So here it is - the Science and Technology Committee's report on climate science communication. In it we learn that the Mail and the Telegraph are bad people™ and that the BBC has been allowing other bad people on air.
So far, so predictable.
I was hugely amused by one bit of the report. I had told the committee that there wasn't any single trusted source for information about climate science and that you needed to check everything. And in particular I took issue with the reliance on peer review:
Peer review is completely overdone. I know this Committee has done its own inquiry into peer review, but there is a lot of empirical evidence out there that peer review does not do a lot for you. On the whole, it does not find fraud or error, so the only way of getting to the bottom of whether something is right is to verify it.
Quoting the opening sentence of the excerpt above, the new report declares:
We cannot agree with this contention as we made clear in our report Peer review in scientific publications, in which we concluded that peer review was “crucial to the reputation and reliability of scientific research”
This is a bit naughty of the committee, because if you refer to the report they mention, the opening words are "Peer review in scholarly publishing, in one form or another, has always been regarded as crucial to the reputation and reliability of scientific research". In other words this centrality of peer review was a premise of the report rather than the conclusion. Moreover, the report notes that there is "little solid evidence on the efficacy of pre-publication editorial peer review..."
So while we can all agree that peer review is seen as important, the committee's own report on the subject agrees with the point I made; the one that they are now trying to dispute because I am a bad person™. Really, it comes to something when a select committee has to misrepresent one of its own reports in order not to have to find itself in agreement with a sceptic.