Guest post by Michael A. Lewis, Ph.D
In a New Year’s Day post, Anthony mounted the Abstract from a Paper titled Warming Power of CO2: Correlations with temperature change. Subsequent comments raised some questions about the Journal citation, International Journal of Geosciences, and the publisher, Scientific Research Publishing.
A commenter wrote that he (or she) had called the listed number for SRP and had not received an answer. I had the same experience. I wrote to the author, Professor Paulo Cesar Soares, and received a nice reply saying that yes he is a retired professor and researcher at the Federal University of Paraná, and he did write the article and published with SRP because they have free access to all Journal articles available to researchers and students alike.
So, the article can be judged on its own merits, and the legitimacy of SRP can be judged on the quality of articles it dispenses.
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Note: the journal’s first edition can be seen here (PDF)
I would note the list of the editorial board members on Page 2 – Anthony
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Politeness? He will be ejected from the AGW community immediately. But good for him. Polite debate on the science is what makes for good science. After all, science has advanced only because people showed other people where they were wrong.
Scientific arguments are always judged on their own merits, even if written in pencil on the back of an envelope.
Civility and open disclosure, from a published professor whose expertise lies in atmospheric CO2 science…. How refreshing!
Well……….. let’s hope the manage to tick all the important boxes. If they do, they stand a chance of displacing the current popular list of coffee table mags.
The boxes?
!. Well written articles backed up with real-world data
2. A fair and open review process that authors and the audience can respect and trust
3. A open and fairly moderated response forum that can deal with criticism as well it accepts bouquets
More??????
A brave venture.
Best of luck to them, and success assuming they play a fair game to embrace all scientists, and not allow any of the clique behaviour that spoiled their competitors.
john r
“Note: the journal’s first edition can be seen here (PDF)”
There was an error opening this document. The file is damaged and could not be repaired.
Downloaded the document a second time. Same error message.
REPLY: System issues then, I have no trouble- A
Not surprised. I’ve long wondered at the lack of secular correlation in the ice cores between T and CO2. The millennial correlation is easily explained as a tandem response to ice sheet extension–the apparent multi-century lag of CO2 behind T did not seem relevant in light of the lack of short term correlation, mere icing on the cake.
And as Walter Munk noted a decade ago, length of day tracking argues strongly against serious sea level rise–at least it presents a paradox. And since his paper appeared we have seen only two leap seconds.
The Soares paper itself, Warming Power of CO2 and H2O: Correlations with Temperature Changes, is available free online here:
http://www.scirp.org/Journal/PaperDownload.aspx?FileName=IJG20100300002_69193660.pdf&paperID=3447
On its website it makes the following statement:
Aims & Scope
International Journal of Geosciences is a peer reviewed journal dedicated to the latest advancement of geosciences. The goal of this journal is to keep a record of the state-of-the-art research and to promote study, research and improvement within its various specialties.
Looks like Chinese scientists do not buy the western AGW myth…
What? No paywall? Outrageous!
“I would note the list of the editorial board members on Page 2 – Anthony”
Sorry Anthony. I am a little thick today. I do note the prevalence of Chinese scientists, as well as Russian, South American, and scientists that apparently don’t prescribe to alarmism as a tenet of good science. These are all relative “unknowns” vis a vis Hansen, Jones, and Mann. Is that what you wanted us to note?
REPLY: Only that it has one, as any proper journal would, and I’ll point out that the US no longer has a monopoly on climate science, in fact it lags much of the world now. It also doesn’t look like it will get any better. If your point is that you think that a new journal on Geosciences must have well known celebrity scientists to be of any value, then I pity your distorted view of science journals. – Anthony
Is it the same Soares who wrote this article?
PALEOESTRUTURAS E PETRÓLEO NA BACIA DO PARANÁ, BRASIL
ojs.c3sl.ufpr.br/ojs2/index.php/rbg/article/download/10446/7619
dbleader61,
Perhaps you think Chinese, Russian and South American scientists are’nt as good as US scientists? Maybe you haven’t heard so much about them because they don’t necessarily try to publish in West centric journals such as Nature, Science etc.
Here is the link to the journal.:
http://www.scirp.org/journal/ijg/
I read several of the papers and they are refreshingly candid. There are many other Journals available covering a wide range of disciplines from this organization.
http://www.scirp.org/journal/ijg/
It seems that some of the posters on WUWT might be able to publish in at least one of them. I have certainly read commentary here that is as good, and often better than many journal articles I have read.
Thank you Michael A. Lewis,
I posted some of the conclusion comments from the above paper on one of my Facebook postings. In response a seemlingly resonable request was made to provide a “peer reviewed paper” to support the comments I had made about CAGW and a new paper that showed no correlation between temp and CO2 anymore. So I supplied the above paper.
