The way the process works in practice casts a shadow over one of the favorite claims of the climate campaign—namely, that there exists a firm “consensus” about catastrophic future warming among thousands of scientists. This so-called consensus reflects only the views of a much smaller subset of gatekeepers.
That's a huge problem. You have a large number of probably sincere scientists working on their narrow scope of expertise who funnel their work to the top for that IPCC bible. It is all to easy for the scientists at the bottom to know that their own work is fraught with uncertainty. And they may express this in their work. But they obviously can't be experts on all aspects of the complicated research. At some level, they have to trust that the work of others is more reliably certain than their own because the gatekeepers say it is. And even if you fudged the conclusions a bit, what are the odds that the rest did the same? Your small dishonesty merely supports the effectiveness of the science that you know is out there. How can they really know otherwise?
As much as I think the top guys are true believers, I have to believe that most of the climate researchers are honestly seeking answers. But when you mix dog poo ("effectiveness" in selling the global warming story) with ice cream (scientific "honesty)--even if the ice cream is the vast majority, you won't like the taste it leaves in your mouth. You can see that solving Stephen Schneider's dilemma is just not possible. This scenario explains the problem in a manner more believable (and less troubling, really) than thinking that the entire science is corrupt and dishonest.
I hope the real effect of Climategate and version 2.0, if I am right about the line scientists' basic integrity, is that the working scientists realize that their individual doubts and uncertainties are not isolated. As I've written, I don't deny science. I just deny science is what we have on global warming.
