Also, it appears the opinion of ONE board member is all it takes, so much for consensus.
Richard Toll provides this communication:
Rejection letter by ERL:
Article under review for Environmental Research Letters
Comment on: “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the literature” – Professor Dr Richard S J Tol
ID: ERL/477057/COM
BOARD MEMBER’S REPORT
============================
The comment raises a number of issues with the recent study by Cook et al. It is written in a rather opinionated style, seen e.g. in the entire introductory section making political points, and in off-hand remarks like labelling Skeptical Science a “polemic blog” or in sweeping generalisations like the paper “may strengthen the belief that all is not well in climate research”.
It reads more like a blog post than a scientific comment.
The specification for ERL comments is:
“A Comment in Environmental Research Letters should make a real
contribution to the development of the subject, raising important issues about errors, controversial points or misleading results in work published in the journal recently.”
I do not think this manuscript satisfies those criteria. It is in a large part an opinion piece, in other parts it suggests better ways of analysing the published literature (e.g. using a larger database rather than just Web of Science). These are all valid points for the further discussion following the publication of a paper – colleagues will have different opinions on interpreting the results or on how this could have been done better, and it is perfectly valid to express these opinions and to go ahead and actually do the research better in order to advance the field.
I do not see that the submission has identified any clear errors in the Cook et al. paper that would call its conclusions into question – in fact he agrees that the consensus documented by Cook et al. exists. The author offers much speculation (e.g. about raters perhaps getting tired) which has no place in the scientific literature, he offers minor corrections – e.g. that the endorsement level should not be 98% but 97.6% if only explicit endorsements are counted. He spends much time on the issue of implicit endorsements, about which one can of course have different opinions, but the issue is clearly stated in the Cook et al. paper so this does not call for a published comment on the paper. He also offers an alternative interpretation of the trends – which is fine, it is always possible to interpret data differently.
All these things are valid issues for the usual discourse that exists in many informal avenues like conferences or blogs, but they do not constitute material for a formal comment.
==============================================================
You can read Dr. Tol’s submitted comment here and decide for yourself: As submitted to Environmental Research Letters; data
Meanwhile the email address of the editor, Daniel Kammen is here for those that wish to query him: http://kammen.berkeley.edu/
Kammen as editor-in-chief of ERL, has an interesting blog on the paper. From his bio there, he seems to be mostly a celebrity policy wonk, and I’m puzzled about the “1935” as he lists it here: http://blogs.berkeley.edu/author/dkammen/
==============================================================
Daniel Kammen, Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy
Daniel M. Kammen is the Class of 1935 Distinguished Professor of Energy at UC Berkeley, where he holds appointments in the Energy and Resources Group, the Goldman School of Public Policy, and the department of Nuclear Engineering. From 2010 to 2011 he worked for the World Bank, as its inaugural chief technical specialist for renewable energy and energy efficiency.
Kammen is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL), the co-director of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment, and director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center. He received his undergraduate (Cornell A., B. ’84) and graduate (Harvard M. A. ’86, Ph.D. ’88) training in physics. After postdoctoral work at Caltech and Harvard, Kammen was professor and chair of Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at Princeton University in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (1993-98). He moved to the UC Berkeley in 1998. Kammen is a coordinating lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. He hosted the Discovery Channel series ‘Ecopolis’ and has appeared on ‘NOV’ as well as ’60 Minutes.’
===============================================================
Of course, I suppose that we can’t expect much from an organization that has an admitted document thief on their editorial board.
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>>I’m puzzled about the “1935″
My guess is that the Class of 1935 sponsored a position at the university – for example, “After forty years on the Berkeley faculty, Professor Sawyer, the Class of 1935 Professor of Energy Emeritus, accepted the appointment of Governor Schwarzenegger to head California’s air quality and climate change programs as chair of the California Air Resources Board.” from http://erg.berkeley.edu/courses/index2.shtml
I was hoping to see a link to a published warmist article that used the same kind of language that was rejected in this one.
REPLY: Go for it, I can’t do everything – Anthony
Also, it appears the opinion of ONE board member is all it takes, [ to do what?]
Maybe you mean all it takes is for one board member to reject a paper.
But maybe all it takes is one board member to accept a paper.
The evidence supports both hypothesis, although odds favor the former.
Perhaps it was Stefan Rahmstorf since he is a co-founder of Real Climate. I’m not familiar enough with his writing style to say though.
The comment raises a number of issues with the recent study by Cook et al. It is written in a rather opinionated style, seen e.g. in the entire introductory section making political points,
Given that the entire introduction to the Cook piece admitted to its function as a piece of political propaganda, that was entirely appropriate.
ERL only gets sqeamish about mixing politcis with science when the politics aren’t theirs. Anti-scientific bullshit.
Did anyone expect anything different? Even once-respectable science journals have caved, but ERL has always been a rag — and little more.
If you agree that human generated CO2 causes GW/CC then you are in the 97(or 98)% majority so one person is, in effect, a majority. I am disappointed that you were not able to work that out yourself. /sarc
WUWT is a ray of hope in the wilderness. Keep it up please.
Peer review in action. Every bit the same utter failure it has made of climate science.
I searched briefly at ERL for language similar to Prof Tol’s in letters and comments and did not quickly find any exact matches. However, I did find one article (there may be many more, but I stopped searching to read the article) which uses relatively disparaging language about “climate skeptics”. The authors are Painter and Ashe, Environ. Res. Lett. 7 (2012) 044005 (8pp). A link to the pdf open access is
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/4/044005/pdf/1748-9326_7_4_044005.pdf
For example, they refer in the literature review section to:
“This changed in the 2000s, when McCright and Dunlap played an important role in deepening the concept of climate scepticism. Examining what they termed a ‘conservative countermovement’ to undermine climate change policy, they explored its organization within right-wing think tanks, looking first at its claims-making activities (McCright and Dunlap 2000), and then its organization and tactics. They highlighted the way such groups draw on scientific ‘experts’ linked to fossil fuel industries and concluded that ‘our nation’s failure to enact a significant climate policy is heavily influenced by the success of the conservative movement in challenging the legitimacy of global warming as a social problem’ (McCright and Dunlap 2003, p 367).”
