During our last ice age about 18,000 years ago, the sea level was approximately 100 meters lower than it is today and it's been rising ever since. The rate of rise has varied substantially during this period...variances in rate of rise are historically normative.
How a tiny blog and a collective of climate enthusiasts broke the biggest story in the history of global warming science but not without a gatekeeper of the climate establishment trying to halt its proliferation.
It was triggered at the most unlikely of places. Not in the pages of a prominent science publication, or by an experienced muckraker. It was triggered at a tiny blog a bit down the list of popular skeptic sites. With a small group of followers, a blog of this size could only start a media firestorm if seeded with just the right morsel of information, and found by just the right people. Yet it was at this location that the most lethal weapon against the global warming establishment was unleashed.
The blog was the Air Vent. The information was a link to a Russian server that contained 61 MB of files now known as Climategate. Within two weeks of the files introduction, the story appeared on 28,400,000 web pages.
Not entirely the death of global warming as many have claimed what happened with Climategate is much more nuanced and exponentially more interesting than the headlines convey. What was triggered at this blog was the death of unconditional trust in the scientific peer review process, and the maturing of a new movement that of peer-to-peer review.
This development may horrify the old guard, but peer-to-peer review was just what forced the release of the Climategate files and as a consequence revealed the uncertainty of the science and the co-opting of the process that legitimizes global warming research. It was a collective of climate blogs, centered on the work of Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, which applied the pressure. With moderators and blog commenters that include engineers, PhDs, statistics whizzes, mathematic experts, software developers, and weather specialists the label flat-earthers, as many of their opponents have attempted to brand them, seems as fitting as tagging Lady Gaga with the label demure.
This peer-to-peer review network is the group that applied the pressure and then helped authenticate and proliferate the story.
Now, as expected, the virtual organism that is the global warming establishment resisted release of the weapon. At the first appearance of the Climategate files, which contained a plethora of emails and documents from the University of East Anglias Climate Research Unit, the virtual organism moved to halt their promulgation. Early on, a few of the emails were posted on Lucia Liljegrens skeptic blog The Blackboard. Shortly after the post, Lucia, a PhD and specialist in fluid mechanics, received an email from prominent climatologist Gavin Schmidt from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). It said in part, [A] word to the wise I dont think that bloggers are shielded under any press shield laws and so, if I were you, I would not post any content, nor allow anyone else to do so.
In response to my inquiry about his email, Schmidt posited, I was initially concerned that she might be in legal jeopardy in posting the stolen emails. Gavin Schmidt was included in over 120 of the leaked correspondence.
Gavin_SchmidtGavin Schmidt
When asked if she thought the Climategate documents were a big deal at first sight, Lucia responded, Yes. In fact, I was even more sure after Gavin [Schmidt] sent me his note.
Remember these names: Steven Mosher, Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Jeff Id Condon, Lucia Liljegren, and Anthony Watts. These, and their community of blog commenters, are the global warming contrarians that formed the peer-to-peer review network and helped bring chaos to Copenhagen critically wounding the prospects of cap-and-trade legislation in the process. One may have even played the instrumental role of first placing the leaked files on the Internet.
This group can be thought of as the first cousins to Andrew Breitbarts collective of BIG websites obsessively curious, grassroots investigators that provide vision to the establishments blind eye. Peer-to-peer review is the scientific version of the undernews.
To fully understand how this amorphous body came about, one has to press rewind back to the introduction of the now famous hockey stick graph, and how this iconic image inadvertently gave birth to this group.
**
On October 14, 1998, Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley, and Malcolm Hughes, also known as Mann et al (1999), penned a paper entitled Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations and submitted the study to the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). Given the acknowledged uncertainties and limitations expressed in the title, it is hard to believe that the graph showcased in the paper would later become the poster child of certainty for a scientific consensus on global warming but it would become just that. The paper, an extension of a study published earlier that year in Nature magazine, included a reconstruction of global temperature variation over many centuries.
Part of the science of reconstruction claims that tree rings viewed in the cross-section of specific trees can be used to infer temperatures in the past. Subscribers to trees as temperature proxies believe that they provide a picture of past temperatures at times when thermometers were not present. The paper was published by GRL in 1999, and included the first hockey stick that stretched back to 1000 AD.
