Got Science?

A couple of days ago I posted about the new NOAA climate change literacy publication.
A couple excerpts from that:

"WHAT IS CLIMATE SCIENCE LITERACY?
Climate Science Literacy is an understanding of your influence on climate and climate’s influence on you and society. A climate-literate person

• understands the essential principles of Earth’s climate system,
• knows how to assess scientifically credible information about climate,
• communicates about climate and climate change in a meaningful way, and
• is able to make informed and responsible decisions with regard to actions that may affect climate."

and;

"HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT IS SCIENTIFICALLY CORRECT?

The Peer Review Process

Science is an on-going process of making observations and using evidence to test hypotheses. As new ideas are developed and new data are obtained, oftentimes enabled by new technologies, our understanding evolves. The scientific community uses a highly formalized version of peer review to validate research results and our understanding of their significance. Researchers describe their experiments, results, and interpretations in scientific manuscripts and submit them to a scientific journal that specializes in their field of science. Scientists who are experts in that field serve as “referees” for the journal: they read the manuscript carefully to judge the reliability of the research design and check that the interpretations are supported by the data. Based on the reviews, journal editors may accept or reject manuscripts or ask the authors to make revisions if the study has insufficient data or unsound interpretations. Through this process, only those concepts that have been described through well-documented research and subjected to the scrutiny of other experts in the field become published papers in science journals and accepted as current science knowledge. Although peer review does not guarantee that any particular published result is valid, it does provide a high assurance that the work has been carefully vetted for accuracy by informed experts prior to publication. The overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed papers about global climate change acknowledge that human activities are substantially contributing factors."