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A Climatology Conspiracy?
The CRU e-mails have revealed how the normal conventions of the peer review process appear to have been compromised by a team* of global warming scientists, with the willing cooperation of the editor of the International Journal of Climatology (IJC), Glenn McGregor. The team spent nearly a year preparing and publishing a paper that attempted to rebut a previously published paper in IJC by Douglass, Christy, Pearson, and Singer (DCPS). The DCPS paper, reviewed and accepted in the traditional manner, had shown that the IPCC models that predicted significant "global warming" in fact largely disagreed with the observational data.

We will let the reader judge whether this team effort, revealed in dozens of e-mails and taking nearly a year, involves inappropriate behavior, including (a) unusual cooperation between authors and editor, (b) misstatement of known facts, (c) character assassination, (d) avoidance of traditional scientific give-and-take, (e) using confidential information, (f) misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of the scientific question posed by DCPS, (g) withholding data, and more.

*The team is a group of climate scientists who frequently collaborate and publish papers which often support the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. For this essay, the leading team members include Ben Santer, Phil Jones, Timothy Osborn, and Tom Wigley, with lesser roles for several others....

...On 21 July 2008, Santer hears that his paper is formally accepted and expresses his sincere gratitude to Osborn for "all your help with the tricky job of brokering the submission of the paper to IJoC." Osborn responds that "I'm not sure that I did all that much."

On 10 Oct 2008, the Santer et al. paper is published online. Thirty-six days later Santer et al. appears in print, immediately following DCPS, who have waited now over eleven months for their paper to appear in print. The strategy of delaying DCPS and not allowing DCPS to have a simultaneous response to Santer et al. has been achieved.