The Spencer and Braswell story goes viral

I think most sane Warmist are concerned. I had a science editor in my office yesterday that merely talked about energy delivery systems versus the nut cases who want …..nothing. That is right. The left is against every form of conduction of electricity.
The discussions used to be about measuring .1 degree temperature increases in Wisconsin and tides that seem a bit high (cat5astrophic sea rise).

Gleick is a good example on how “brights” can be the dimmest of the lot.

“Does anyone have a list of the contrary papers that they are supposed to be guilty of ignoring?”
The New York Times,
The Washington Post,
and
The LA Times.
Those are the only papers I can think of off the top of my head but I’m sure there are others.

I have a prediction on the format of the “debunking” which will be offered by Dessler in GRL next week. If he follows true to form for “consensus” debunkers it should go something like this
You morons attempted to challenge the rock solid modelling of our our colleagues and broheims with your feeble observational data, but we asked them and they still say they’re right and you are wrong. So there!
We await your response in a year or two if you can find anybody to publish it. And don’t bother sending us a prepublication copy ’cause we’ll have one already.

“Does anyone have a list of the contrary papers that they are supposed to be guilty of ignoring?”
While Wagner doesn’t explain in what way the open discussion and his reference refutes the work, or even link to the discussion so we can see for ourselves, it’s easy to recognise it as a description of the RealClimate article by Trenberth and Fasullo (T&F).
“The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted in open discussions and to some extend also in the literature (cf. [7]), a fact which was ignored by Spencer and Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers.”
is a description of
“To help interpret the results, Spencer uses a simple model. But the simple model used by Spencer is too simple. We have already rebutted Lindzen’s work on exactly this point. The clouds respond to ENSO, not the other way round [see …]”
This is apparently referring to S&B’s paper where it says:
“Finally, since much of the temperature variability during 2000–2010 was due to ENSO [9], we conclude that ENSO-related temperature variations are partly radiatively forced. We hypothesize that changes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere circulation during the El Niño and La Niña phases of ENSO cause differing changes in cloud cover, which then modulate the radiative balance of the climate system. […] What this might (or might not) imply regarding the ultimate causes of the El Niño and La Niña phenomena is not relevant to our central point, though: that the presence of time varying radiative forcing in satellite radiative flux measurements corrupts the diagnosis of radiative feedback.”
So S&B say ” the El Niño and La Niña phases of ENSO cause differing changes in cloud cover”, T&F rebut this with “The clouds respond to ENSO, not the other way round”, and Wagner effectively complains that S&B hypothesised that ENSO affects clouds without citing or responding to the scientific counter-argument that ENSO affects clouds.
If you can follow that, you’re doing well.

Strange how Gleick is very willing to give comments on Realclimate the same status as peer reviewed research despite the fact they in no way actual meet these standards . I wonder if he extends that idea to comments on other blogs too?
Stranger still that he know the paper in GRL will be brilliant but he admits he knows little on the subject and may have no even have read it , so how does it he its going to be any good ?
Like Wagner his making lots of nose about ‘other papers ‘ but as with Wagner he can’t name them and just like Wagner he claims Spencer did not address the problems but can offer no idea of what problems it was Spencer was to supposed to have ignored.
Pielke’s point that the normal procedure should be followed is as very good one , although it may not work in the court of public opinion, those in the scientific community are well aware of how these things should work and why GRL as opposed to Remote sensing is being used , becasue it restricts Spencer ability to deal with the rebuttal of his paper. Although they may have largely kept their mouths shut over the behavior seen in climate science, to some what their shame , I don’t think the wider science community are at all happy about what is going on and what damage it could do to the public perception of science general.
Worst case situation for the warmest , the GRL paper turns out to be poor and is seen to be so outside of Gleick and his fellow travelers. Spencer papers stands and Wagner’s resignation looks even stranger in reality . Although there is a worst than worst case situation for the warmists , GRL paper supports Spencer , given the front loading we seen about it form Gleick and friends who must be getting their info from somewhere, I can’t see this being the case.

@Cinbadthesailor: Nah, peer review has failed everywhere. This isn’t unusual. In fact, peer review only “works” where it’s not needed. In engineering and (to some extent) in medicine, real lives are at stake so researchers actually stick to the facts and do good science.
They don’t stay honest because of peer review. They stay honest because people will die, and huge lawsuits will result, if their work is definitely bad.
Sort of like the US “education” system, which only “works” when it’s not really used. The “education” system does a fine job with smart kids who learn so well outside of school that they aren’t completely ruined by the ferociously counterproductive time spent in school. For the kids who need a public school, it fails completely.

This is all part of the same pattern that has characterized the warmists’ approach to climate “science” since the last century. They come up with models and use these to produce predictions which are then baptized as sovereign truth. In real science, they would have been required to demonstrate the predictive validity of their models before their predictions would be granted any confidence – and when observations contradicted predictions, they would have been expected to revise their models instead of beating the data until it fit the model outputs. Instead, thanks to Algore, Hansen, left-wing politicians looking for regulatory and legislative mechanisms to control the polity and extract more tax dollars, and a compliant left-leaning media hungry for “imminent disaster” headlines, the burden of proof has been shifted to those who challenge the modellers instead of being left where it belongs: with the modellers who still have not demonstrated the validity of their models. I simply cannot believe we are still discussing a theory that, 20 years after it went mainstream, has yet to produce a single scrap of confirmatory empirical evidence.
The extent to which the AGW true believers have warped the scientific method to serve their pecuniary and political ends is simply breathtaking. Climate science represents the greatest perversion of the scientific method since the Enlightenment. It is phlogiston, phrenology and Lysenkoism all rolled up into one big, fat, corrupt boil desperately in need of lancing.

Nullius in Verba: many thanks for that. I had read the paper through looking for the methodological faults and the errors that Wagner complains of and was resigned to reading back through the sources. You have at least simplified the job. If that is the sum total of the problem then I cannot see how that omission in the paper justifies a resignation.