Two days ago I posted on this story in this blog related to APS opening up debate on climate change. It appears Lord Monckton did in fact have his paper, Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered, reviewed by APS, and he drafted revisions per that review, after which the paper was accepted by APS for publication. Yesterday, APS put this disclaimer in red over the paper on their website:
The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.
Monckton writes:
This seems discourteous. I had been invited to submit the paper; I had submitted it; an eminent Professor of Physics had then scientifically reviewed it in meticulous detail; I had revised it at all points requested, and in the manner requested; the editors had accepted and published the reviewed and revised draft (some 3000 words longer than the original) and I had expended considerable labor, without having been offered or having requested any honorarium.
(h/t: David L. Hagen)
More excerpts from the blog Uncommon Descent are below:
PeerGate review scandal at American Physical Society
The American Physical Society alleged that Lord Monckton’s paper Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered was not peer reviewed when Monckton in fact thoroughly revised his paper in response to APS peer review. Monckton immediately demanded retraction, accountability and an apology.
The Editor of the American Physical Society’s Forum on Physics and Society launched a debate on global warming, inviting Lord Monckton to submit a paper for the opposition. After news that a major scientific organization was holding a debate on IPCC’s global warming, someone at the APS posted an indirect front page disclamation plus two very bold red disclamations in the Forum’s contents, and into the paper itself:
————————-
Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered
The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley . . .”
————————-
Alleging that a Peer of the Realm violated scientific peer review – when in fact Lord Monckton had spent substantial effort responding to the APS’s peer review – is just not done! As circulated by Dr. Benny Peiser to CCNet, and as noted by Dennis T. Avery at ICECAP,Lord Monckton responded immediately, emphatically demanding redress and an apology as follows:
—————————
Lord Monckton’s letter in response to APS web page statement:
19 July 2008
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Carie, Rannoch, PH17 2QJ, UK
Arthur Bienenstock, Esq., Ph.D.,
President, American Physical Society,
Wallenberg Hall,
450 Serra Mall, Bldg 160,
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA 94305.
By email to artieb@slac.stanford.edu
Dear Dr. Bienenstock,
Physics and Society
The editors of Physics and Society, a newsletter of the American Physical Society, invited me to submit a paper for their July 2008 edition explaining why I considered that the warming that might be expected from anthropogenic enrichment of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide might be significantly less than the IPCC imagines.
I very much appreciated this courteous offer, and submitted a paper. The commissioning editor referred it to his colleague, who subjected it to a thorough and competent scientific review. I was delighted to accede to all of the reviewer’s requests for revision (see the attached reconciliation sheet). Most revisions were intended to clarify for physicists who were not climatologists the method by which the IPCC evaluates climate sensitivity – a method which the IPCC does not itself clearly or fully explain. The paper was duly published, immediately after a paper by other authors setting out the IPCC’s viewpoint. Some days later, however, without my knowledge or consent, the following appeared, in red, above the text of my paper as published on the website of Physics and Society:
“The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.”
This seems discourteous. I had been invited to submit the paper; I had submitted it; an eminent Professor of Physics had then scientifically reviewed it in meticulous detail; I had revised it at all points requested, and in the manner requested; the editors had accepted and published the reviewed and revised draft (some 3000 words longer than the original) and I had expended considerable labor, without having been offered or having requested any honorarium.
Please either remove the offending red-flag text at once or let me have the name and qualifications of the member of the Council or advisor to it who considered my paper before the Council ordered the offending text to be posted above my paper; a copy of this rapporteur’s findings and ratio decidendi; the date of the Council meeting at which the findings were presented; a copy of the minutes of the discussion; and a copy of the text of the Council’s decision, together with the names of those
present at the meeting. If the Council has not scientifically evaluated or formally considered my paper, may I ask with what credible scientific justification, and on whose authority, the offending text asserts primo, that the paper had not been scientifically reviewed when it had; secundo, that its conclusions disagree with what is said (on no evidence) to be the “overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community”; and, tertio, that “The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions”? Which of my conclusions does the Council disagree with, and on what scientific grounds (if any)?
Having regard to the circumstances, surely the Council owes me an apology?
Yours truly,
THE VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY
———————————–
Monckton’s demand for redress and an apology from the APS is being picked up on the internet.
How will the American Physical Society respond to Lord Monckton’s procedural and scientific gauntlets?
As of noon on Saturday July 20, 2008, the offending paragraph in the table of contents had been removed. However, this offending paragraph was still very much evident in Monckton’s paper Climate Sensitivity Revisited. It was also evident in the Forum’s full PDF of its July, 2008 newsletter Physics and Society Vol 37, No 3, p 6.
