With the series of exposes about the shortcomings of the peer review process it seems odd to lean on that very much. This seems particularly true since this topic is so politically charged and there would be virtually no funding available for climate change research absent government spending.

You don't throw the baby out with the bath water. That certain journals aren't doing peer review correctly, or that there is politics in the academia isn't a reason to not have peer review at all. And it does seem to work for some (PLoS One, for example). A flawed peer review system to validate knowledge is still better than a propaganda system driven for short term corporate gain.

Also - most academic scientific research depends on government spending. That's the whole point of academia, no? To work on problems companies don't want to fund because of no clear short-term impact on the bottom line. Not everyone is a Bell Labs or Google.