elm7, I like your quote of the professor who thinks you must always believe peer reviewed research.
I am a scientist and am not so accepting. Example, just a few years ago there was a top scientist who was publishing in all the right journals, Nature, Science to name the top two. He was touted as a future Nobel prize winner. One day a young lady scientist looked at a figure in a published paper of his and thought it looked familiar. It turned out he had used the exact same figure in a number of papers each to illustrate some fanciful new point he was reporting. He was a complete fraud.
I have read too many papers that are riven with mistakes, many minor but never the less mistakes.
More to the point, I decided to read an IPCC report the other day and decided to look at the 1997 report. There in the first figure was a glaring scientific error. It is to do with aerosols. This is the section in the report. The paragraph begins by correctly describing an aerosol but then talks about O3 which is not an aerosol but they treat it as though it is. It is factually wrong!
Aerosols are suspensions of small particles in the air which influence climate primarily through their role in reflecting a portion of the incoming solar energy back to space (a direct effect) and in regulating to some extent the amount and optical properties of clouds (an indirect effect). Aerosols also absorb infrared radiation to some extent. Aerosols are produced both naturally and through human activity; natural aerosols include sea salt, dust, and volcanic aerosols, while anthropogenic aerosols are produced from burning of biomass and fossil fuels, among other sources. Some aerosols, such as dust, are directly emitted into the atmosphere. The majority of aerosols, however, are not directly emitted but, like tropospheric O3, are produced through chemical transformation of precursor gases. All tropospheric aerosols have a short lifespan in the atmosphere due to the fact that they are rapidly washed out with rain. For this reason, and because emission source strength varies strongly from one region to another, the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere varies considerably from one region to another. The nature, amount and distribution of atmospheric aerosols are themselves influenced by climate (see SAR WGI: Sections 2.3 and 2.4).
