{#11a} D. LaFramboise The Delinquent Author - Peer Review

This post will focus on the first sentence in LaFramboise's chapter eleven of The Delinquent Teenager.  Here I want to take a moment to consider Donna's driving meme - namely, that if a "citation" is not "peer reviewed" it should be discarded.   Donna even goes so far as to imply that the amount of "non-peer reviewed" citations indicates deception.

I will review the rest of her chapter "The Peer Review Fairy Tale" in another post.

For an introduction explaining why I'm reviewing this piece of work, please click here.

{Courier font identifies LaFramboise's words
Laframboise, (2011-10-09). T D T W W M W T C E (Kindle Locations 195-201). 
Ivy Avenue Press. Kindle Edition. }

#11 - The Peer Review Fairy Tale 

“Having repeatedly encountered the claim that IPCC reports rely solely on peer-reviewed literature,”

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Let’s look at this premise Donna keeps pounding on.

Donna’s “repeated encounters” revolve around selective quotes from PR interviews.  Why does Donna ignore IPCC’s actual policy?

LaFramboise derides Pachauri for overstating reality - then she turns around and tears into him with the most florid hyper-inflated melodrama of her own fabrication. . . what’s fair or honest about that?

Perhaps Pachauri was the over enthusiastic coach during interviews - but why does that give Donna license to hyper-inflate her charges? 

The Fact Remains that the IPCC never claimed it would only cite peer-reviewed documents!

~ ~ ~

An actual journalist would have asked: What is the “Citation's” roll in a study or IPCC chapter?  

Instead, LaFramboise mesmerizes her audience with a wholly unreasonable expectation that every item cited needs to be a peer reviewed study.

Whoever said every citation of an IPCC chapter must reflect a peer reviewed report/study? 

Donna has been getting a free ride with this - “if the citation isn’t peer reviewed it’s junk” meme.  Still, there's something very deceptive about it.

Think about it, 
citations are a record of all the documents looked at during the writing of an IPCC chapter.  The “citations list” says nothing about the rank/weight of one particular citation over another.

It’s a fair question to ask:  What does it matter that Donna found only a little over a quarter of the “citations” for this chapter specifically “peer reviewed publications?” 

{My figures are based on my own survey of the 50 citations used for IPCC’s WG3Ch#1(2007).}

Who says those peer reviewed papers weren’t the foundation for that chapter with those other citations acting as supporting information?

Beyond some misleading generalizations, Donna never takes a look at any citations.

Donna won't tell you that over a quarter of the citations were references back to other IPCC sections. 

What’s wrong with that?  

What justifies these references getting written off as junk?
~ ~ ~

Another +quarter of the “non-peer review” citations come from authoritative governmental organizations such as
European Environment Agency,
U.S. Department of Energy,
German Federal Ministry of the Environment (BMU),
German Federal Environmental Agency (UBA),
International Energy Agency.

Donna would have us believe that every government report is to be consider suspect or junk.  Doesn’t all this start sounding a bit wacky paranoid? 

Experts throughout the world consider these government operated Earth Observation studies quite authoritative - remember this information is public and well vetted by the community of experts and used by many.  

Why won’t Donna acknowledge any of those reports as valid pieces of supporting information?
~ ~ ~ 

The next large category of “non-peer reviewed” citations are those Earth “advocating” NGO’s… Donna's (and the right wing’s) hated Greenies.  Donna’s loathing and her absolute dismissal of the various global Earth advocacy NGOs is unnerving.  

At this point I’d like to ask LaFramboise: 

Why do right-wing people harbor such hostile feelings towards “greenies”?  

Have such folks actually forgotten that our Earth’s "environment" is our life support system?  

Why the distrust and contempt for protecting our biosphere? 

Beyond that, when it comes to these organizations, Donna ignores their rich heritage of research and Earth Observations.  These organizations have sponsored or undertaken many important studies because no one else could or would.  They have filled an important gap that deserves thanks rather than ridicule and dismissal.  

Furthermore, Donna never mentions that a good many NGO science based reports do get peer-reviewed. 

~ ~ ~

Also I noticed that some citations Donna dismisses turn out to be reports that refer back to peer reviewed publications.  Why do those deserve being dismissed?  After all learning is a process of gathering all the information you can and then sorting out the grain from the chafe.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Guess the real tragedy of these games Donna and other luminaries of the ‘scientific consensus denying’ crowd play, is that tacit agreement between a promotional speaker and their politically motivated audiences.  

Seems to me her audience want easy answers - they like being handed an enemy like the "greenies" to blame everything on - they don’t want to think about the tough reality outside their windows.  They want simple answers, scapegoats and to be told they don’t need to change or think about anything.

So who’s the biggest liar? 
The person telling the lies or
The people grasping at easy answers no matter how obviously contrived and vapid those answers might be?