Snailgate...? And Global Warming...it Never Ends...

[2aguy]

Well, apparently a giant snail that was killed into extinction because of global warming....er....is alive and well...where it has always been...and as the first few flakes of snow sliding down a mountain can lead to a massive avalanche...could this be another big climate scandal...?

Snailgate The Slime Trail Left By the Royal Society s Vanishing Credibility

As we reported ten days ago under the heading Extinct Giant Snail Killed By Climate Change Crawls Back From The Dead, the sorry tale began in 2007 with the publication in one of the Royal Society's journals Biology Letters of a "peer-reviewed" study by Justin Gerlach.

Gerlach's study claimed that the Aldabra Banded Snail (Rhachistia aldabrae) had gone extinct in the late 1990s due to climate change.

However, this was immediately disputed by four experts in the field, led by Oxford University ecologist Clive Hambler who argued that there simply wasn't enough evidence to justify to claim, and urged Biology Letters to print their prepared rebuttal.

And what is the problem here...what is the cause for concern?...the peer review process...

Instead, Biology Letters refused to publish the rebuttal on the grounds that it had failed to pass "peer-review."

Thanks to new research by Times environment correspondent Ben Webster, we now have an inkling as to how this may have happened. The two "peer-reviewers" who accepted the erroneous J Gerlach paper were the same two referees who rejected the subsequent rebuttal paper. Though their reasons for doing so are unclear, one evident possibility is that they did not wish to make themselves look foolish by accepting a paper explicitly rejecting the one they had so recently approved.

But we should just completely trust that the peer review process...also exposed in Climategate...is completely trustworthy and not prone to human bias...

 

[IanC]

Results that are useful to the AGW narrative get pal review but the criticisms of those papers find it almost impossible to find a publisher. Net review has become indispensable because the information is immediately available rather than delayed by months of stonewalling, and often rejection at the hands of tthe authors of the original paper.

 

[Billy_Bob]

Results that are useful to the AGW narrative get pal review but the criticisms of those papers find it almost impossible to find a publisher. Net review has become indispensable because the information is immediately available rather than delayed by months of stonewalling, and often rejection at the hands of tthe authors of the original paper.

This is why most PHD's who do real science now have blogs.. they test fire their work in open discussions... It actually gets them more traffic than professional journals these days and real time results or criticisms.. Even the enviro wackos have created their own blogs..

I know of two PHD's who use closed blogs with their students to openly discuss things. I fully expect this trend to grow.

 

[Old Rocks]

Briebart. Just as well post garbage from the Weekly Globe. Same level of credibility.

 

[IanC]

Briebart. Just as well post garbage from the Weekly Globe. Same level of credibility.

Why do you have such great difficulty distinguishing the content of the story from the source it was linked from?

 

[Crick]

Results that are useful to the AGW narrative get pal review but the criticisms of those papers find it almost impossible to find a publisher. Net review has become indispensable because the information is immediately available rather than delayed by months of stonewalling, and often rejection at the hands of tthe authors of the original paper.

So, Ian, you believe that the vast AGW conspiracy extends to biologists as well?

o Have you read the original study?
o Does it claim as a fact that the subject snail is extinct?
o Does finding one of these snails prove (in denier parlance) that the snails were never affected by global warming?
o Would a hypothetical finding that these snails had not been driven towards extinction by anthropogenic global warming prove (in denier parlance) that anthropogenic global warming was not taking place?

You and I know that the answer to each of those question is 'no'. So... I'm wondering why YOU are here.

 

[jc456]

Results that are useful to the AGW narrative get pal review but the criticisms of those papers find it almost impossible to find a publisher. Net review has become indispensable because the information is immediately available rather than delayed by months of stonewalling, and often rejection at the hands of tthe authors of the original paper.

So, Ian, you believe that the vast AGW conspiracy extends to biologists as well?

o Have you read the original study?
o Does it claim as a fact that the subject snail is extinct?
o Does finding one of these snails prove (in denier parlance) that the snails were never affected by global warming?
o Would a hypothetical finding that these snails had not been driven towards extinction by anthropogenic global warming prove (in denier parlance) that anthropogenic global warming was not taking place?

You and I know that the answer to each of those question is 'no'. So... I'm wondering why YOU are here.

Jiminey, when I read a post like this from you I can only imagine you have little to do. First off, you seem to always work from a premise of fact, which on USMB you have never been able to prove. Then in your spin world, you always expect the counter argument side of a subject is the only source requiring proof of claim, excuse me, non-verified-claim. You are a hypocrit plain and simple. It's still all gobbldi-goop/ mumbo jumbo because you will never provide proof.