Then all heck broke loose after I posted a link to the paper, as I was assaulted with vicious personal attacks against me (at least 15 by one of the cementers alone) and vicious attacks against the papers author. Rather than any actual criticisms of the science contained with the paper all that spewed forth were personal attacks of one sort or another.
One of these people even criticized the Journal saying it had a low “Impact Factor” (IF)…
“I asked that it [the paper] be from a credible journal with an impact factor that wasn’t laughable. The journal you cited has an IF of 1.73… Nature by comparison has an IF of 34.5 and when combined with PageRank it’s a 52.” – David Smith BEFORE he had any chance to read the paper!!!
My response was:
“The jury is OUT on ALL scientific papers. Double sigh. Clearly you believe the anti-scientific nonsense you are uttering. Let’s be clear. The journal that a scientific paper is published in has no bearing upon whether or not the paper has any scientific merit. ‘Prestige’ aka ‘impact factor’ of a journal is politics and not science. To think otherwise is unscientific and political.”
So now it’s not enough to be published in a peer reviewed journal but the “Impact Factor” of the Journal determines if the science is correct or not? It’s just stunning arrogance on the part of people like David Smith who think with a “social credibility” aka “consensus” mindset that is picky about WHERE a paper is published rather than a scientific mind set that looks at the actual content of the science within the paper and it’s evidence, claims, methods and conclusions. It’s a strange kind of “scientific snobery” that people like David Smith exhibit and has them “believing” the claims rather than having “vetted, verified or refuted” the claims and being able to support their verifcations or refutations with actual scientific arguments.
It’s been a long while since I’ve directly encountered anyone so vicious in their CAGW hysteria as David Smith. I’m still waiting for his promised response to the content of the paper.
Michael A. Lewis, Anthony Watts, Professor Paulo Cesar Soares, et. al. it’s very refreshing to know that there are people who appreciate the methods of science and more importantly the philosophy of science that has a spirit of validating science claims and not just accepting them carte blanc as if they were dictates of high tech priests in some religious cult.
Keep up the great work asking excellent questions that cut to the heart of the matter! You guys are keeping the flame of science alive!
____________________________________
“Journal Impact Factor is from Journal Citation Report (JCR), a product of Thomson ISI (Institute for Scientific Information). JCR provides quantitative tools for evaluating journals. The impact factor is one of these; it is a measure of the frequency with which the “average article” in a journal has been cited in a given period of time. ”
http://www.sciencegateway.org/impact/
“The impact factor, often abbreviated IF, is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to articles published in science and social science journals. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field, with journals with higher impact factors deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. The impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now part of Thomson Reuters. Impact factors are calculated yearly for those journals that are indexed in Thomson Reuter’s Journal Citation Reports.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
I do note the prevalence of Chinese scientists, as well as Russian, South American,
Is that infering that those scientists are less capable than US and UK scientists? They too were once “unknowns”. Where would Mann be today if not for AGW? An unknown.
Oh, at the time not really knowing what an impact factor was I looked it up and Wikipedia had this little tidbit that supports my point that the science is what matters and not the “reputation” of the journal: “they are obliged to assess the quality of the content of individual articles, not the reputation of the journal in which they are published”!
“Incorrect application of impact factor
The IF may be incorrectly applied to evaluate the significance of an individual publication or to evaluate an individual researcher.[22]
This does not work well since a small number of publications are cited much more than the majority – for example, about 90% of Nature’s 2004 impact factor was based on only a quarter of its publications, and thus the importance of any one publication will be different from, and in most cases less than, the overall number.[23] The impact factor, however, averages over all articles and thus underestimates the citations of the most cited articles while exaggerating the number of citations of the majority of articles. Consequently, the Higher Education Funding Council for England was urged by the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee to remind Research Assessment Exercise panels that they are obliged to assess the quality of the content of individual articles, not the reputation of the journal in which they are published.[24]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Incorrect_application_of_impact_factor
I love new scientific journals. Just like magazines, if they’re good, they’ll survive, if they’re not, they won’t. In medical literature the old, highly regarded journals become somewhat stodgy and they’re taken over by physicians practicing in academia. About 20 years ago clinical pharmacists started publishing some new journals focusing on pharmacotherapy (i.e. drug therapy). They were consistently better and more clinically relevant to a practitioner than the esoteric, pure research articles published in the well established pharmacology literature. Further, they had a quite rigorous peer review process.
I would think the climate research community would welcome a new journal…unless, perhaps, it’s one where the “elite” don’t own the editorial board and the acolytes don’t serve as the reviewers.