The APS’s PeerGate scandal may well prove to provide much greater publicity and serious examination of Monckton’s thesis than if the disclaimers had never been posted. It also exposes the superficiality of statements by executives of the American Physical Society and other scientific organizations supporting the IPCC’s global warming. Those statements were typically not submitted to the rank and file for scientific peer review, nor were they typically voted on by the rank and file. Whatever will come out of this PeerGate Scandal?
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Yes, vincent, thank you.
Of course there are numerous unrefuted falsifications of AGW as you stated, many of which have appeared here. Some within the APS understand that cracks are appearing in their AGW edifice, and as we can see in this instance, they are desperately thrashing around, trying to stop the truth from being printed.
I recently read a book titled “The Emperor of Scent” by Chandler Burr. It is a factual story about Dr. Luca Turin who developed a theory of smell that differed from the consensus. The chapters “Nature” and “Author’s Note” about Dr. Turin’s and the author’s experiences with the journal “Nature” do not inspire confidence in the peer review process or in the openness and objectivity of the journal’s gatekeepers. The description in the book was anecdotal, but it had the ring of truth, an eye-opening look at journal politics, peer review and consensus science.
Re post by Glenn, “Another interesting article published by APS” re paper by Gerald Marsh. http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200804/editor.cfm
If you have not been able to find it, try April 2008.
e.g. “the ‘A’ contribution in CO2 is measured at 3% or so, which suggests that this is not enough to upset the cart”
Well, it does seem to have produced a 3.5 BMTC “overflow” that currently causes a 0.4% increase in the annual atmospheric carbon sink. Thus, CO2 has risen by c. 30% in the last 50 years or so.
However, I do not believe a 30% increase in CO2 has any significant effect on climate because CO2 is as little as 3.6% of the greenhouse effect and there are no positive feedbacks in evidence.
Even dirty snow is probably more significant. And that problem will simply go away on its own in the natural course of events within a few decades.
[…] Brozyna following on from a comment by Manfred in Watts Up With That? 19 July, […]
Marc Sheppard at The American Thinker has weighed in with a blunt essay: The American Physical Society Owes Lord Monckton an Immediate Apology
“Are we expected to believe that the “Council” was somehow unaware of P&S’s invitation to Lord Monckton, a well-known “denier” of AGW dogma? Perhaps, but my Bravo Sierra alarm suggests that they were just as likely “convinced” post-publication — by the same pathetic political forces that taint the science of the IPCC — that there can be but one “truth” about climate change.
While the Viscount tactfully chose the word “discourteous” in describing the treatment he’d received, far harsher adjectives certainly come to mind. The crimes against progress feckless scientists the likes of the APS “Council” are guilty of know no ample punishment. There should be a special place in hell for each and every one of them as penance for the offense of falsely empowering the laughably inane yet widely accepted fantasies of Al Gore alone.
But inviting a man of Monckton’s measure to participate in an evenhanded analysis of both sides only to summarily demean the very position they requested of him is beneath the dignity of any true society of science. . . .These are desperate times for the alarmists, and they are resorting to desperate measures. But I suspect they’ll soon regret the attempt to turn Lord to Pawn.”
Pacific Decadal Oscillation switches to COOL.
Of major interest to complement Monckton’s analysis is: Shifting of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from its warm mode to cool mode assures global cooling for the next three decades. Don J. Easterbrook
Note the major cool PDO period from about 1945 to 1977 followed by the warm PDO period from 1978 to 1999. Compare this with the increase in CO2 and it is easy to see how global warming alarmists might conclude from looking just at that time frame and so tuning models that CO2 was the culprit -when a major portion was a natural climate oscillation.
REPLY: Don Easterling sent me his original manuscript, I plan on posting it tomorrow. – Anthony
Frederick Davies (17:54:11) :
You know, when I studied Physics all those years ago, I do not remember any of my university professors saying degrees or qualifications were a requirement to be able to produce scientifically valid results.
How very insightful, considering most of those generating the data and scientific results have no Ph.D. or qualifications beyond a Baccalaureate Degree. I’ve personally seen quality scientific experiments conducted by and data collected by those without even a high school degree.
randomengineer:
Note that the standard AGW poster image is a “runaway greenhouse effect” pointing to Venus; i.e. a system that went out of balance. Were I you I’d be wary of advancing the argument that positive feedback doesn’t exist.
I did some looking and one theory is that increasing solar irradiance through geologic time caused the removal of the climate buffering (esp. wrt CO2) effect of liquid water on the surface of Venus ( doi:10.1016/0019-1035(88)90116-9.) So making the connection between anthropogenic CO2 and runaway global warming a la Venus is pretty darn tenuous. Not to mention that this is pretty much conjecture anyways, no one has any clue as to the boundary conditions on early Venus. Heck we hardly know the boundary conditions on current Venus.