 

[IanC]

I am here because this is another example of the uneven playing field of peer review, especially when it has anything to do with 'climate change'.

If a paper is wrong either in its data or conclusions then the rebuttals should be published. Not ignored because it might 'dilute the message'. A similar case dealing with butterflies happened a few years ago. Again climate change was claimed to have caused extinction but not only was it not an extinction, climate change was not even the reason for the population drop in the particular area studied. Rebuttals were stymied for a lengthy time and never got media attention when they finally got published in a less prestigious journal.

This is typical of the peer review process, not an unusual event. There are many Climategate emails that discuss exactly how skeptic papers were suppressed.

 

[flacaltenn]

Absolutely no snail has gone extinct due to simply a 0.5degC change in Mean Global surface temp in 80 years.. The fact the Goldyrocks and BullWinkly want to impeach the source and ARGUE about the inherent bias in that conclusion would be mildly amusing if it didn't happen every day around here...

 

[IanC]

There are basically no extinctions due to climate change that are legitimately documented. That doesn't appear to have any effect on the doomsayers bringing out papers every year predicting 5, 10 or higher% extinctions coming real soon.

 

[Crick]

Ian, can you name any extinctions (since the KT event) for which a definitive single cause is legitimately documented?

 

[IanC]

Ummmn Dodo birds be plenty tasty!

Species that are only found on specific islands are always vulnerable to previously unknown predators but I haven't really researched the subject. Are you bringing up the usual 'if climate change is any part of the problem, no matter how small, then we should affix the blame on CO2'? That mantra is getting old and it isn't holding water any more.

 

[flacaltenn]

Ian, can you name any extinctions (since the KT event) for which a definitive single cause is legitimately documented?

Does immense stupidity count as a single cause of extinction?

 

[Crick]

Can't think of one, can you.

 

[Crick]

Ummmn Dodo birds be plenty tasty!

Species that are only found on specific islands are always vulnerable to previously unknown predators but I haven't really researched the subject. Are you bringing up the usual 'if climate change is any part of the problem, no matter how small, then we should affix the blame on CO2'? That mantra is getting old and it isn't holding water any more.

I haven't attempted to contend that any specific extinction is due to climate change but, throughout the Earth's history, that has probably been a common cause. Call it "environmental change" instead and it will seem more reasonable.

That radically fast climate change will accelerate the already high rate of extinctions the Earth's biota is currently experiencing is a simplistic and irrefutable statement.

 

[IanC]

The already high rates of extinction? Hahahaha

The bullshit never stops with you guys.

 

[Billy_Bob]

The only thing extinct from the CAGW bull shit is commonsense and scientific process...

 

[Crick]

The only thing extinct from the CAGW [sic] bull shit is commonsense and scientific process...

That must explain the extremely high rate at which active, degreed climate scientists find AGW a valid explanation of the behavior of our current climate and why less than one in one hundred of them believes ANYTHING like what you believe.

 

[SSDD]

Results that are useful to the AGW narrative get pal review but the criticisms of those papers find it almost impossible to find a publisher. Net review has become indispensable because the information is immediately available rather than delayed by months of stonewalling, and often rejection at the hands of tthe authors of the original paper.

So, Ian, you believe that the vast AGW conspiracy extends to biologists as well?

o Have you read the original study?
o Does it claim as a fact that the subject snail is extinct?
o Does finding one of these snails prove (in denier parlance) that the snails were never affected by global warming?
o Would a hypothetical finding that these snails had not been driven towards extinction by anthropogenic global warming prove (in denier parlance) that anthropogenic global warming was not taking place?

You and I know that the answer to each of those question is 'no'. So... I'm wondering why YOU are here.

When climate science was in its infancy...and money wasn't flowing in by the boatload...climate science was a very small field and actually did science...when the hoax got wheels and the money started coming in by the boatload..all sorts of scientists jumped on the bandwagon...they are practically all climate scientist now...and when the money dries up because the hoax is finally exposed..then climate science will again, become a relatively small field which actually does science.

 

[Crick]

The number of scientists, in all fields, who accept AGW as valid, has done nothing but grow. You claim they aren't doing science, yet of the thousands of papers published on the subject, you find a very small handful in which you can find errors. If this were the hoax you claim, a very large portion of those thousands of papers would have to be false. If this were a hoax, there is simply no way that the proportion of scientists accepting AGW could be as high as it is. Your unsubstantiated assertions - and that is all they are - fail the sniff test.