Challenges to the CO2 Global Warming Hypothesis: Peer Review Abused to Axe Skeptical Paper
The apparent switch of CO2 from feedback to driver is clearly visible in the figure above about 17,500 years ago, when the temperature escalated sharply. Although the authors attempt to explain the sudden change as resulting from variability of the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation), their argument is only hand-waving at best and does nothing to bolster their postulated dual role for CO2.
In any case, a detailed, independent analysis of the same proxy data has found there is so much data scatter that whether CO2 leads or lags the warming can’t even be established. This analysis is shown in the right graph above, where the green dots represent the temperature data and the black circles are the CO2 level.
All this invalidates the reviewers’ first main criticism of Richet’s paper. The second criticism is that Richet dismisses computer climate models as an unreliable tool for studying the effect of CO2 on climate, past or present. But, as frequently pointed out in these pages, climate models indeed have many weaknesses. These include the omission of many types of natural variability, exaggeration of predicted temperatures and the inability to reproduce the past climate accurately. Repudiation of climate models is therefore no reason to reject a paper.
Some of the reviewers’ lesser criticisms of Richet’s paper are justified, such as his analysis of only one Antarctic ice core when several are available, and his inappropriate philosophical and political comments in a scientific paper. But outright rejection of the paper smacks of bias against climate change skeptics and is an abuse of the time-honored tradition of peer review.