“Consequently, the Higher Education Funding Council for England was urged by the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee to remind Research Assessment Exercise panels that they are obliged to assess the quality of the content of individual articles, not the reputation of the journal in which they are published.”
It sounds like the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Technology_Select_Committee] might actually being doing their job!
Now isn’t that astounding, politicians comprehending the scientific method! Could it be?
dbleader61 says:
January 13, 2011 at 1:01 pm
“Proof of the pudding is in the eating” so to speak. Does the editorial board select/clear papers presenting sound scientific research? Here is what one accomplished U.S. scientist (more than 350 papers/books authored/co-authored) has to say about another paper in the same issue of the IJG.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/research-issues-on-the-missing-heat/
<
R. S. Knox, David H. Douglass 2010: Recent energy balance of Earth International Journal of Geosciences, 2010, vol. 1, no. 3 (November) – In press doi:10.4236/ijg2010.00000
with the abstract
A recently published estimate of Earth’s global warming trend is 0.63 ± 0.28 W/m2, as calculated from ocean heat content anomaly data spanning 1993–2008. This value is not representative of the recent (2003–2008) warming/cooling rate because of a “flattening” that occurred around 2001–2002. Using only 2003–2008 data from Argo floats, we find by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from –0.010 to –0.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of ±0.2 W/m2. These results fail to support the existence of a frequently-cited large positive computed radiative imbalance.
is a solid scientific study on these questions. The paper could, of course, be in error [although it is robust in my view], or the Argo data could have errors that Josh Willis (or others in that community) has not communicated to us. The blogosphere and peer reviewed papers are the venue to debate these questions.
<
As opposed to this millennial prognosis.
“[Kielh]warns that, if carbon dioxide emissions continue at their current rate through the end of this century, atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas will reach levels that existed about 30 million to 100 million years ago, when global temperatures averaged about 29 degrees Fahrenheit (16 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels.
Kiehl said that global temperatures may gradually rise over centuries or millennia in response to the carbon dioxide. The elevated levels of carbon dioxide may remain in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years, according to recent computer model studies of geochemical processes that the study cites.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110113141607.htm
Yup. Those models again. This time adjusted to allow for a doubling of CO2 heat storage capacity and running it through a few thousand years. Why? Because he could.
Was there an earlier version of this post? I thought I had seen earlier that someone had returned his call.
It is somewhat funny* to note that there isn’t much of any “western” doctor in that list and which is why the crazed hippie crowd, mostly, will try and debase the journal by, which becomes scary.
The subdued sneaky racism is still racism.
*The funny thing is that my country, a EU country, and EU actually have decided that doctors’s, real or philosophical, education isn’t worth the same depending on where they come from in the world. It is funny because every country within the european union forgot about science all together for about 1500 years after the fall of Rome to christian fanaticism, but most of the doctors that come to countries within EU but are put down as not having an equal qualitative education, and so has to start all over pretty much from scratch, are from countries that for those about 1500 years actually embraced science, and still had time to go with religious fanaticism.
Now the hippies want to take the “western world” into religion again, forgetting, again, about science, whilst the rest of the world gets ahead by embracing science. Of course “western hippie world” will deny the rest of the world as having qualitative doctorates. Although, I’m thinking the “western hippie world” won’t outgun the rest of the world, to decide the agenda, this time around due to the fact that all them countries with lesser qualitative doctorates are well having nukes too and space programs and what have we not.
Dandytroll’s “Christian fanaticism” is the only thing that kept science and scholarship alive during those “dark ages.” Few events in history were more anomolous than the burning of the Alexandrian library. Tell me what script you use, and I’ll tell you what religion your ancestors were–their religion is the only reason you are literate. –AGF
Poor dbleader61 got pounced on pretty quickly.
I couldn’t see that he was anything more than puzzled as to what he should take note of.
I’m sure he meant ‘subscribe’ instead of ‘ prescribe’ but “…alarmism as a tenet of good science” doesn’t bring me to conclude that he’s a fan of Hansen.
Twitchy trigger fingers?
I read a chat on another forum where a PhD student had been invited onto the editorial board of a scrips journal. He wroter back to point out he was a PhD student. This seemed to count as a yes from the publishers and he ended up on the editorial board listed as a professor.
This is just one example but it suggests a rather low level of scutiny. But I agree with others comments there is serious elitism and to some extent imperialism in the science publishing process which sees scientists from developing countries often excluded from the better journals.
As Antony says judge the science, from what I’ve seen the scrips journal articles that have been highlighted by WUWT have lacked a certain amount of rigor.