There's an appalling story coming out of the UK today: Real Climate faces libel suit. A group that is publishing some wacky claims is threatening to sue the science bloggers of Real Climate. Some of you may know the Real Climate bloggers. They are a resource I've turned to over and over for quality information and sources of debunking materials.
Can you imagine losing those voices?
Here's the story:
Real Climate faces libel suit
Prominent blog run by climate scientists could be sued by E&E after accusing the journal of 'shoddy' peer review
I'm sure we can all agree that scientists have a right to call out shoddy material when they see it. Apparently that's what the Real Climate guys have done about this journal.
Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeller and Real Climate member based at Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, has claimed that Energy & Environment (E&E) has "effectively dispensed with substantive peer review for any papers that follow the editor's political line."
Is that statement libelous? I don't think so, seems to me to be an opinion. But the UK libel laws are notoriously in favor of cranks, and it may be there's real risk here.
However, it's easy to publish anything today. Anyone with a blog, or with something pretending to be a journal could say anything they wanted, and it would have quite a reach with new media. I would hate to think that people check their science at the door for their political line. I can't imagine people on the left would do that....cough.... The Nobel-winning Paul Nurse recently observed in the BBC Horizon's show that I wrote about (Science Under Attack), it isn't about peer-review anymore. It's about what fits one's point-of-view.
But it's entirely possible that scientists here would also run into such situations. It's really unfortunate that more and more policy that ought to be based on scientific data is getting run through the courts. And how much mis-information is being published by all sorts of sources. Whether you like that or not, though, it is the way of the world right now.
What do you think? Should scientists cool their opinions because they fear lawsuits? Should political view taint the material that gets published as science?
I hope that scientists won't be cowed into silence by threats of bullies. We need scientists to speak out with courage more than ever today. The multi-media assaults on the facts are daunting. Anyone can publish anything they want these days, and peer-review doesn't seem to matter to so many now.
Let's hope this doesn't play out to squelch science.
Updated by mem from somerville at Sun Feb 27, 2011, 11:22:05 AM
According to an item posted at RealClimate, the EE team is walking back the threat. Very nice, if true... http://www.realclimate.org/...