Silly Little Country

More Ugliness - Another CRU Misbehavior

I would certainly have been totally outraged had any of my academic papers been treated this way under peer review.

We will let the reader judge whether this team effort, revealed in dozens of e-mails and taking nearly a year, involves inappropriate behavior, including (a) unusual cooperation between authors and editor, (b) misstatement of known facts, (c) character assassination, (d) avoidance of traditional scientific give-and-take, (e) using confidential information, (f) misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of the scientific question posed by DCPS, (g) withholding data, and more.

Most of these categories had been exposed in other posts I have read on the CRU e-mails, but category d) was new to me and truly appalled me - the connivance of a journal editor to hold up publication of one paper in order to give time to selected CRU scientists to write a separate paper arguing against that paper, and in the process denying them the fairly standard right to respond to criticism of a given paper.
Read the whole thing; it is not a pretty picture. The CRU scientists seem so invested in the IPCC processs (which is explicitly political, and only slightly scientific) that they seems to have lost a grip on what makes science useful. It does make me wonder what role their work will appear to have had scientifically in twenty or thirty years. We are well aware of what role it has had politically,

Labels: Academic misbehavior, CRU, science

posted by Alan Adamson @ 5:03 AM