SIR - If Dr Paul Williams (Letters, December 13) looked at leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia, he would know why a sceptical position on climate change is published on the internet rather than in peer-review journals.

The climate change cabal has been claiming that a sceptical position is wrong not on evidence but by appealing to peer-review, the classic logical fallacy of appeal to authority. Some of them, meanwhile, have been cynically working to ensure that peer-review journals will not accept work that runs counter to their own dubious claims, and deciding that any journal that does publish such work is no longer a serious journal.

This makes it a logical impossibility to publish anything they do not approve of in a peer-review journal that they consider serious and respectable.

All the while the members of that cosy cabal were reviewing each other's papers and unwittingly allowing their dubious science and deeply flawed data processing to be published.

SIR - Dr Paul Williams reminds us of the foundation of scientific understanding on the bedrock of peer review.

However in the light of "Climategate", it is very clear why an alternative means of communication was needed, given the cosiness of peer review among the true believers who saw any contradiction to their views as heresy and therefore unworthy of publication.

Dr Eric Huxter
Ashtead, Surrey

SIR - Dr Paul Williams is surely looking in the mirror when he describes sceptics as "well-educated people [who] abandon their powers of independent thought".

He dismisses Christopher Booker for relying on blogs, but does he not realise that some of the very best scientists are writing and debating on blogs?

Dr Robin Brooke-Smith
Shrewsbury