Given that even the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board recognizes that the endangerment finding is too solid for Pruitt to tackle, one might think the deniers would focus their energies on more achievable targets.
Well, one would be wrong. Seems the Kochtapus still wants to push Pruitt to take on this Sisyphean task. In a new post, Michael Bastasch at the Daily Caller dutifully and uncritically parrots a press release on the publication of a new peer-reviewed study that claims to use mathematical analysis to invalidate the endangerment finding, and denies the existence of a tropical hot spot (which definitely exists). Unfortunately for Bastasch’s churnalism, this “peer-reviewed study” is actually a pal-reviewed white paper.
Normally, the term “peer review” means that the work was published in a peer-reviewed journal. This time, there’s no evidence that this was published by any academic journal. That said, the second page of the report lists six people who agree with its conclusions. Of the six, five appear on DeSmog for their regular denier shenanigans, and the sixth lists among his qualifications that he was former chief economist for Exxon Venezuela. Not exactly an unbiased group of reviewers.
This statistical claptrap is worth mentioning because, according to Bastasch’s story, this is a basis for the petition calling on Pruitt to reconsider the endangerment finding. So it should probably be addressed in some official and substantive fashion (meaning by folks smarter than us) so that the EPA can point to solid science and put the petition to rest.
Now that the science aspect is settled, we’d like to offer a refresher for Bastasch on a basic aspect of science journalism: if the press release doesn’t list the journal, look for the DOI, the Digital Object Identifier. Real peer-reviewed papers (like this brand new one showing the pause wasn’t a statistically significant variation from the warming trend) have them as an identification mechanism, no matter where the paper is later republished. Whitepapers that couldn’t get published in real journals are not worth assigning one.
To be charitable, we probably shouldn’t blame Bastasch for failing to do basic journalistic due diligence and describing this paper as a peer-reviewed study instead of a biased embarrassment from a bunch of fringe scientists affiliated with fossil-fuel-funded lobby groups. It’s not like he has any actual education or training or experience in journalism or anything--just politics.
Then there’s the fact that, unlike this masterpiece, most peer-reviewed papers include the name of the publication (in this case none), and don’t semi-randomly bold, underline and capitalize words written in a 16 point font like a chain email forwarded from 2004. It doesn’t exactly take a journalism degree and years on the science beat to know that.
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