It’s a case of Big-Spin and Bluster. It’s what they do: aggressively push a simple message, a theme, a piece of marketing, and like all the rest of their audacious PR, it’s at best a half-truth, and in this case, a lie.
Rajendra Pachauri states:
IPCC studies only peer-review science. Let someone publish the data in a decent credible publication. I am sure IPCC would then accept it, otherwise we can just throw it into the dustbin.
As usual, it’s honest volunteers who have conscientiously tested the IPCC by going through 18,500 references. And the final total? Fully 5,600, or 30% of their references are not peer reviewed.
Donna LaFramboise at NoConsensus has coordinated the dedicated team (that is a lot of references to go through).
How many times do we need to show they are incompetent and dishonest?
Why this matters
Make no mistake, this “number” of papers tells us nothing about the climate either way. And we skeptics are not so fussy about “peer review” vs non-peer review in any case, what matters to us is good logic, transparent data and methods, and top-notch design. We know that the haloed “peer review” is a human politico-social process which was never that stringent, and has been corrupted of late. We also know that even at it’s best, peer review is just a few unpaid, anonymous authors–it’s hardly rigorous, and plenty of uninspiring stuff gets published in peer reviewed journals, stuff that turns out to be wrong.
So why bother tallying them up? It’s the IPCC that made this point matter. They are the ones who market themselves as being holier than thou, as being superior experts, who only use peer reviewed evidence. Peer-review has been their gate-keeper: on the one hand they “own” the journals and simply reject contrary viewpoints, and on the other they convinced much of the less science-savvy world that peer-review matters and is a mark of quality. Their bluster is almost totally based on the fallacious argument from authority and backed up by a few half-truths.
Every time the IPCC have spat on a scientist with “that’s not peer reviewed”, they have set themselves up to look like duplicitous fools when caught relying on student theses, magazine articles and boot cleaning guides.
What matters here is not that the IPCC only have 70% of their references “peer reviewed”, what matters is that they have been exposed as fakers. They lied. They poured scorn on anyone who put forward arguments, that no matter how strong, had not jumped through the rigged, bureaucratic hurdle known as peer review.
They are all bluff, bluster and spin. They can’t name and explain any empirical evidence that supports the feedback effects they claim cause anything from 2 – 11 degrees of warming (especially from the major ones, water vapor and cloud cover). Remember, deception with financial implications is fraud.
The whole report is available from NoConsensus. Thanks to Donna and the team of helpers who did the mammoth undertaking of sorting so diligently through that list.