The trouble is that here in Australia they are now going to spend $AUD5 billion on cooling a cooling planet. This is a real worry. I wish it was a laughing matter but it ain’t! LOL
randomengineer- you say “Note that the standard AGW poster image is a “runaway greenhouse effect” pointing to Venus; i.e. a system that went out of balance.”
I have run into this a lot at various other blogs. I think Venus is as much in balance as Earth. Venus has a lot more atmosphere (93 bar) than Earth, which leads to the higher temperature difference between surface and TOA, even with its higher overall albedo (0.7 versus Earth’s 0.3). To move Earth towards a Venusian surface temperature requires increasing the atmospheric pressure on Earth by a factor of 93, or adding 93,000,000 ppm of CO2 to the present atmosphere.
By the way, I enjoy your frequent comments here.
That said… previous, We should have no objections to many of the greens/AGW’s agendas: that is reducing populations, reducing emissions, reducing city sizes ect no problems. The only only point I think that this blog is about is that C02 does NOT cause changes in Global temperatures?
There is no reason to put a lot of faith in modern scientific and medical journals. Remember the phony study that was rushed into The Lancet before the last presidential election in the US about the supposed death of civilians in Iraq? Here is the editor of that once great publication at a peace rally:http://youtube.com/watch?v=csxvUzpIQ18&feature=related I would bet my 401k that his politics had a great effect on what he published.
Randomengineer,
Regarding feedbacks, of course there are positive feedbacks. What matters is the net balance of all the feedbacks. Feedbacks are very easy to characterize as long as you are not trying to characterize individual processes, trying to find out whether they contribute a positive, or negative feedback then try to guess the magnitude of their contribution. It is a Herculean task and by its very nature is very imprecise.
Fortunately electronic engineers, who first characterized feedbacks came up with rather simple and effective tools. The first and probably most important and least well known concept is the so called “Black Box” description which tells you that as long as the input and the output of the system is known, you can ignore all the complexities inside the system. Makes sense that you are interested in the input and output of an amplifier and not what little electrons inside the transistors are doing.
Hence the name “Black Box” The feedback is obtained when you connect the output to the input. The climatic equivalent is that heating generated by CO2 -output – is acting as an additional input by making water evaporate and create additional greenhouse heating. The question is how much is this additional heating. Modellers predict that it is substantial and this why they came up with huge climate sensitivity numbers. The latest by number by Hansen is 6.5degree C temperature rise for doubling the carbon dioxide concentration. Electronic engineers have long learnt to measure feedback and characterize it. It has two components, one is the coupling factor between output and input the other is the amplification. If the product of the two factors is greater than one then you have a system with a net positive feedback. You can get an output value which is larger than the output without feedback, but the system will not be stable. A lot of you probably experienced what happens to a public address system when your microphone (input)
gets too close to the loudspeakers (output). The acoustic coupling between the loudspeaker and the microphone times the amplification gets greater than one (positive feedback) and you get a very loud annoying whistle. The system is no longer stable and you amplifier is driven to produce its maximum output. This is why any climate model that predicts an output which is enhanced by positive feedback is an incorrect description of the climate because we know from millions of years of climate history that it is stable.
Thanks for your responses. Indeed the article does have a reply within it, I realized that shortly after posting. Various posters, please before being vile understand that I am just trying to participate in the debate and find answers to questions. I have been known to argue both sides of this debate.
I’ve found the SPPI response. And David Hagen, thanks for the links to those papers.
Lord Monckton, I apologise, that quickly dredged link was indeed discourteous to post. You’re right that my posting adds little of scientific value but it has served to dredge up a crop of papers, the relevant replies and put them all in the same place. Which should be beneficial to the readers of this forum!
paminator and Drew Latta –on Venus — e.g. (“So making the connection between anthropogenic CO2 and runaway global warming a la Venus is pretty darn tenuous.”)
What I was pointing out was simply that with millenia of human history telling us that things are balanced, advancing an argument that balance doesn’t exist (there’s negative feedback but no positive feedback) won’t “sound right” to most folks — regardless of whether or not the argument is correct. It could well be correct; and if it is, it will be one tough sell. Venus got mentioned merely due to it being what the AGW’s sell.
Like it or not, winning the argument with the public at large will have to involve some from of readily digested, easily understood imagery/metaphor, and the public at large is being sold Satan’s personal vacation realm at a mere 900 degrees F on a nearby planet. In more than one way, fighting AGW and winning well be the modern equivalent of Henry VIII’s smackdown of the papacy.
***
Evan Jones — (Even dirty snow is probably more significant. )
Undoubtedly. Certainly this site seems to illustrate that temps seem to be largely — if not wholly — influenced by land use. Take GISS (take it please, and apologies to Henny Youngman) for example; they interpolate everything north of 80 degrees based on a belief (magical, methinks) that temps must also be changing there as well, and from what I can tell they’re ignoring the effect of particulates. Certainly one could argue that albedo change is the same animal as land use change.
