Peer Review for IPCC Means "Rubber Stamp"

Steve McIntyre over at Climate Audit recounts his frustrating experience at attempting to review two unpublished papers to support conclusions in the paleoclimate section of the IPCC 4th Assessment. He requested to review the data, but was rebuffed by the Working Group with a bunch of bureacratese. Also, the writers of the papers refused to allow access to their data, because they were currently under review by their respective journals. Here's where the cherry picking of support for AGW shines through as political bias.

First, reviewers of support papers are expected only to verify the respective papers' references, according to the IPCC. However, that practice is only done for already published papers, which we assume the scientific journal did a good job on their own review. But for unpublished papers, obviously the reviewers for the IPCC have to do their own review of the data, instead of just looking up old articles and making sure newer published papers have not negated those older conclusions. But from Dr. McIntyre's initial queries, it seems the IPCC is not in the business of peer review, which means they should not have even included unpublished papers for support anyway.

So, even though this is only one reviewer's experience, it seems that the position that the IPCC's assessments on climate change are based on "peer reviewed" research is not entirely accurate.