Sometimes, and yes.Does the APS publish other non-peer-reviewed papers? If they do, did they actually tell him his would be?
Monckton's paper was sent to an external reviewer, not an editor, and working with his recommendations M. made multiple revisions, expanding his original submission by 3000 words. At all times M believed, and was led to believe, that this was a peer-review process.
I am very suspicious of a 'consensus' which has to be maintained - or the illusion of which has to be maintained- by the suppression of dissent. In an age where the head of a government science agency can call for a "Nuremburg-style tribunal" to try and punish 'deniers,' where the American Meteorological Sociey has moved to expel any TV weatherman who doesn't toe the party line, where scientist after scientist has been denied tenure, shut out of scientific conferences and rejected by academic journals because no matter how scrupulous their research, their conclusions disagreed with the prevailing orthodoxy, and many others of their colleagues are too afraid for their jobs even to speak out, I see disturbing trends undermining academic freedom (and by extension scientific progress), not to mention possibly catastrophic economic consequences resulting from ill-considered measures undertaken on the basis of a forged 'consensus.'
What is claimed as 'consensus' I very much suspect is what is known as an 'information cascade.' Let me cite Schopenhauer, perhaps the first to perceive this phenomenon:
When we come to look into the matter, so-called universal opinion is the opinion of two or three persons; and we should be persuaded of this if we could see the way in which it really arises.
We should find that it is two or three persons who, in the first instance, accepted it, or advanced and maintained it; and of whom people were so good as to believe that they had thoroughly tested it. Then a few other persons, persuaded beforehand that the first were men of the requisite capacity, also accepted the opinion. These, again, were trusted by many others, whose laziness suggested to them that it was better to believe at once, than to go through the troublesome task of testing the matter for themselves. Thus the number of these lazy and credulous adherents grew from day to day; for the opinion had no sooner obtained a fair measure of support than its further supporters attributed this to the fact that the opinion could only have obtained it by the cogency of its arguments. The remainder were then compelled to grant what was universally granted, so as not to pass for unruly persons who resisted opinions which every one accepted, or pert fellows who thought themselves cleverer than any one else.
When opinion reaches this stage, adhesion becomes a duty....
--The Art of Controversy
But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Solar variation theory predicts that temperatures will continue to fall for at least another decade; carbon theory predicts the opposite. Although I could be proven wrong by events, my prediction is that eventually data which even James Hanson can't successfully distort will send this current 'consensus' crumbling onto its sandy foundations.