MBH99_Hockeystick
It is hard to overestimate the influence that this iconic image has had on the discourse over anthropogenic global warming, or temperature increases due to human emissions of CO2. From its introduction, the hockey stick graph, named for its shape resembling Wayne Gretskys weapon of choice, was seen as compelling evidence in the case for man induced global warming. The graph showed a relatively stable temperature trend over the past 1000 years, until about the 1900s, where the graph takes a turn upwards, followed by another dramatic turn sharply upwards at around 1960 through the time of the publication of the article.
What was alarming about this graph was that the up trend coincided quite closely to the beginning of the industrial revolution, widely thought to start at about 1850. If true, the graphs temperature increase could be tied to the introduction of carbon dioxide emissions pointing to man and machine steering the earth toward a collision course with the apocalypse. Theories of man-induced climate change had been around long before Mann et al, but their graph gave the effect of italicizing, underlining, and boldfacing the problem of global warming.
WMO_Graph
The utility of the hockey stick graph to convey this alarming belief was quickly realized, with a variation of the graph appearing on the front cover of a World Meteorological Organization report entitled WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999 (above). This version of the graph included temperature reconstructions of three different groups of climate scientists, including Michael Mann, as well as Phil Jones and Keith Briffa, the latter two both from the University of East Anglias Climate Research Unit the university where the Climategate files originated. This graph was even more compelling than the Mann et al (1999) hockey stick because it provided a graphical scientific consensus of man-induced global temperature increase.
Michael_MannMichael Mann
Now, the WMOs 1999 report was not just any obscure scientific climate audit. The World Meteorological Organization is one of the founders of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the very body that is tasked with evaluating the risk of climate change caused by human activity. The inclusion of the hockey stick on the front cover was an indication that the graph would also be highlighted in the gold standard of global warming reports the IPCCs 2001 Third Assessment Report (IPCC TAR). The IPCC TAR is the document that provides governments with policy prescriptions to mitigate the effects of global warming.
The indication proved to be true, with the hockey stick graph being highlighted in not one, not two, but six different places throughout the report. Again, a scientific consensus was implied providing a nice tidy story.
Its inclusion cemented the hockey stick as the iconic image for proponents of man-induced climate change. The graphs colorful and prominent display, in a sense, incited environmentalists to enlist with the camp of urgent action, and even inspired Al Gore to include a variation of the stick in his Oscar-Awarded documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
With its big screen debut, the hockey stick had pierced pop culture. It was now big time.
(More to come.)
PART II The hockey stick graph inadvertently incites a new camp of lukewarmer skeptics. Climategate files make first appearance on the internet, but were in the hands of one person days before they were made public.
If history tells us anything, it shows us that inciting an audience is an extremely precarious undertaking. Inspiring one group of followers with a call-to-action can just as easily unleash the furor of another. Arousing a community to attack an indisputable villain can surprisingly lead to a circling of the wagons by the scoundrels close associates. Inciting is an unpredictable endeavor, best left for those with an innate ability to read a situation or an army on-the-ready to quickly take advantage of an opening.
So is the story of the hockey stick just as quickly as it was used as a rallying call for warmists, it also inadvertently gave birth to a camp of skeptics.
MedievalWarmingPeriod
Enter Steve McIntyre, stage right. A retired mineral explorer and math scholar from Toronto, McIntyre became interested in climate science and the hockey stick due to its seeming inconsistencies. A Medieval Warming Period (seen above) had been a well-documented event in which the earths temperature increased considerably sometime between 1000 and 1300 AD, followed by a cooling trend known as the Little Ice Age. A graph of this cycle was even included in the IPCC First Assessment Report in 1990. These events were, however, absent from the Mann et al hockey stick graph. McIntyre was curious about how the graph was made and as chance would have it, the discipline of temperature reconstructions, largely an exercise in statistics, fit right within his mathematics wheelhouse.
Steve_McIntyreSteve McIntyre
On investigating the hockey stick, McIntyre happened upon what he viewed as some errors in the application of his field of expertise along with some misuses of data. He contacted Ross McKitrick, an environmental economist with a PhD in economics, and the two worked on a paper that would highlight the errors in the original hockey stick article.
