Administration report on "climate change" relies on non-peer-reviewed sources, ignores peer-reviewed ones that contradict its thesis

John Tierney, the science writer for the NY Times, reports:

The new federal report on climate change gets a withering critique from Roger Pielke Jr., who says that it misrepresents his own research and that it wrongly concludes that climate change is already responsible for an increase in damages from natural disasters. Dr. Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, asks:

[Why] is a report characterized by [White House] Science Advisor John Holdren as being the “most up-to-date, authoritative, and comprehensive” analysis relying on a secondary, non-peer source citing another non-peer reviewed source from 2000 to support a claim that a large amount of uncited and more recent peer-reviewed literature says the opposite about?

(Tierney's post is here. Dr. Pielke's website is here. Via Instapundit)

This sort of thing is disturbingly common. When evaluating a scientific claim, it's important to "follow the footnotes" -- i.e., to check the sources cited by the author to see if the sources really support the proposition for which they are cited. Given the hyperbole surrounding climate change and the grandiosity of the proposed solutions for it, following the footnotes is crucial task these days.

The same goes for historical claims. Two authors who have done yeoman's work in this vein are Ramesh Ponnuru and Christina Hoff Sommers. Ponnuru debunked a famous legal brief that 281 historians submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to influence the decision in the abortion case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. The historians argued that at the time of America's founding, abortion was legal under the common law -- and that therefore even the modest restrictions on the abortion license at issue in Webster should be struck down. Ponnuru followed the footnotes and discovered that "the published work of the signatories disproved [the brief's] historical arguments." The brief was, for the most part, an utter falsehood. (Read Ponnuru's article on this subject here. It's also discussed at length in his book, which I strongly recommend).

Sommers has similarly unmasked a number of claims made by the shriller left-wing feminists, such as the claim that there is a dramatic increase in spousal abuse on Super Bowl Sunday, a widely quoted "statistic" that has, quite literally, no basis in fact.

Feeling trampled by the "herd of independent minds" in the press and the academy? Follow the footnotes.