David Bellamy rejects peer-reviewed journals : Deltoid

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Tim Lambert (deltoidblog AT gmail.com) is a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.

David Bellamy rejects peer-reviewed journals

Category: Global Warming
Posted on: March 25, 2009 8:58 PM, by Tim Lambert

George Monbiot has the latest on David Belllamy's descent into crankdom:

Among other gems, Bellamy's interview contained the following marvellous assertion of independence: "peer-reviewed journals - it's the last thing I would use now."

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Comments

That's right! Stuff posted on web sites is just as good!

Posted by: James F | March 25, 2009 9:28 PM

I don't blame him.

The last Peer who reviewed his journal was Lord Monckton.

Posted by: Ezzthetic | March 25, 2009 10:45 PM

Why does this remind Eli of

God does not exist - Nietzche

Nietzche does not exist - God

I can't spell Nietzche - Eli

Posted by: Eli Rabett | March 25, 2009 11:18 PM

Saw this linked from Monbiot's article:

Tunisian pilot who prayed as his plane went down jailed in Italy.

<cranky> Coincidence? I think not! </cranky>

Posted by: bi -- IJI | March 25, 2009 11:40 PM

Bellamy's decline into crankdom is very sad. I remember him on television from my childhood - his enthusiasm for the natural world, his explanations of the wonders of science, his wonderful paintings and tunes on the didgeridoo. Oh no, hang on, that was Rolf Harris.

Posted by: Zara Svelte | March 26, 2009 5:09 AM

It is true ... Bellamy was a larger-then-life, overgrown child whose enthusiasm just swept you along.

Pity he's turned into a gobshite.

Posted by: toby | March 26, 2009 5:22 AM

Here, have another depressing news item:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090326/tsc-climate-change-debunkers-take-stage-e123fef.html

Posted by: Luna_the_cat | March 26, 2009 7:36 PM

Did he ever have anything accepted in a peer-reviewed journal?

Posted by: QrazyQat | March 26, 2009 9:22 PM

QrazyQat, yes he has a pretty reasonable publication record up until he moved into the media. WoK lists 8 items in Nature, the most recent in 1976. One of these papers has >40 citations. His last proper academic paper appears to have been published in 1986 in the Canadian Journal of Botany.

Of course this just serves to show just how sad it is that he now says the things he does. It will be a shame if he is remembered for this, and not for his real contributions to knowledge and education.

Posted by: Dr Dave | March 27, 2009 5:03 AM

Oh please, Tim. I was all over the intertubes for years with dozens of examples of these bastards' war on peer review. That was the marching orders for a couple of years. Overlapped with the war on consensus, and the war on data gathering later, which was called feathering the researchers' nests (cf. "Only In it for the Gold").

The Line of the Year was "Peer Review is broken." Also "Peer Review is a flawed concept." Then "This crackpot website/pamphlet is peer review." They've just come 'round again to the attack peer review mode.

There is not one part of science they accept.

Posted by: Marion Delgado | March 27, 2009 2:04 PM

re: #9 Dr Dave It is sad but true that a tiny fraction of scientists does this, one must include both good and bad together. That someone has contributed does not mean that one ignores that, but one also doesn't ignore the damage done later either. Crankdoms vary in their harmfulness.

Linus Pauling Vitamin C [not too bad] Willliam Shockley eugenics [mostly ignored, I think]

Frederick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, William Nierenberg (i.e., the core Marshall Institute folks); climate, non-regulation of anything.

From anti-science reasons, I'd speculate:

Bellamy: PSYCH-1, PSYCH-5 Seitz, Jastrow, Nierenberg: IDEOL-1 (at least from Naomi Oreskes' & others' research)

Posted by: John Mashey | March 27, 2009 2:34 PM

Perhaps he was thinking that peer review can get you dodgy papers like MBH98, Santer et al 2008 and Steig et al 2008, ie a crock.

Posted by: Dave A | March 29, 2009 5:53 PM

ie a crock

DaveA's just given us an accurate mental image of what fills that space between his ears.