The article, entitled Corrections to the Mann et al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series, was published in the journal Energy and Environment in 2003.
In addition to their MM paper, as it came to be known, they performed other investigations into the work of climate scientists. To McIntyre and McKitricks surprise, it didnt appear that there was much review of the work on which so much government policy was being derived. They claimed that, in addition to Mann et al adding in temperatures where there were holes in the data through a guessing method called extrapolation, they also found improper duplication of data sets and a strong cherry-picking effect that would result in a hockey stick formation no matter what type of temperature data was entered into the climate models. They input what is called red noise, or random data, into the model and out popped a hockey stick graph.
Eventually, the MM paper led to Mann et al publishing a modification to provide more detail to their original article. However, the scientists did not change any of their underlying results. The MM Paper also led to a congressional hearing and multiple counter studies were published, with one known as Wahl and Ammann (2006) supporting Mann et als position and another, known as The Wegman Report, supporting the MM paper.
To journalize his investigations into climate science, McIntyre created a blog called ClimateAudit and this is when the peer-to-peer review network first took solid form.
Others followed suit. Anthony Watts, a weather specialist, created WattsUpWithThat, Lucia Liljegren created The Blackboard, and Jeff Id Condon created the Air Vent. Both the contributors and commenters at these sites meticulously picked apart the work of the scientists featured in the Climategate emails thats how this community works.
When I asked Gavin Schmidt about whether this group has had any impact on the science, he responded, On the science? No. He continued, There is an old joke about a professor reading over one of his not-so-promising students work: This paper contains much that is novel and correct. [the professor] continues, Unfortunately, that which is novel is not correct, and that which is correct is not novel. It fits the bill here.
In response to Schmidts claim that the group had no impact on the science, Steve McIntyre told me that the then-Chairman of the National Academy of Science Committee on Statistics endorsed our findings on [Mann et al].
One of the main contention points of the peer-to-peer reviewers has been a concept termed divergence.
Some climate scientists noticed a problem with tree ring temperature reconstructions beginning around 1960. What they found was that the tree rings showed a downward trend in temperatures starting at this time while the actual thermometer readings showed a temperature increase. This is termed a divergence because the reconstructions didnt match the actual temperature. So what the climate scientists did in some of the hockey stick graphs, according to the skeptics, was delete the tree ring data starting in 1960, replacing them with the actual temperatures. The climate scientists rationale was that tree-rings had a change in response to the environment over recent decades. The peer-to-peer group claimed that the climate scientists were participating in bad science. Why? Because the divergence raises the question that if the tree-ring reconstructions could not read the higher temperatures of today, how could the scientists be sure that there werent higher temperatures throughout the last thousand years that have also gone undetected by the tree-rings.
The spike in temperatures that are there today could also have been there one thousand years ago inferring that the earth is just going through a natural cycle. This divergence problem appeared to show a serious problem with the science that was the underpinning of the hockey stick graphs.
It was this concern, continually highlighted by the peer-to-peer reviewers, that has brought so much perspective to the now infamous Climategate email of Mikes Nature trick to hide the decline sent by Phil Jones. Several of the hockey stick graphs appeared to be underpinned by data that mixed apples with oranges. Even in graphs where the actual temperatures were not added, the divergence appears to be artfully hidden as seen in a hockey stick graph included in the IPCC Third Assessment Report.
As can be seen, the Briffa et al reconstructions (in green) come to a halt at 1960 and the end of the graph, which is trending downwards, is hidden behind others that trend up thus providing a strong rhetorical impression of a scientific consensus of unprecedented temperature increase. The pressure applied to climate scientists to reach this consensus would be later revealed in the Climategate emails.
Another complaint by these skeptics was the lack of transparency and access to data used by the climate establishment. In repeated attempts, Steve McIntyre attempted to acquire the computational code from Michael Mann and data from Keith Briffa and Phil Jones that were used to build the hockey stick graphs. Like the US, the UK has Freedom of Information legislation that allows for individuals to request information related to government-funded projects. The peer-to-peer network requested the data directly from the University of East Anglias Climate Research Unit and McIntyre even approached the peer review journals that the global warming establishment used to legitimize their research, in hopes for access to the underlying data and code that the scientists were using but all were continually met with some form of resistance.
