For academics, there are few things more satisfying than having a research paper you slaved over for months published in a top peer-reviewed scholarly journal. When a leading scientist then blogs enthusiastically about the article, telling the world how great it is, the feeling is even better. That’s what happened this week for a group of IRIS researchers after they published an article in the prestigious journal Biological Conservation about whether to use “assisted migration” to help species adapt to a rapidly changing climate.

Assisted migration is the intentional translocation of species outside their historic ranges to mitigate biodiversity losses caused by climate change. While this idea has been around for decades, it has recently become the subject of fierce controversy in the academic literature.

The article was written by IRIS Senior Fellow and York geography instructor Dr. Nina Hewitt and an interdisciplinary team of IRIS-affiliated researchers from biology, environmental science, business, law and social science.

Hmmm – I arrived home after a hard week of BIOL 2010 (PLANTS) lectures and more missed deadlines, to pick up the Globe and Mail Friday edition for a nice, relaxing read, when I suddenly sat up straight at Neil Reynolds’ Business section column – The mythical assertion of fossil fuel scarcity. It’s all about a recent article by Professor Emeritus Peter Odell, in the European Energy Review (I haven’t downloaded and read it yet, but I will).

“Wow!” I thought, “it kind of goes against everything that I have been reading about Peak Oil, for much of the last decade”, so it must be important. And then, I ask myself, who is this Odell? Quickly checking him on Google Scholar, I found that my academic work is cited more than his, and he’s 30 years older than I am.

Well, I was wrong, wrong, wrong, when I told several colleagues, some weeks ago, that the CRU (Climate Research Unit) at UEA (University of East Anglia) e-mail hacking incident was silly, and to ignore it.

It has not gone away, because climate-change deniers are fully invested in launching what appears to me to be an across-the-board attack on peer reviewed science. This has happened before, to whit, the lobbying for and subsequent removal of Robert Watson as Chair of IPCC (the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change).

How on earth should the scientific community respond? Well, I challenge everyone to hack into your own emails using terms such as “rejection”, “rejected”, “plagiarism”, “trick”, “fix” and see what emails you come up with. Then you can find incriminating phrases that can be taken out of context and used to self-smear your own integrity as a scientist.

Here’s another reason why history matters. Because anyone who has done their research into Bjørn Lomborg’s history would be aware that most of what he has published in the peer-reviewed journal literature (and it’s not much), has hardly ever been cited by other academic scholars in their peer-reviewed journal articles! (I checked Lomborg’s citation record on Web of Science). He and his appallingly researched book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, (defended by Cambridge University Press as peer-reviewed), were investigated for academic dishonesty. While the book was found guilty (but not the author), the decision was later overturned by a Danish government review for “process” reasons.

Like Daniel Simberloff, when I read the chapters in the book on which I would consider myself an expert, I was shocked at the poor coverage of the pertinent literature. My own book with Judy Myers was also published by Cambridge University Press, and I was therefore interested in the overall implications for and interpretations of the quality of their in-house book review system.

It’s about a year since I last blogged.  When we got the new IRIS website up and running, it was great fun to learn about blogging, but it actually took a lot of time to write and fact-check serious blogs (as opposed to simply churning out drivel).  It’s been a challenge to get people associated with IRIS to commit to blogging and to sustain it.  This challenge has given me insight into why social networking sites such Facebook, and the sms-driven Twitter, are so appealing.  Having said that, while you CAN post to these sites really quickly, I also think that far too many people (including members of my family and a lot of students and older people that I know) spend far too much time on these sites; there is a very addictive quality about them.