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Nuclear Winter
Peer review is the standard process by which scientists carefully evaluate and correct one another’s work before publication. It is the main benchmark that distinguishes legitimate scientific research from unproven assertion.
Peer Review Quotes in Merchants of Doubt
The Merchants of Doubt quotes below are all either spoken by Peer Review or refer to Peer Review. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Introduction
Quotes
Every scientific paper and report has to go through the critical scrutiny of other experts: peer review. Scientific authors are required to take reviewers’ comments and criticisms seriously, and to fix any mistakes that may have been found. It’s a foundational ethic of scientific work: no claim can be considered valid—not even potentially valid—until it has passed peer review.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5
Quotes
Scientists are confident they know bad science when they see it. It’s science that is obviously fraudulent—when data have been invented, fudged, or manipulated. Bad science is where data have been cherry-picked—when some data have been deliberately left out—or it’s impossible for the reader to understand the steps that were taken to produce or analyze the data. It is a set of claims that can’t be tested, claims that are based on samples that are too small, and claims that don’t follow from the evidence provided. And science is bad—or at least weak—when proponents of a position jump to conclusions on insufficient or inconsistent data.
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Peer Review Term Timeline in Merchants of Doubt
The timeline below shows where the term Peer Review appears in Merchants of Doubt. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
...it before publication. (He did make changes to it, but only as part of the peer review process that all reputable scientific work undergoes.) Santer and his colleagues publicly rebutted these baseless...
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Chapter 1
...didn’t make truly scientific claims. They never collected evidence, reached any conclusions, or went through peer review . They simply spread doubt. But it worked for more than 50 years. Since not...
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Chapter 5
The true test of good and bad science is peer review . A board of nine qualified doctors and research scientists peer reviewed the EPA study,...
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Chapter 6
The Carter administration asked the NAS to peer review the Jasons’ study. Leading climate modeler Jule Charney led a nine-member panel who used more...
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...the government should “wait and see,” and people will migrate and adapt to new environments. Peer reviewers like physicist Alvin Weinberg critiqued the report’s unsupported claims about climate adaptation, but the NAS...
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...work with a series of baseless claims, ranging from the accusation that it was never peer reviewed (it was) to an insistence that the climate was actually cooling (it wasn’t). At a...
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...40 other IPCC scientists wrote the Journal to explain that the changes were part of peer review , but the Journal significantly edited their letter, including by deleting the forty other scientists’...
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Conclusion
...White House took the George C. Marshall Institute’s reports seriously, even though they were never peer-reviewed and full of serious misrepresentations.
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