It wasnt until the Climategate files were leaked that we would understand the significance of these efforts.
**
Jeff Id Condon moderates a small blog called the Air Vent which is frequented by lukewarmers a group of global warming enthusiasts that believe that CO2 does trap energy and could be warming the planet, but questions the magnitude of the problem and the certainty of climate science. Moderates is actually a loose descriptor for what Jeff does to posted comments because it was actually his lack of moderation that put his blog at ground zero of Climategate.
On Tuesday November 17th, Jeff was hunting deer, as he puts it, unsuccessfully in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. On his return he had one hundred or so emails and comments that needed to be moderated before they would go live. Jeff was at his parents house at the time and didnt pay much attention to the all-important comment. What I did was read in a huge hurry, [because] I was at my folks house and kept being interrupted, and I read the email and posted the link. There was no cussing, it seemed to be about climate so I investigated nothing.
Jeff then jumped on the road for the five-hour drive home.
Unknown to Jeff though, was that one of the comments was the morsel of information that would validate the peer-to-peer review network and provide clear perspective to their efforts.
The comment was from a user named FOIA, posted to the blog from a computer with a Saudi Arabian IP address. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it. The comment linked to a file named FOI2009.zip on a Russian server.
By the time Jeff got home he noticed an email from Steven Mosher bringing attention to the content of the link. Steve Mosher is as smart a guy as any of us will ever meet so I quickly opened and looked at a couple of [the FOI2009.zip] emails. Understanding the implications of the files, Jeff immediately pulled down the link.
Not knowing exactly what to do next, Jeff returned to the trusty peer-to-peer review network. He emailed Steven Mosher, Lucia, Anthony Watts, and Steve McIntyre questioning what they should do about the files. Little did he know that most of this group had already downloaded them and begun investigating the content.
An hour had passed with no response, but he didnt let the hour go to waste. With his jaw on the floor, Jeff read one damning email after another, getting more acclimated with the content of the files.
Now Jeff is not a lawyer, hes an aeronautical engineer by trade, but he was concerned about the legal implications of posting personal emails. What he did notice, however, was that both Anthony Watts blog and Lucia had posted several of the emails. With two from the network opening the door, Jeff thought to himself, the others have already posted on this, what is wrong with you, put it up. He posted the article Leaked FOIA files 62 mb of gold.
The Air Vent was the little blog that could it was not, however, the first place that the files turned up on the internet. The first place they turned up was on the very site moderated by those implicated in the Climategate files.
**
It was Tuesday November 17th at 6:20am EST when the Climategate files made their first known poke onto the internet. An unknown user logged into RealClimate.org, the climate science blog of co-founders Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt, disabled all legitimate users, then uploaded from an IP address in Turkey a zip file with the title FOIA.zip containing the Climategate documents. Michael Mann is, of course, the father of the hockey stick graph and Gavin Schmidt is one of the top climatologists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). This unknown user then attempted to create a draft post identical to that posted on the Air Vent, but the RealClimate admin stopped the foreign user before the post could go live.
A short while later, another user, likely the same RealClimate foreign user, posted a comment to an article on the blog of Steve McIntyre (ClimateAudit) at 7:24am EST from a Russian IP address. The comment was much more subtle than the one that would later be posted on the Air Vent. It read only, A miracle just happened. The user was listed as RC, and linked to the FOIA.zip file on RealClimate. Four downloads occurred from this post before the link was made inactive by the admin. This comment had apparently gone unnoticed by Steve McIntyre, who wasnt made aware of it until Gavin Schmidt highlighted its existence in a post on November 23rd.
The post on ClimateAudit was not exactly the grand announcement that was seen on the Air Vent and didnt lead initially to an explosion of the story. Why did the promoter of the Climategate files choose such a subtle post? Did the leaker know anything about the ClimateAudit server that made him or her avoid making a stronger proclamation and drawing more traffic to the site?
The closest that you can currently get to the leaker is, intriguingly, someone from within the peer-to-peer review network.
**
As anyone who really researches Climategate will learn, the name Steven Mosher continues to pop up. When the story broke, it was Mosher who drew attention to the comment at the Air Vent. He was also the man that alerted Lucia of The Blackboard blog to the files. And he was the first to alert followers of ClimateAudit with a series of posts that included some of the emails.
