The scientific team advising Penny Wong responded to Senator Fielding’s initial three questions with some clear statements. Score for the believers in climate change.

The scientific team advising Senator Fielding responded with the “due diligence” statement the Senator has posted on his website. Score to the contrarians—and to the contrarian community, possibly game over.

But the seeker after truth might then Google blogs like Deltoid or Open Mind to have what is purportedly due diligence performed on the due diligence … and then with equal ease find contrarian blogs with a completely different spin on the same data.

And so on.

What’s real, and where does it stop?

Unless there is a mutually-agreed upon channel for science to be vetted and approved as the best available, it won’t stop. The disparate bits of information that constitute climate change research can be re-packaged and re-presented to describe just about any agenda.

That leaves the bewildered public to choose a possibility. Disturbingly, the choices seem to be increasingly defined along political lines; believers to the Left, non-believers to the Right.

Political faithful seem to be able to take almost anything from their politicians and still vote along party lines. If a position on climate change has become an article of political faith, it seems likely that Reason will play a diminishing role in this discussion.

Faith, the ancient enemy of science, is reasserting itself.

There has to be a standard for scientific truth, or the nearest approximation of it, for those of us who want to stand upon something more robust than faith that our team has got it right.

The four contrarian scientists behind Senator Fielding want the standard to be set by a Royal Commission. That bypasses the scientific community’s traditional filter for accuracy, peer review.

Peer review is imperfect. Reviewers, being human, can let a paper through that other scientists will quickly identify as being wrong, a journal can choose reviewers with a known bias, or choose not to review a paper at all.

If accepted, it is the nature of the field that a scientific paper is only right until proven wrong—and that might be in the next issue of the same journal.

Science can also deliver technologically brilliant answers, only to find it asked the wrong question.

But even with the odd perverse outcome and dry gully, peer review helps sort the wheat from the scientific chaff. It’s a refining process that has helped science become tremendously powerful; an influence on every aspect of our lives.

At the moment, with a few exceptions, peer-reviewed science overwhelming concurs that global warming is real, humans are causing it, and that climate change is occurring as a result. In this context, a political response is appropriate—although whether an ETS is the right response is another question altogether.

It is to be sincerely hoped that the contrarian view is right, and that global warming and climate change is all a storm in a computer model.

But it is up to the contrarians to persuade us with science. Not science channelled through the media or Senator Fielding, but science that stands up to peer review.

If peer review is as flawed as the contrarians claim, they need to propose another impartial standard by which the scientific world can debate the matter internally, without politics clouding the view.

Otherwise we revert to faith, and potentially another of the faith-based ideological wars that have dogged humanity from the time that two tribes first conceived of different gods.