Yesterday, we mentioned that Scott Pruitt’s pro-smoking policy to limit the science the EPA can use was sent to OMB for review. Today, the Washington Post is reporting that Pruitt will announce the new policy, and nearly a thousand scientists sent him a letter urging him not to adopt the policy. We also recently found out that the EPA was consulting with White House regulatory chief Neomi Rao, who likely softened the proposal. Rao is tightly linked to the Koch brothers, as the founder of a Koch-funded academic center at George Mason University. The fact that even a Koch crony finds Pruitt’s smokey science policy too toxic should tell you something.
But that doesn’t mean the policy is without its corporate supporters. Last week Undark’s Michael Shulson explored how the industry front group National Association of Scholars has promoted the pro-smoking policy as part of its “worry” over the supposed reproducibility crisis in science. This group, borrowing credibility from the real NAS (National Academy of Sciences), is using legitimate concerns about peer-review as “political ammunition” for its right-wing, pro-industry agenda, Shulson writes.
For all its supposed worry about science, NAS somehow misses that it’s deniers, not “alarmists,” who abuse peer-review. For the latest on that front, Retraction Watch has a story about how a 2017 paper claiming warming is natural passed peer review.
At issue is a May 2017 paper in the journal Global and Planetary Change, which claimed to provide “an alternative concept” of the natural carbon cycle which just so happened to shift the blame for increasing CO2 concentrations off of humans and on to the natural world.
A few months later, the journal published a rebuttal to the study, in which authors wrote that the paper’s alternative concept “reaches an incorrect conclusion” because it “is too simple, is based on invalid assumptions, and does not address many of the key processes involved in the global carbon cycle.”
So how did it get published in the first place? A trio of journal editors investigated, and published a commentary about it in this month’s issue. They conclude that the journal’s peer review “quality control mechanisms have failed in this particular case.”
In short, through “pal review.” That’s the name for when journals offer study authors the opportunity to suggest reviewers for their paper. In many cases, a study author knows exactly who else is doing similar research, and since there can be very specific and complicated issues at play, it’s helpful to have someone knowledgeable review a paper.
But it can also go wrong, when an author suggests only friendly reviewers who share a particular view- in this case, that climate change is natural. When the three journal editors looked at who was invited to review this paper, they found that all were “prominent individuals advocating” that warming is natural and that none that could “be considered an expert or authority” on the science involved. When they reached out to three other, non-biased, all recommended the paper be retracted due to its errors.
The journal decided not to retract the paper, “but rather let it remain to stimulate further discussion about such a highly charged and contentious topic.” And now, they will no longer allow study authors to suggest editors.
But if we can get someone besides a Koch stooge to edit Pruitt’s policy proposals, then we’ll be getting somewhere.
Top Climate and Clean Energy Stories: