Editorial board member pissed off over a paper on “the pause”
Story submitted by WUWT reader Duane Oldsen
WUWT readers may remember Dr. Syun Akasofu as the source of a graph tracking the Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation with sine wave shifts in global temperature up and down. 
Dr. Akasofu’s recent submission to the first issue of the new journal “Climate,” a submission in this same vein of analysis, provoked one of the journal’s editorial board to resign in protest.
Dr. Asasofu’s submission was entitled “On the present halting of global warming,” and Dr. Chris Brierley of University College London declared the work to be of such insufficient quality for publication that his resignation in protest was requisite.
Dr. Brierley cites computer models and insufficient evidence in the paper as his reason for rejecting Dr. Akasofu’s submission to ‘Climate’ and thus provoking his resignation from the journal’s editorial board, despite crediting Dr. Akasofu’s hypothesis as valid and reputation as “deserved.”
Dr. Brierley specifically cites a lack of testing of Dr. Akasofu’s assertions in the submitted paper, which Dr. Brierley presents as an extreme abuse of the scientific method.
Dr. Brierley lists extensive critiques of the quality (i.e. lack thereof) of Dr. Akasofu’s work in the submitted paper. If accurate, this would be an effective indictment of Dr. Akasofu’s previous work as well. So both Dr. Akasofu’s source article and Dr. Brierley’s critique deserve attention.
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Here is the paper:
On the Present Halting of Global Warming
Syun-Ichi Akasofu
International Arctic Research Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, USA
Received: 28 January 2013; in revised form: 15 April 2013 / Accepted: 15 April 2013 / Published: 3 May 2013
Download PDF Full-Text [810 KB, uploaded 3 May 2013 14:45 CEST]
Abstract:
The rise in global average temperature over the last century has halted since roughly the year 2000, despite the fact that the release of CO2 into the atmosphere is still increasing. It is suggested here that this interruption has been caused by the suspension of the near linear (+ 0.5 °C/100 years or 0.05 °C/10 years) temperature increase over the last two centuries, due to recovery from the Little Ice Age, by a superposed multi-decadal oscillation of a 0.2 °C amplitude and a 50~60 year period, which reached its positive peak in about the year 2000—a halting similar to those that occurred around 1880 and 1940. Because both the near linear change and the multi-decadal oscillation are likely to be natural changes (the recovery from the Little Ice Age (LIA) and an oscillation related to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), respectively), they must be carefully subtracted from temperature data before estimating the effects of CO2
Opening paragraph. Should, “up and down”‘ read, “upside down” ?
Heresy – burn him at the stake!
Dr Chris ran all the way to Skeptical Science…. to explain why he resigned.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/brierly-resignation-climate-akasofu.html
I see Brierley has chosen the Junior SS Treehouse Gang as the platform for his flounce.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/brierly-resignation-climate-akasofu.html#commenthead
Hmmm
Science is not about belief systems, it’s about evidence. One of them is being unscientific…
If a warmist flounces off in a huff in a forest, and no one is listening, does he make a sound?
“..Dr. Brierley presents as an extreme abuse of the scientific method…”
Uh, so he goes to a website that is an extreme abuse of what they attempt to pass as “science”!?
“Nobody expects the East Anglian Inquisition!
Our three weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the IPCC.”
I’ll get my coat…
So, he’s protesting reality. Sounds about right.
I’m waiting for Hansen to be seen picketing the White House with a sign that says “Nature! Stop Proving Us Wrong!”
While Akasofu’s work has been some of my favorite, I’ve also considered it fairly simplistic. This paper doesn’t seem to off anything new other than an update in the observations and comparison with the IPCC data.
I haven’t hunted down Brierley’s full critique, is it online? “Dr. Brierley cites computer models and insufficient evidence” can be interpreted in a couple ways. Akasofu doesn’t refer to computer models in his paper, but he does refer to observations, which trump model output anyway unless you’re critiquing models. Perhaps Brierley thinks Akasofu should be presenting a model that supports his interpretation. That might be nice, that could be a project far beyond the scope of this paper or even the papers the IPCC reports are drawn from.
The usefulness of this paper is that it’s an update to Akasofu’s hypothesis and comparison to IPCC’s past work. A lot of papers do something similar, it’s just they conclude with a call for more funding to better understand why the climate is warming and we’re all gonna die.
Instead, Akasofu says:
Which indeed is nothing new, but it’s not something worth resigning about.
I guess it all depends on whether you are swayed a model that seems to fit the observed data or one that one that scrapes into the 2% confidence level.
Rather than Akasofu’s model not being very convincing, I suspect it is the observed data that Brierley doesn’t find convincing. Seems its acceptable scientific method to discount observed data, in favour of computer models.
Sounds like Brierley fell on his sword to take responsibility for his failure to man the gates and keep out the heresy—or maybe to protect his funding by proving his loyalty to the cause.
I like Akasofu’s theory, because it’s a simple theory.
Nice and simple.
Well luckily, he can chat with Cook about his paper, which I’m sure he agrees is great science.
