[MD] Global Warming: Science or Politics?

[Case]

Ian,

Peer review at minimum is designed to ensure that the editor's deciding
whether or not to publish an article have the faintest clue what the article
is talking about. While certainly politics are involved they are secondary
considerations and they are academic politics not government politics. 

I confess to not having the time or interest to read the Booth article in
full but your exchange with Bradford was interesting. Newton just about
single handedly invented modern science. His reluctance to publish and his
battles with Hook and Royal Society are legendary. But this is the kind of
office politics that is inevitable in any human institution.

Peer review is an academic practice aimed at maintaining the quality of
academic research. The fact that it on occasion fails is not a condemnation
of the practice. Academics are quick to root out and censure mistakes when
they are found.

All you are doing with this kind of postmodernish-cult-of-professionals talk
is fuelling the kind of misguided and political condemnation of academia
that the Platt's of the world relish.

The idea that academia should support the publication of any crazy idea
someone wants to publish is just wrong. There are plenty of outlets to
publish anything anyone wants to say. The internet, at least for the time
being, is the great equalizer of information access. But to receive a
"Quality" seal of approval from an academic journal, authors must rightly go
through a process to at least try to make sure their ideas have merit.

To abandon this goal to some idealized democratization of intellect is sheer
folly. Society can eventually learn to love its contrarians but by God they
ought to have to work for that love. There should be obstacles in the path
of wackos.

If society is going to be totally open minded there is not telling what kind
of nonsense will pass as common sense.

Case