After reading a great article written by a liberal (of the Democratic brand), I thought I’d broach this charged issue if only tangentially. The author makes a great point about the way environmental debates are framed by liberal circles – you are either right (in their eyes) or you shouldn’t be able to speak. The idea that all climatologists and environmental scientists are on the same boat is just absurd – when is there ever a unanimous consensus on anything? Moreover, the journal publishing process is just as political as anything else; there is no “objective authority” that determines what gets published and what doesn’t.
Besides, peer review does not ensure that the conclusions of an article are correct — merely that the author followed accepted principles of the scientific method in striving to prove a significant hypothesis. It should also be noted that when a vast majority of scientists concur with a theory, peer review may easily turn into peer pressure. Thus peer review could be a form of peer-imposed censorship as alternative viewpoints are marginalized or denied publication.
I wish the author would have gone a bit more into how problematic this issue really is, but for the Caffeinated readers out there I recommend checking out this article from Cato’s Regulation Magazine.
On an even more marginal note, a particular comment the author provided from one of his previous articles struck me:
“Those who claim that research has been falsified have not been able to demonstrate that to legitimate climatologists. It’s easy to make claims. It’s not so easy to back them up. But I’m not surprised that those on the right don’t understand how science works. Those facts are cleverly hidden in books.”
I’ve heard this type of “criticism” (which is just a useless ad hominem attack) before, and it bothers me a lot. First off, non-politician right-wingers have a huge cannon to their name which defends their position (excluding ridiculous books like Ann Coulter’s). Even better still, I once compiled a spreadsheet of scholars from think-tanks in the D.C. area, and I discovered a few very interesting facts:
1.) There are at least twice as many think-tanks supporting a right-leaning position than a left-leaning one.
2.) The few left-leaning think tanks there were had ~10% of their scholarly staff dedicated to researching economics and regulation, whereas the more conservative/libertarian ones had ~50% dedicated to those issues (that number excludes EPI of course, which is an outlier).
Is this an example of liberals shunning “the facts” and “the evidence” that stand against most of their command-and-control economic policy prescriptions?? Are they the ones who need to take some time away from watching Jon Stewart and pick up a book on economics?? If so, I recommend Ben Bernanke’s Intro to Macro…