At SkS, Brierley says:
This seems to represent the ideal for ground breaking work that changes people’s mindsets and opens new avenues of research for decades to come. The Watson and Crick double helix paper was one of that class. However, Akasofu’s paper is merely an update of a process that moves so slowly it takes decades to see if the claims stand up. In the long run scientists do a lot more of this sort of work, I doubt few scientists wake up in the morning thinking “Today, I change the world,” and those who do suffer disappointment very well.
Brierley certainly sounds right at home with the SkS folks, and that alone makes his resignation a Good Thing.
Have not read the paper yet so I can not say whether it is mediocre or not. And I don’t know if this new journal is supposed to be a top tier journal. If so, perhaps his resignation makes more sense.
But what I do like about the figure above is that it makes clear predictions one way or the other and afterword one can say definitely which one the actual temperatures are following more closely. The low sunspot cycle may play a role here, not sure if that is included in this analysis.
It would be interesting to hear what Dr Brierley thinks about inventing one’s own statistic so that the data can be interpreted as supporting the desired proposition when actually it fails all conventional statistical tests. I’m thinking here, of course, of Wahl & Amman’s ludicrous Calibration/Verification RE Ratio – supposedly validating Mann’s hokey stick – a statistic unknown to statisticians and never elsewhere spotted in any single one of the planet’s entire collection of scientific papers and essays. Would this be a resigning matter if it came your way, Dr Brierley?
It’s good to see what a ‘not a scientist’ looks like. I was curious.
It is not clear to me why a “submission” should be cause for resignation. Is Brierley saying the paper should have been rejected but other editorial board members disagreed?
Either way, it is not sufficient cause for me to take the trouble of visiting the-website-that-cannot-be-named. They already get far too many clicks.
:I’m waiting for Hansen to be seen picketing the White House ”
I am afraid he would have better luck picketing at the golf course.
According to Dr. Brierley’s page:
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/about-the-department/people/academics/chris-brierley
Dr Chris Brierley wrote this:
http://www.nerc.ac.uk/about/consult/debate/climatechange/summary.asp?cookieConsent=A#newiceage
And participated in this:
http://www.pocketissue.com/book.aspx?Name=Global+Warming
But what appears to upset him IMO is that he is “in charge of both the MSc in Climate Change and the MSc in Environmental Modelling” at University College London, and Dr. Syun Akasofu’s work either threatens what he’s teaching, or introduces a doubt.
Where are Dr. Brierley’s specific objections to Dr. Syun Akasofu’s work?
Dr. Brierley specifically cites a lack of testing of Dr. Akasofu’s assertions in the submitted paper, which Dr. Brierley presents as an extreme abuse of the scientific method.
Ha! Coming from a crimatologist, specifically a climate modeler, that’s rich!
I guess his interpretation of the scientific method is to test his theories against The Models, and then they would be found Wanting.
“Nobody expects the East Anglian Inquisition!
Our three weapons are fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the IPCC.”
And these nice green uniforms, oh damn. Hey SkS, I’m laughing at the superior intellect.
-Frank
The cause that represses.
Maybe the paper is bad – I’ll trust other able scrutineers to deal with that knowing that no one gets a free pass here- but Dr. Brierley’s rationale presented in sks (of all places to be ranting on the scientific method) goes on about the scientific method, testing of hypotheses and falsification, critical thinking, etc. In the post above he apparently cites computer models and lack of evidence and testing. Gee whiz, skeptics have been deconstructing self-fulfilling models, lack of evidence, cooked evidence, cherry-picked evidence, omission of evidence that doesn’t support the meme, destroyed evidence, out and out fabrications of evidence….They have demonstrated that the “consensus” theory is busy falsifying itself, diverging off below the lowest level of warming predicted. And will they let go? No.
Much of what is wrong with mainstream climate science itself has been hinted at by Brierley, but the irony is lost for sure on someone who heads up the “Climate Change” MSc program at U London. Talk about bias before one utters a word. If one were to head up the Dangerous Population Growth program you can imagine where his jumping off point is. This man is hurting bad. He’s the one most likely with the papers that are going to fade away (remarks on correction of science in sks) before he finishes his tenure (looking at his youthfulness in the pic). Moreover, he is heading a program that will be sending out in volume unemployable, inappropriately trained climate scientists into a rapidly shrinking market. His own PhD may well be at risk of being asterisked if he’s too steeped in the Kool Aid.
He mentions a similar principled resignation of another editor in connection with the Spencer Braswell paper which presented good evidence that climate sensitivity is much less than the IPCC authors put out and they question the sign of cloud forcing. This was two years ago and the work since then has vindicated their work – even the IPCC has been chopping down sensitivity and questioning clouds positive feedback. Now I think we have a trend: the doctrinaire climate change guys stuffed onto editorial boards will soon all be resigning while they think their way through to safety after it is all over and Climate Change U departments and government agencies will, through a few steps, morph into just Climate. As one WUWT wag (was it you Gunga Din?) said with the start of the crumbling of the climate change edifice, “I feel sorry for the wives and small pets of these guys” (badly paraphrased).