Steven_Mosher_secretSteven Mosher
Why was Steven Mosher so ubiquitous when it came to the breaking of the Climategate story? Because Steven Mosher had the files several days before they reached the internet.
**
PART III A global warming skeptic receives the leaked files from an anonymous Deep-Climate insider. Release of files exposes gatekeeping and leads to the maturing of a new science movement that of peer-to-peer review. Last in a series. Please click for Part I and Part II.
Few outside the climate skeptic circle have ever heard of Steven Mosher. An open-source software developer, statistical data analyst, and thought of as the spokesperson of the lukewarmer set, Mosher hasnt made any of the mainstream media outlets covering the story of Climategate. But make no mistake about it when it comes to dissemination of the story, Steven Mosher is to Climategate what Woodward and Bernstein were to Watergate. He was just the right person, with just the right influence, and just the right expertise to be at the heart of the promulgation of the files.
One could even argue that Mosher is one of the few people with the right assortment of circumstances, and associates, to understand the significance of the Climategate files and the technical expertise to post them on various locations using open proxies, a method hackers use to hide their identities while online. Given that the Climategate files came from computers with IP addresses in Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, open proxies is most likely the technique used by the person who posted the files and links on ClimateAudit, RealClimate, and the Air Vent.
Several days before the Climategate files were made public, Mosher says he had been given the files from an undisclosed source. [The] file came to me in the form of a CD, and I was asked by people to take a look at it and give my opinion whether it was a hoax or not.
Mosher, having participated in submitting requests for data and code to the Climate Research Unit (CRU), was the perfect outsider to authenticate the files. Mosher also successfully lobbied NASA to release temperature data and code in 2007. With the file in hand, I didnt sleep, he said, while embarking on reviewing the emails to check timelines against various historical events, as well as calling colleagues to check the Climategate emails against the actual emails they received.
Having felt that it was highly unlikely that it was a hoax, Mosher went one step further. Prior to [the emails] being public, I got confirmation from sources inside CRU that the files I held were real.
Steven Mosher can now add muckraker to his long list of impressive capabilities.
Shortly after confirming the authenticity of the Climategate files, Mosher says he saw the link to the file on the Air Vent. My first reaction to the link was relief, he said. I didnt want to be the only person who had these files and the task of plowing through all the mails was overwhelming.
Mosher understood the power of the peer-to-peer review network. The task of mining the emails for relevant data could only be undertaken by the group that had been closely monitoring the workings of the global warming establishment. Once the link was on the Air Vent, Mosher hit the ground running. He simultaneously informed Jeff Id and Lucia Liljegren of the existence of the link on the blog. He then posted some of the emails on Steve McIntyres ClimateAudit blog. I did this with some fear because I knew it would probably take Steves site down, either through a [denial-of-service] attack or just traffic load. Mosher was right, ClimateAudit grinded to a modem-era crawl in the hours after the post.
But by this time ClimateAudits slothy nature didnt matter. The Climategate files were under the fierce scrutiny of the peer-to-peer review network at both The Blackboard and WattsUpWithThat. The origin of the term Climategate can even be tracked to the commenters of their first blog posts. By the time the story would reach the mainstream media, the peer-to-peer reviewers had already authenticated, named, packaged, and wrapped up the files in a nice little bow for the news outlets to either ignore or build upon. Within days, the files were fully searchable on the web for the reviewers to comb.
Regardless of how the news networks would handle it, the undermedia quickly recognized its soul mate and the story grew exponentially from there.
**
The impact of the Climategate story on the public discourse over global warming legislation is an interesting tale that will be in flux for the foreseeable future. The back-story, however, is beginning to settle into a firm position. It is one of how a small group of lukewarmers applied pressure on the science of climate in a way that the peer review establishment did not and could not.
The last email exchange within the Climategate files is November 12, 2009. Within the tight circle of climate skeptics, the significance of this date is telling. It is coincidentally the day before a crucial piece of information was denied to the peer-to-peer reviewers.
