To: RetiredNow who wrote (15515 ) 12/19/2009 10:03:35 AM From: Brumar89 1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) | Respond to Are you saying that skeptics and deniers are a legitimate part of the debate and contributing to the evaluation of climate science? Scientists who attempt to publish material indicating the global warming due to manmade causes is not evident or weak, or who doubt the severity of the problem, are not treated well by some. I have had first had experience with this. I am known as somewhat of a skeptic regarding global warmings effects in the NW--although I do believe that greenhouse gases are a serious problem in the long-run. A group of us noted that the snowpack in the Cascades was NOT rapidly melting away, in contrast to some publications by some local CLIMATE scientists and publicized by Mayor Nickels. The reaction was intense. One of my colleagues, Mark Albright, who was the first to notice the lack of snowpack loss was fired as associate State Climatologist and the media went wild...we called it Snowpackgate...and it got national attention. We then wrote a paper on the subject (the main contributor being Mark Stoelinga) and submitted it to the Journal of CLIMATE. I have published a lot of papers in my life (roughly 100) and I never had problems like we had with this paper. Very biased associate editor and some reviewers. Four review cycles and it was about to be turned down, until we appealed to the editor, who provide fair and reasonable. This paper has now been accepted for publication, but it really revealed to me the bias in the system. Poor papers with significant technical, but reflecting the "official" line, get published easily, while papers indicating the global warming is weaker or delayed, go through hurdle after hurdle. The media tends to publish all kind of threatening predictions about global warming without really researching them. A good example is that suggestion that heavier precipitation will fall in the NW under GW...or is already happening. There is no evidence for this, but it gets repeated over and over again.
