link to grist story here.