The blogosphere seems not yet to have taken note of the extraordinary new paper by Hansen, Sato and Reddy entitled, somewhat misleadingly, I think, “Public Perception of Climate Change and the New Climate Dice”.
Before getting into the meat of the matter I wanted to fire off a quick note about Hansen’s method of publication is. Getting a paper into arxiv is simply a matter of uploading it. Why not submit this to peer review? Well, having Hansen as first author confers a credibility comparable to publishing in a top flight journal. I think we can already consider this paper part of the scientific literature.
But this raises the question of what the journals are for. If I were to upload a paper to arxiv, it would not have comparable credibility. But if I got a few of my better-known climatologist acquaintances to read it and they appended favorable reviews, wouldn’t that suffice? After all, it’s not as if bad papers don’t get into even the best journals. This method would mean that papers were reviewed by those most interested.
Science would, in that way, work better. The reason it doesn’t happen is because it is harder to measure. The journals are not gatekeepers of science at all. They are gatekeepers of careers. One consequence is that someone as established as Hansen simply doesn’t need them anymore. Why should the rest of us?