Editing and reviewing the canon of scientific knowledge is a critical function that should involve checks and balances, distribution among multiple groups, clear objective standards and the disclosure and/or elimination of conflicts of interests. These factors are especially critical when the stakes are high and governments look to the product of scientific endeavor to set public policy, enact legislation and determine the future economic course of action. What you need to understand what Climategate revealed about global warming literature:
Few people understand the real significance of Climategate, the now-famous hacking of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Most see the contents as demonstrating some arbitrary manipulating of various climate data sources in order to fit preconceived hypotheses (true), or as stonewalling and requesting colleagues to destroy emails to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the face of potential or actual Freedom of Information requests (also true).
But there's something much, much worse going on—a silencing of climate scientists, akin to filtering what goes in the bible, that will have consequences for public policy, including the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) recent categorization of carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."
The bible I'm referring to, of course, is the refereed scientific literature. It's our canon, and it's all we have really had to go on in climate science (until the Internet has so rudely interrupted). When scientists make putative compendia of that literature, such as is done by the U.N. climate change panel every six years, the writers assume that the peer-reviewed literature is a true and unbiased sample of the state of climate science.
Referred literature has been completely compromised and the EPA, having relied entirely on the IPCC findings, has now lost the very basis of its findings!
