First step is, somebody has to put something forward for consideration. In this case, my note on field relevance last week. One important aspect of this is, the 'something' has to be said concretely enough that people can point to the mistakes you've made.
The second step is that the comments (reviews) have to point to specific things that are wrong. Ranting about leftists (happened elsewhere) doesn't count. Saying that I grossly understated the relevance of biologists because -- and give reasons for that 'because' -- does.
The third step is for the original author to revise the article in response to the reviewer comments. That doesn't necessarily mean 'do what every reviewer wants', not least because the reviewers (c.f. gmcrews and John Mashey) may disagree. But there should be at least some response, if only to add some explanation in the article that addresses why you're not doing (what reviewer X wanted). I'll be doing that later, but am waiting for words from the biology folks about how the field applies to deciding whether and how much of recent climate change is due to human activity.
To summarize the comments some here (do read the originals if you haven't already):
Each of this is a common general sort of comment to see in a peer review. To rephrase it more generally:
In terms of my rewriting process, the first two are pretty easy to deal with. Many people made many good comments. Those can be incorporated fairly straightforwardly, along with the fields that the comments prompted me to remember even if they weren't directly mentioned.
The second two, however, aren't quite so obvious. The third is taken care of if I go clearly to making the question addressed "How much of the recent warming is due to human activity?" And that is what the graphic actually tried to address (though still with some issues with respect to the first two sorts of comment).
But, is it useful to address that question in this way? My thought was that for non-experts, it could be a useful guide when encountering, say, a 'conference' whose speakers were almost entirely from the lower ranges. On the other hand those antiscientific conferences are seldom so specific about what they're addressing. Either the figure is focussed on too narrow a question, or many separate such figures would be needed. Experts, or at least folks at, say, K6 and above in Mashey's scale, should just go read the original materials to decide.
I haven't decided which way to go on this. Comments, as always, welcome. I also realized that it's a long time since I wrote up my comment policy, and link policy, so they are now linked to from the upper right (in the 'welcome' section).
In the mean time, I'm taking down my version of the figure and asking those who have copied it to remove it as well.
But, to come back to peer review:
All this illustrates why it is you want to read peer-reviewed sources for your science. Nobody knows everything, so papers can otherwise be incomplete, inaccurate, etc.. People can also think that something is obvious, but have forgotten about things that they themselves do know (like my temporary brain death about biology as a field for knowing that climate is changing). Or they know certain things so well themselves that they don't write it up well for the more general audience. (Even in a professional journal, most of the readers aren't in your particular sub-sub-sub-field. 'more general' may only mean make it accessible in the sub-sub-field instead, but that can still be a challenge.) In a productive peer review process, these questions are all addressed.