On November 13, 2009, a letter was sent by the Director of Information Services at the University of East Anglia to Steve McIntyre refusing his request for temperature data under the UKs version of the Freedom of Information Act. The timing of the denial, which was a day after the last email in the Climategate files, and the fact that the files were titled FOIA.zip and FOI2009.zip, which are both abbreviated references to this Act, provides a striking indication to the impetus of the leak. This denial may have been just enough to incite someone from within the guarded establishment to give others a peak behind the green curtain.
If the connection holds, it shows a fascinating circularity of how a denial of transparency actually led to a forced transparency consequently displaying how a professional culture changes regardless of its resistance to change.
The establishments peer review process is one that subjects an authors scientific research to the scrutiny of other experts in the same field of research. An author typically submits their research to a recognized peer review publication, and this publisher then sends the article to a select group of peers for critical review. The peer review literature is a lot like the mainstream media. Its an old system where the spaces on its pages are guarded by a very select group of gatekeepers. Its a control system of sorts an elite group is the decision maker that designates which papers are to be, or not to be, considered serious.
As Climategate has shown, this process became compromised causing an instability. As seen in the leaked emails, many within the climate establishment were interrelated and working together to ensure their message of global warming wasnt diluted. There were even desires to redefine the peer review literature to punish journals that published skeptics papers.
The attempt to control the process dates back years, as seen in the emails, then continues at the time of the release of the files, with even bold attempts to control after the story had been blown wide open.
As mentioned in Part I, Gavin Schmidt emailed Lucia Liljegren, providing a word to the wise in an apparent attempt to halt Climategates promulgation. The connectedness of these climate scientists is also seen in this email. Lucia, as I am certain you are aware, hacking into private emails is very illegal, said Schmidt. If legitimate, your scoop was therefore almost certainly obtained illegally.
An interesting observation in this statement is his use of the words if legitimate. You may recall that the Climategate files had been uploaded to Gavin Schmidts site, RealClimate, approximately two days before the story broke on the Air Vent. I had no idea where [the file] had come from or if they had been tampered with, said Schmidt, when asked about the use of the term if legitimate. However, Schmidt could have easily authenticated their content because he was a participant in over one hundred of the email exchanges. The use of if legitimate appears to have been purposefully used in this correspondence with Lucia.
Even the mainstream media was not immune from the ire of the scorned climate scientists. According to Roger Pielke Jr., the New York Times writer Andy Revkin was threatened with the Big Cutoff from the climate science community by Michael Schlesinger, a climate scientist from the University of Illinois, for the sin of gutter reportage and for providing space in his Times blog for skeptics. This, coming after Climategate was fully exposed, shows the severity of the issue.
The global-warming establishments futile attempt to resist pressure from an opposing, grassroots collective caused a shift to occur displaying a process known in certain scientific circles as self-organization. The new order that has emerged has placed a new definition on the label peer that of an amorphous group of intelligent online observers, detached from the outcome, with an extremely solid grasp on the topic at hand. This peer-to-peer review network surrounds and attacks the study, in search of chinks in its armor. Its not pretty, but through this social, open dialogue, problem areas inevitably rise to the top. In a case where politics comes into play, it appears that this review process is much more rigorous it ostensibly sanitizes the outcome from the affects of interested parties.
This is the point that one must take from Climategate.
We no longer live in an age where a system can be entirely controlled. Information lacks the protective coat that it once had bureaucracies can be infiltrated and cracked, and access to broadcast tools are pervasive. When a system is no longer operating correctly, pressures mount, causing an inevitable instability. And when the hands of Big Government play a part in molding the consensus, or in this case Big Global Government, the peer-to-peer review network and the undermedia will play the unavoidable role of getting to the truth a truth desperately needed when crafting policy that will affect every living human and their offspring.
The Times Thomas Friedman recently stated, The internet is an open sore of untreated, unfiltered information. There is much truth in his statement. But when taken in context, it is spoken like a true gatekeeper. The quote came in response to how the undermedia exposed controversial information on former green jobs czar Van Jones.
Climategate was indeed an open sore but it could only be seen on the internet, through the window of a tiny blog called the Air Vent, and treated by Steven Mosher, Steve McIntyre, and others through a new process called peer-to-peer review.
So take heed gatekeepers. The Undermedia has arrived. Peer-to-peer review has matured. Either operate effectively, or be self-organized out of existence.
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