(Meaning the review process, not Hansen’s work.)

I’m not surprised by what Hansen went through. I’ve published in a number of magazines over the years, all in a much more commercial vein, and that experience has always been a good substitute for hallucinogenic drugs.

Some people believe that a senior researcher’s work automagically sails through peer review and gets accepted. Nope.

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Brian Kernighan [might be familiar to computer people] & I once submitted an article to a computer conference, purposefully taking a somewhat different approach to the conference topic than we expected most would.

It was rejected:

2 referees said it was very good, and very apropos, accept
1 said: “heard it before, nothing new”, reject
1 said “has nothing to do with this conference”, reject

Someone went to the conference, and it turned out that quite a bit of discussion involved exactly this approach.

A bit later, a journal editor was bugging Brian for articles, so he pulled it out and they published it. later yet, people at IEEE Computer really wanted a version of it also, so we updated it and published it there as well, in 1981. It still occasionally gets cited.

“However, in all SRES scenarios the production of conventional oil starts to decline at some point. Therefore, peak oil is part of the SRES scenarios.”

This seems like something that should have a yes or no answer as to whether it’s true, and fairly central to the issue of whether the paper should be published.