Wind Watch: Construction photos, Newburyport, Mass.

Jan. 8: They said the trees would hide the Wind Turbine. Does this look hidden to you? And the blades aren’t on yet!

Q&A with Roger Pielke, Jr. on the climate change story :: CEJournal

Q: What is going to be the single most important story to tell in connection with climate change in the next few years?

A: The utter failure of the global climate regime starting with the new efforts of the U.S. under Obama, (and why people who saw it coming were ignored).

Q: Have we put too much faith in the peer review system? And should we seek sources outside the usual scientific circles?

A: Peer review is simply a cursory check on the plausibility of a study. It is not a rigorous replication and it is certainly not a stamp of correctness of results. Many studies get far more rigorous peer review on blogs after publication than in journals. I use our own blog for the purpose of getting good review before publication for some of my work now, because the review on blogs is often far better and more rigorous than from journals. This is not an indictment of peer review or journals, just an open-eyed recognition of the realities.

It is hard to say who is outside and who is inside scientific circles anymore. McIntyre now publishes regularly in the peer reviewed literature. [Pielke is speaking of Steve McIntyre, whom I would describe as a climate change gadfly; he publishes a blog called "Climate Audit"] Gavin Schmidt blogs and participates in political debates. [Schmidt is a NASA earth scientist who conducts climate research.] Lucia Liljegren works at Argonne National Lab as an expert in fluid dynamics and blogs quite well on climate predictions for fun. She is preparing a paper for publication based on her work, but she has never done climate work before. I am a political scientist who publishes in the Journal of Climate and Nature Geoscience and blogs. Who is to say who is ‘outside’ and who is ‘inside’? Is participation in IPCC the union card? How about having a PhD? Publishing in the literature? Testifying before Congress?