THERE'S PEER REVIEW. THERE'S ALSO PEER PRESSURE.

That's how "consensus" becomes cover for bullying.  It might be that Power Line's Steven Hayward is conflating evidence of dysfunctional academic departments (of which there are more than a few) with evidence of scholars behaving as gangster-gramophones for the Inner Party.

The dysfunctional department, notes Nature, is no less than the Max Planck Institute.

We will never know how many promising scientific careers around the world have been brought to a premature end because young researchers felt they could not continue to work under a bullying senior figure. But it should stop. Now. Those affected must be shown that the system will protect them if they choose to speak out. Institutions should ensure they have explicit policies in place for dealing with bullying, and, as part of that, define what constitutes bullying. And senior scientists who see colleagues behave in an inappropriate way should speak out.

Yes, that's a constant quality of academic departments, and sometimes Lernfreiheit is constrained by the preferences of the senior scholars and the purses of the granting agencies.

It's different, though, from the limitations that trammel inquiry Mr Hayward next addresses.  "It shouldn’t need pointing out that the most egregious bullying in the science world is toward anyone who dissents in the slightest regard from the very narrow orthodoxy of climate change."

Perhaps you can't point out the anomalies in the climate data because it's a threat to the gravy train, or to the socialist agenda.  More fundamentally, though, consensus might be the ad popularum fallacy dressed up in academic regalia.

In the case of climate science and environmental policy, though, anomalies aren't enough to make influential people reconsider their priors.  You'd think the fact that we are reading and writing about the controversies might have changed a few minds: since that first Earth Day in 1970, the end of civilization as we know it was supposed to have come by 1980, or perhaps 2000, or perhaps there would be no snow after 2015: but apparently, as one Roger Pielke is learning, there are some emperors whose clothes must be admired.  "Pielke does not dissent from the basic climate “consensus” much at all, but he has earned the bullying of the climatistas essentially for the sin of embarrassing Al Gore (among others) for calling b.s. on some of the favorite harum-scarum claims that the data don’t back up."