I reckon it’s a funny thing to think that they’re partly right; temps seem to be going up because they ARE and these are because of land use; the north pole melts “too much” for the same reason. CO2 need not apply. I say this because there’s no widespread melting or otherwise similarly strong GW signal in the southern hemisphere. One would think that atmospheric mixing of CO2, if this were indeed the planetary virus, would affect… erm… uhhh… well, the entire planet and not seem to track land use change (mostly in the north…) Simply observing land use alone explains the apparent phenomenae without resorting to their (modeler’s) overly complex explanations and hand waving concerning oceanic convection and conveyors that they demonstrably don’t really understand.
So yeah, I think you’re right.
I’ve done my best to agitate the warmers here in Australia via editorials etc without getting too many bites like Monckton has. The greenies have shown remarkable discipline I believe, in not engaging on matters such as the temperature trend, or anything else really that compromises them, so Monckton has obviously hit a nerve. He will take a heap of bullets like Durkin did but the warmers are spending a lot of credibility at the same time. The APS reaction is a revealing and damning breach of discipline by a well organized opposition who know full well they are under siege and that it will only get worse. How apt that he talking about sensitivity, because we just found one very tender spot it would seem. The term “dropping their bundle” comes to mind.
Bravo Monckton of Brenchley! Maintain the dignity and prevail. I sense you have started something. What did Churchill say – something about the “beginning of the end”. Matty (Perth, Western Australia)
Monckton of Brenchley.
Well done. There are many that stand shoulder to shoulder with you.
There were two other papers published alongside Lord Monkton’s paper
What level of “peer review” did they receive such that they didn’t require such comments?
Once again the global warming propoganda and disinformation war has broken out. Yet, let’s recall that this is all background noise designed to distract us from the real science and data.
The APS are sheninigans and best ignored. Here readers would be well advised to go back looking at CLIMATE DATA. And what do they show?
Correct!
NO WARMING OVER THE LAST 10 YEARS.
Sea levels have stagnated
Sea ice is back
The AGW pretenders can pretend all they want that the globe is overheating. But the data tell another story.
Sam Vilain (23:10:56) : 19th
Well said, that responce makes you a gentleman.
randomengineer, the lack of a runaway climate occurring in the last billion years is strong evidence for a convergent system with a lot of slack. CO2 levels have been many times higher in the past without the system running away.
Convergent systems tend to have negative feedbacks not positive ones, not a “balance”.
Just wanted to say thanks to all of you (pros and cons) – great reading.
Congratulations APS,
You’ve suceeded in admitting your intellectual bankruptcy.
The APS and other similar organisations may not know it, but my gut feeling is that a lot of scientists are beginning to be awfully turned off by this sort of intellectual bullying. Science by bullying and other dictatorial methods are things the Nazis and Stalinists had to stoop to.
In observing the poor judgement being displayed by APS in their handling of this affair and the recent comments about the atmospheres of Mars and Venus, I am reminded of the equally poor judgement displayed in Jan 2007 by Stephen Hawking as he jumped on the AGW bandwagon to warn of the danger of Earth becoming like Venus. Even a brilliant mind can have its moments and in my mind, this one was a monumental boo boo.
Geting back to the data:
“Instead of a rise of 1°F during the first decade of this century as predicted by IPCC climate models (Fig 2), global temperatures cooled slightly for the past nine years and cooled more than 1°F this year (Fig 3). Global cooling over the past decade appears to be due to a global cooling trend set up by the PDO cool mode and a similar shift in the Atlantic.”
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/WashingtonPolicymakersaddress.pdf
A cautionary note perhaps?
Over the last decade I have read that $50bn has gone into research supporting the AGW theory and just $19m as gone into the “skeptic” community’s research pond. (These figures are from a journalist so carry a heavy health warning).
Therefore, for any scientist or scientific community to change tack will take enormous courage and access to private funding.
Until the flow of research dollars moves to a more balanced level I do not see much change in the stance of organisations like the APS.
To change the flow of research dollars would require the debunking of the AGW theory – but the AGW promoters know this and won’t permit open and rigorous scientific analysis by widely publishing their data and their modelling techniques (as shown so clearly by Steve McIntyre) – that would risk not only their reputations but their funding.
Equally anyone who puts significant research dollars into the sceptical AGW community will be seen to be not politically correct and not environmentally friendly.
Hence it seems to me to be a very strong financial model in favour of the AGW group and it is self reinforcing.
I believe therefore that until the world is clearly seen to have cooled then there will be very little prospect of much change. And, of course, as Anthony has shown all too readily the people in charge of the temperature gauges will do there level best to confuse the true position anyway.
This will surely be a long haul in my very humble opinion.