Then, slightly later,
“Another key area of interest has continued examining the organizational links between climate scepticism and conservative think tanks/business communities (Oreskes and Conway 2010, Jaques et al 2008). Placing climate scepticism within the historical context of an anti-environmental, or even anti-scientific, turn in the politics of the American right (Buell 2003, Jacques 2006, Mooney 2006, Ashe 2011, Washington and Cook 2011, chapter 4) has helped explain its historical roots, but has also resulted in a tendency to view it as a discourse with conservative affinities, a hypothesis that has not been tested outside the US context.”
In general, it seems the notion of political context is not foreign to ERL.
Again, I did not continue searching but I suspect there is much more here.
As an aside, I do believe Prof. Tol’s paper could have struck a much drier, technical tone, but I suspect the result, i.e. rejection, would have been the same.
It appears that even a revised comment would not be acceptable to ERL. However, just being mentioned at WUWT may give it wider circulation than if ERL had published it.
To be fair to McCright and Dunlap, they apparently publish in sociological journals which seem more appropriate for the quotes taken from them. However, the translation of their results, and the attendant implied approval, into a journal for “climate science” seems to reinforce the notion that “climate science” as it seems to be practiced has become much more about social control and politics than physical science.
I’m not sure what Prof. Tol expected. The 97% has pretty much been debunked. Also, take a look at the interests of the editorial board. Only a couple of them seem like they are doing anything scientific. The rest seem to have drifted off in to social sciences.
Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory? What the heck is appropriate energy?
Why even bother with these folks?
FWIW, this reads as if the editor sent the submission to a third party who provided the last three paragraphs which read as advice to the editor. Eli understands these things.
Oh yeah the 1935 thing, what Frank Cook said.
I do not see that the submission has identified any clear errors in the Cook et al. paper that would call its conclusions into question – …..
Apparently, Kammen doesn’t believe the authors of the various papers know whether or not they’re endorsing AGW/ACC? Or maybe that’s not important. And, apparently, methodology holds no meaning in the validity of cli-sci papers. Well, we all knew that already. One almost feels sorry for Tol. He tried, anyway. But, sloppy work, fuzzy math, and data hiding have been the order of the day in cli-sci for years.
i happen to agree with the critique and reason for the rejection. The letter should have centered on the statistical shortcomings of the research, not its political nature. Color commentary has no place in a letter submitted to a research journal.
Actually, what is salient of this “editorial board” response is that they support junk science. Richard Tol’s comment centered entirely on missing data and Best Practices for conducting a survey of abstracts. The rejection addressed neither issue. If the “editorial board” was not so caught up in the politics they could have provided Prof. Tol with the data to complete his analysis. Obviously, the data does not exist anymore and if it did, would not shed any good light on the situation.
ERL comes up time and time again for lack of editorial diligence and should have no more attention than an idle gossip rag. As Richard’s reasonable points out:
The rejection did not come as a surprise. ERL has been heavily promoting the Cook paper. The editor-in-chief personally praised the paper in his blog and played a supporting role in the press release. (This is not something editors usually do.)
The rejection letter shows just how much the odds were stacked against me.
In the opening paragraph, I give five reasons why people may be less enthusiastic about climate policy and argue that the Cook paper does not take away any of these concerns. In fact, those who worry about the quality of climate research have more to worry about now.
The editor does not engage with the comment at all. Data quality, data unavailability, bias, unrepresentative sample, misinterpreted results are all swept under the carpet.
The editor highlights my concern about rater fatigue. Others have been bemused. This is a real issue in survey-based research. If a questionnaire is too long, people will “tire” of answering. They will answer as fast as they can. In a multiple choice survey, for instance, they may always pick option a.
In the Cook survey, raters performed on average 1922 tasks. One complained online about fatigue. I ran the standard statistical tests for fatigue (because Cook had not), and rejected the null of non-fatigue.
Admittedly, I did so on less than perfect data — but to dismiss this as speculation …
So now you see how the science was settled, but good.
==============
Cheer up,Dr Tol. Being rejected by this lot is like having your comments deleted at SkS – a badge of honour!
“…suggests better ways of analysing the published literature…”
Here we see the writer wrote “analysing” with an “s” and not a “z”, thus showing it is likely someone from Europe. Hope that narrows it down a bit.
Looking at the board they all seem to be from academia, mostly alarmists, one a thief and liar, another from UN Realclimate.
Almost said it all but if course all funded by the taxpayer.
The important thing for ERL was that the author was contacted to write the piece, decisions were made, hopes were raised, and money had changed hands. How could anyone demand integrity from the likes of environmental anything under such circumstances? It’s like holding out hope for the wrong boxer.
Typo: “Richard Toll provides …”
An excess of ells.
My god, these are RAEL suckers at the great teat of global warming. Fingers in every green pie and trough in existence.
Nothing new for those of us with experience in these matters. This is how peer-review often works, that is, with a reviewer getting out of his/her way to torpedo a paper. The proper response is to resubmit addressing the “issues” in the paper and/or directly in a communication. And, of course, by submitting elsewhere before ever considering giving up on the manuscript.
If some of you reading this comment ever find yourselves starting a career in academia, you will encounter a lynching mob at nearly every turn. Stand behind your work. Don’t give up. Distrust the criticism of every reviewer until clear proof of honesty is made evident.