None of those three papers are "crocks".

Posted by: dhogaza | March 29, 2009 6:08 PM

Dave A's comment #12 was obtained from 'climate change facts' website 'sponsored' by Peabody Coal, Western Fuels, ExxonMobil and the Scaife Foundation.

Access to website is limited to invited trolls only.

Posted by: ScaredAmoeba | March 30, 2009 3:26 AM

dhogaza,

Not crocks? Dodgy statistical methods all round, but not crocks? You jest!

Scared Amoeba,

Stay in your self chosen environment because you obviously can't handle the fact that others can think for themselves.

Posted by: Dave A | March 31, 2009 5:56 PM

Stay in your self chosen environment because you obviously can't handle the fact that others can think for themselves.

Uh, DaveA, you've proven on many a website that you can't think at all, much less for yourself, and know absolutely nothing about anything remotely connected to climate science.

You're a cut-and-paste unteachable troll.

Posted by: dhogaza | March 31, 2009 10:17 PM

I will admit that DaveA is not as stupid as Tim Curtin. But then again, neither is my front porch.

Posted by: Dhogaza | March 31, 2009 10:21 PM

DaveA: if you can think for yourself as you claim, then why write utter garbage like,

Perhaps he was thinking that peer review can get you dodgy papers like MBH98, Santer et al 2008 and Steig et al 2008, ie a crock

The you write, with no evidence at all,

Dodgy statistical methods all round

Thinking is not a pre-requisite for making vacuous hit-and-run statements like these. Where's your evidence? How many peer-reviewed papers have you published in the empirical literature? What you wrote sounds exactly like it came from 'climate change facts' websites 'sponsored' by Peabody Coal, Western Fuels, ExxonMobil and the Scaife Foundation. Throw in a few right wing blogger sites and others promoting a political agenda, and there's your evidence.

What your empty comments prove is that, in their responses, dhogaza and ScaredAmeoba are, in fact, completely correct.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | April 1, 2009 5:19 AM

Jeff Harvey,

Go visit Climate Audit and educate yourself. Nothing at all to do with Peabody Coal etc. Stop deluding yourself that everyone who doesn't agree with you is influenced by the coal/oil etc lobby.

Posted by: Dave A | April 1, 2009 6:00 PM

Go visit Climate Audit and educate yourself.

We know all about Climate Fraudit.

Posted by: dhogaza | April 1, 2009 8:06 PM

Dave A sunk humself, as I expected he would. He does not read the primary literature but depends for his information on a web site (dhogaza sums up what most here think about it).

So Dave, what are your qualifications to be able to tell 'good science' from 'bad science'? How many articles have you published in relevant fields in the empirical literature?

Speaking as a senior scientist, I think its actually you who needs a little bit of educating in science.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | April 2, 2009 4:49 AM

Jeff Harvey,

So now there is the appeal to authority. OK, tell me why exactly you are a "senior scientist" and why you think that makes you more qualified to comment?

Posted by: Dave A | April 2, 2009 6:11 PM

Come Dave... asnwer the question... do you even have journal access?

Do you understand that not everthing you read ont the web is true?

Posted by: jonno | April 2, 2009 8:13 PM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Harvey

Dave you can't even use the net properly, let alone understand 'science'

Posted by: jonno | April 2, 2009 8:17 PM

Come on, guys. Dave A is doing nothing but trolling with a link to Climate Fraudit.

Posted by: bi -- IJI | April 2, 2009 11:57 PM

Speaking of rejecting peer-reviewed research, Steve Milloy has a new book and a new blog, both titled "Green Hell." He's not talking about the hell Wall Street is putting us through. Check it out for yourself.

Oy.

