1. Mooney says he can't sort it out the differences just by reading the two studies because Peiser failed to even attempt to replicate Oreskes' study - instead he concocted a different study. That means someone has to actually delve into the data for each study to determine who's right.

2. Oreskes doesn't declare she's right, instead she challenges Peiser to submit his study to peer review, which he didn't even attempt to do. If he had done so, and had been rejected for bogus reasons, you'd have an argument. Incidentally, I think a competitor journal would be happy to accept a good article that knocked Science magazine down a notch, so I'm not too supportive of a conspiracy theory.

3. Peiser has passed off shoddy work in the past, attempting to use an online, anonymous email survey of climate "scientists" with no controls against re-voting or of who can vote in order to show a lack of consensus among climate scientists on global warming. <a
href="http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/2005/05#bray">Link. If you read the comments to the Mooney's post, someone's already tracked down a flaw in Peiser's reliance on abstracts, something that has been emphasized repeatedly here on HZ.