Peer review is what makes the academic world go round. At once the practice of scholarly independence and the means of self-policing, it's both the mechanism of academic freedom and the justification for it. At least that's how the story goes.

The problem is that peer review has been appropriated for purposes other than the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and truth. It has become a means of establishing and enforcing not only professional status (through enforced intellectual conformity) but quasi-religious belief (as the process is used to produce moral dogma rather than to question, discover, debate, and learn). And that makes it a very problematic process indeed.

At Spiked Online, Frank Furedi lays it all out in elegant, damning detail. He is particularly good on the rise of advocacy science. Excerpt:

In numerous areas, most notably in climate science, research has become a cause and is increasingly both politicised and moralised. Consequently, in climate research, peer review is sometimes looked upon as a moral project, where decisions are influenced not simply by science but by a higher cause. The scandal surrounding 'Climategate' is as much about the abuse of the system of peer review as it is about the rights and wrongs of the various claims made by advocacy researchers in and around the IPCC and the UEA.

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Increasingly, peer review is cited as kind of unquestioned and unquestionable authority for settling what are in fact political disputes. Consequently, the findings of peer review are looked upon, not simply as statements about the quality of research or of a scientific finding, but as the foundation for far-reaching policies that affect everything from the global economy to our individual lifestyles.

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Climate alarmists do not simply boast of their monopoly over peer-reviewed outlets – they also do their best to call into question peer-reviewed outlets that dare to publish research that challenges any aspect of their moral crusade. When Cambridge University Press published Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, it faced bitter criticism from campaigners who hinted that something had gone wrong with the publisher’s system of review. Stephen Schneider, a professor in environmental studies, asked why 'a publisher with so excellent a reputation in natural sciences (it even published the IPCC reports) publish[ed] a polemic under its imprimatur', and demanded to know if Cambridge University Press had 'the book completely reviewed?' It seems that as far as Schneider is concerned, it is simply unthinkable that a publication that questions the prevailing consensus could have been properly reviewed.

The zealous policing of peer review by campaigners is directly encouraged by the IPCC itself. As Reiner Grundman argued in (the peer-reviewed journal) Environmental Politics, the IPCC 'characterises outside critics as unscientific as they do not publish in peer-reviewed literature'. With so many moral resources invested in the authority of peer review, it is not surprising that some supporters of the IPCC consensus adopt an almost casual attitude towards the violation of academic protocols. The leaked 'Climategate' emails show how one UEA scientist, Dr Keith Briffa, wrote to a colleague to ask for help in keeping a paper that he did not like out of an academic journal that he edits. US climate scientist Michael Mann has proposed that a journal should be ostracised for daring to publish a paper criticising his work. 'I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal', he argued. Phil Jones, the central figure in the Climategate scandal, promised to keep two research papers out of the IPCC report. 'I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is', he said.

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While the IPCC insists that its critics should be judged by the most rigorous standards of peer review, it has a more relaxed attitude towards its own publications. In recent weeks there have been a series of damaging revelations about how conclusions drawn by the IPCC's 2007 report were based on speculation and anecdotes. So claims made about disappearing mountain ice were cobbled together from information drawn from a student's dissertation and an article published in a mountaineering magazine. Other claims were based on information from newsletters, press releases and reports produced by environmentalist advocacy groups.

There is a powerful double standard at work here: the IPCC attacks its critics for relying on 'grey literature' – that is, non-peer-reviewed literature – and yet it has relied on anecdotes and speculation in its reports. We shouldn't be too surprised about this double standard, because, fundamentally, the IPCC is not simply concerned with presenting the facts but with interpreting them, giving them meaning, giving them momentum. It continually makes conceptual leaps from facts to meaning, from findings to politics. Of course there is nothing wrong with being in the meaning business, just so long as you are honest about it and do not present yourself as the pure, impartial voice of science.

It shouldn't be surprising that those involved in the corruption of peer review should also be happy to use anecdotes and speculation as the moral equivalent of hard scientific data. However, it is important to understand that these people fervently believe in their cause and are convinced that, far from deceiving the public, they are preserving and protecting a higher truth. Like the authors of the British government's dodgy dossier on Iraq, they are convinced they are absolutely right. And it is this sense of righteousness that allows them not to let the absence of a few facts stand in the way of promoting their arguments as either hard intelligence or peer-reviewed science. It was the moral conviction of former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld that allowed him to respond to a question about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq by stating that 'the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. And in a similar manner, the absence of evidence does not deter climate alarmists from practising their art.

The philosophy of the Noble Lie – revealing a 'higher truth' with little regard for meaningful facts – allows people to stretch the truth in good conscience. One apologist for the sordid Climategate affair has reminded the public to 'not forget the context in which many of these emails were sent'. Apparently, 'this is a saga that goes back to a time before the current political and media concern about climate change'. He reminds us that this was before Al Gore got his Nobel Prize and when ‘well-funded climate sceptics routinely spread disinformation’. From this perspective, the 'context' lightens the burden of moral reproach. Climategate is an understandable if not 100 per cent justified response to the 'context'. Which is precisely how Noble Lies are hatched.

More generally, Furedi's comments about how conscience operates within the Noble Lie--ratifying the abandonment of a moral compass in the name of doing the right thing--reminds me of the discussions we've had on this blog about conscience, leadership, and school vouchers.

The questions I have are these: Can peer review be cleaned up? If so, how? If not, what could possibly take its place?