Posted by: Ed Darrell | April 3, 2009 6:12 AM

Dave,

I think that scientists are often - though not always - better qualified to comment on aspects dealing with science. I am not a climate scientist but a population ecologist. However, I defer to the expertise of those doing the research, and as far as I know not a single contributor to climate audit is a trained climate scientist, and between them they have very few papers in scientific journals. The vast majority of climate scientists are in agreement as to the cause of the current warming. There are a few outliers, but they are comparatively small in number. This explains why the recent 'abomination' of a climate conference attracted such a motley crowd of pseudo and non-scientists, the 'usual suspects'. The much vaunted climate sceptics list that was produced a couple of years ago contained names most of which had contibuted little to the scientific literature on climate or any field for that matter. How do I know? I checked the names of many on the list against their performance on the web of science and most had published at most a few articles; many had none. There were very, very few with more than 30 articles in the scientific literature. For me, this speaks volumes about their 'status'. I think that I am doing 'OK' and I have published 88 articles in the peer-reviewed literature since 1993. Less than 30 in more than 20 years of research should exclude scientists from being considered luminaries, at least that is my opinion.

But I asked you a simple question: Climate audit is a web site that spends a lot of time criticizing published studies. Why not go to the primary literature? If climate audit is your main source of climate science-related information,then this tells me all I need to know about your 'knowledge' of climate science.

Posted by: Jeff Harvey | April 3, 2009 7:59 AM

Why Climate Audit should never be trusted as a source of scientific knowledge.

Posted by: Former Skeptc | April 3, 2009 10:45 AM

Climate audit is a web site that spends a lot of time criticizing published studies. Why not go to the primary literature? If climate audit is your main source of climate science-related information,then this tells me all I need to know about your 'knowledge' of climate science.

Shorter Jeff Harvey:

Climate Audit has chosen 'neither' when asked to "put up or shut up" wrt publishing actual research to back its claims.

Best,

Posted by: Dano | April 3, 2009 11:30 AM

Jeff Harvey,

Of course I don't just read CA but spread my net widely, including much primary literature when I can access it. And of course, like you and others I am sure, I can't pretend to fully comprehend everything I read.

I will take some issue with you about peer review. You must surely accept that it has a number of problems, what I call 'backscratching' for example. The same small group of 'experts' review each others work and then it gets published unless it is fundamentally flawed ( Occasionally even the latter gets published witness my posts above :-) )

Posted by: Dave A | April 3, 2009 5:18 PM

Dave A:

Of course I don't just read CA but spread my net widely

Why didn't you say this in the first place instead of only suggesting CA as the place to "educate yourself"?

Posted by: Chris O'Neill | April 3, 2009 9:39 PM

I will take some issue with you about peer review. You must surely accept that it has a number of problems, what I call 'backscratching' for example.

"Backscratching"?

Every scientist I knows takes quite a lot of satisfaction in correcting every minute inconsistency that they might find in a draft of a manuscript, whether they know the author or not. It's a reflection on the reviewers if they fail to do so, and even if the reviewing is anonymous to the authors and to the audience at large, journal editors know, and reviewers value their reputations as being competent in their fields.

If a paper is poorly reviewed it is either because there are few or no suitable expert reviewers in the field, or because the selected reviewers (or the journal editors) are overworked. Backscratching doesn't come into it, unless of course one is speaking of 'journals' of Energy and Environment and its ilk - then all bets are off.

Are you actually familiar with how scientists conduct their publication work?

Posted by: Bernard J. | April 4, 2009 9:54 AM

The same small group of 'experts' review each others work and then it gets published unless it is fundamentally flawed

Are you describing CA, WUWT, or both? Both claim to be expert, but are only 'experts', i.e. self-declared, no meaningful track record. Anthony Watts even sucks as a photographer (something I am expert at).

If you're talking about peer-reviewed science, then leave out the insulting quotes around the word expert.

It just makes you look more stupid.

Posted by: dhogaza | April 4, 2009 11:26 AM

Shorter Dave A: I don't read peer-reviewed publications because he knows they're wrong even before reading them!

Posted by: bi -- IJI | April 4, 2009 11:31 AM

s/he knows/I know/

Posted by: bi -- IJI | April 4, 2009 11:33 AM

Shorter bi--IJI,

I don't read anything I didn't write.

Posted by: Dave A | April 4, 2009 3:46 PM

I thought