[troutman]

https://skepticalscience.com/behind-...cy-theory.html

Bengtsson's submitted paper had made the case that the Earth's climate sensitivity to the increased greenhouse effect is relatively low by comparing the results of several previous studies, but had not made the case well. The journal in question, Environmental Research Letters published the full comments from the reviewer in question, showing that the recommendation to reject the paper was because,

"The overall innovation of the manuscript is very low ... The paper does not make any significant attempt at explaining or understanding the differences, it rather puts out a very simplistic negative message giving at least the implicit impression of "errors" being made within and between these assessments,"

Comments from a second reviewer were even more brutal. This is precisely the purpose of peer-review – to filter out papers that aren't sufficiently accurate or don't add anything significant to our scientific understanding. In fact, Environmental Research Letters is a high-quality scientific journal with a 65% rejection rate. For examples of innovative research in this area, see our discussions of recent papers by NASA's Drew Shindell and Texas A&M's Kummer & Dessler.

In fact, Bengtsson himself seemed taken aback by the conservative media distortions of the journal's rejection of his research (although one wonders why he leaked the reviewer comments to The Times to begin with), telling the Science Media Centre,

"I do not believe there is any systematic “cover up” of scientific evidence on climate change or that academics’ work is being “deliberately suppressed”, as The Times front page suggests. I am worried by a wider trend that science is being gradually being influenced by political views. Policy decisions need to be based on solid fact."