Comment open letter on the bug fix culture of peer review (Score 1) 786
Dear Michael,
The scientific high ground in this matter is to admit that the original peer review process sucked, lacking as it did any reviewer with sufficient statistical expertise to detect subtle methodological errors, and further, to admit that it does not require a PhD in any discipline to point this out (nor, especially, a peer-reviewed paper) if it happens to be true that the paper contained subtle methological errors (which it did).
It's all well and good that the main result itself seems to have held up under additional scrutiny brought to bear once these admittedly small deficiencies were aptly pointed out. This does not change the fact that the original peer review sucked.
(Perhaps you were merely lucky that your result continued to hold water after your subtle statistical errors were properly addressed. This is why a result that merely holds up isn't worth much in a high stakes debate. Proof by hindsight does not strike me as adequate given the magnitude of societal change that effective mitigation seems to require. To me, the stakes seem to be high enough to demand that critical links in the argumentative chain are right in all necessary respects before they are attached to a giant political lever; or, failing to achieve the almost impossible demand of being right in all essential particulars in peer-reviewed published paper V 1.0, that the culture of climate science embrace with a blazing passion the art of the mea culpa bug fix.)
Ordinarily, the peer review process is not expected to be 100% water tight, as the standard pace of science is stately and the stakes are modest. In this example, you paper served as the fulcrum of the biggest political mud fight of the late twentieth century. If climate scientists think that the fate of humanity and the planet lies in the balance, there shouldn't be even an epsilon gap in the quality of the peer review process.
You can't have it both ways without looking like a complete idiot. And it sure doesn't help your cause to look like an idiot when you're being attacked in a thousand illegitimate ways.
Thanks for your attention to this matter. I look forward to the future scientific culture of rock solid peer review in the first instance.
Live long and prosper,
J. Random hockey fan
(By some strange twist of fate, this was the first item to cross my feed after spending thirty minutes flipping through Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery which I'm presently reading to discovery why David Deutsch, in particular, praises it so highly.)