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The American Physical Society alleged that Lord Monckton’s paper Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered was not peer reviewed when Monckton in fact thoroughly revised his paper in response to APS peer review.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:
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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 . . .”
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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:
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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
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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?
[…] three decades. But what caught my attention was what the blogger of Watts Up With That said about a controversy between the American Physical Society and a paper that ran counter to what the immediate cause of […]
Ed Darrell — (Good heavens! Further tracking takes the $50 billion figure to Fox News and — can you write a script like this? — Steven Milloy!)
This number looks to be an estimate, so why you would bother with going after Milloy seems to be pointless. The estimate would have to include greenpeace and similar group funding, the value of airtime wasted on CNN etc promoting what amounts to greenpeace press releases and calling it “news”, the efforts of governments to fund climate studies, satellite time that is used to study the alleged problem, climate conferences, and essentially, the entire ball of wax.
Assuming it’s Milloy’s estimate, it looks like he’s lowballing it. I’d put the number closer to 10x to 20x of that.
My guess is that this estimate is also a reaction/answer to the rather silly and otherwise idiotic allegations that some people make regarding “paid denialists” and so on as propagated by exxonsecrets and other such whistle blowing “public services.”
Assuming the peak oil crowd is correct, the allegations paint a picture of a world corporation chock full of some of the world’s brightest business minds plotting to quickly waste resources so as to go out of business as soon as possible and simultaneously be castigated by politicians and excorciated by the public at large. So, that’s how conspiracy theorists at places like exxonsecrets seem to assume highly trained and ultra-intelligent Ivy League business people think? The allegations are obviously absurd, mendacious rubbish and ludicrous even in the abstract.
Heavens, I would have thought it apparent that this number was that type of estimate just on the face of it.
MarkW — (If indeed the climate is balanced on the knife’s edge, as you seem to believe…)
I didn’t say anything of the sort. I said merely that humans naturally think in terms of balance and any argument to the contrary will be difficult for the majority to believe. Maybe this is because most of us are bipeds, for whom balance seems to be an important notion.
I have made no comment on what *I* think whatsoever.
Currently the internet is alive with people saying that the paper was not peer reviewed. Yet the APS editors sent it out to an APS member who reviewed it and sent back comments and these comments were accepted by the APS.
Why would the APS then claim it was not peer reviewed? What actually ocurred is actually what peer review is. Every paper I have published undergoes exactly this kind of review by the editors.
Am I missing something?
Cyc said something quite odd to me and i dont understand it
and just possibly explain the value of a review by an academic who by his own admission does not understand the difference between a forcing and a feedback ?
I read the peer review by Saperstein, there is nothing in it which says that he does not understand the difference
Here is acopy of the followup post to the <a href=”http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/peergate-review-scandal-at-american-physical-society/PeerGate review scandal post cited above by Watts:
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Following is an email sent 20 Jul 2008 21:46, by Prof. Arthur Bienenstock, President of the American Physical Society, responding to the issues raised by Lord Monckton’s letter to him.
Bienenstock describes the peer review issue as “editorial review for a newsletter” rather than “substantive scientific peer review”. The degree of review can be seen from the comments of reviewer Professor Alvin Saperstein on the page Monckton attached to his letter.
(One blog technically critical of Monckton’s paper is The APS and global warming – what were they thinking? at DUAE Quartunciae)
Prof. Bienenstock does not appear to have addressed Monckton’s second and third requests:
Hi peer reviewer…
Saperstein’s review states plainly: I don’t know the difference between “forcing” and “feedback”.
I guess most folks here are aware that there is actually a difference between formal peer review and a set of helpful comments where something is unclear or could be improved. The P&S forum newsletter is not peer reviewed, and Saperstein’s comments clearly do not constitute a peer review. His lack of familiarity with the technical terms does not prevent him from singling out where the paper might be unclear or improved in format and wording, and this was no doubt helpful in cleaning up the article. But there’s no real consideration of the technical details as would be expected in formal peer review from someone familiar with the subject matter.
As I see it, the reason reason there was a need to put an explicit disclaimer on the article was simply because so many people were so badly misrepresenting things. If there had not been such a large number of news and internet comments hailing this article as having some kind of formal endorsement, indicating a position of the APS itself or a level of technical recognition of validity of the arguments, then there would have been no need, in my opinion, for the disclaimer. There have been other occasions when the newsletter has published idiosyncratic opinion pieces going against the conventional view without adding disclaimers; but in this case the distortions were so widespread that it was only responsible to add a clarification of what should be obvious and uncontroversial — and totally uninsulting.
Cheers — Duae Quartunciae
Peer Reveiwer
– as DQ points out, the clue that Mockton’s ‘reviewer’ does not understand the difference between a forcing and a feedback lay in these words,
‘I don’t know the difference between “forcing” and “feedback”.
which you can find by following my final link
A fair summary of the paper would be innumerate tosh based on flawed premises that would fail the most basic actual peer review.
Hope this helps.
Cyc.
Duae Quartunciae
It might help to review the APS statement added in red bold to Monckton’s paper:
Correction: The indented text in my previous post were my comments. Following is the APS statement added in red to Monckton’s article.
“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.”
See: Climate Sensitivity Revisited
Given the above, a hopefully helpful suggestion..
The APS to be renamed the AMS.
ie,
The American Physical Society,
to become forthwith,
The American Modeling Society.
NB – “Politically correct” only modeling of course….
to CYC
its amazing how you can interpret the review much differently than i do
the actual phrase is:
“I don’t know the difference between “forcing” and “feedback”. If “forcing” is not just external energy flux, than I
would assume it includes “feedback”. What do you mean? Definitions now amplified and clarified in the text”
feedback and forcing as used by IPCC are peculiar meanings, and I thought the reviewer wanted Monckton to answer: What do you mean? to clarify the information in his paper.
The reviewer Saperstein is hardly ignorant. He is an editor of the APS quarterly itself. The APS decided to have the paper reviewed by its own editor! Why would the APS use its own editor to review the paper, and presumbably also review the other papers and then declare that the paper was un reviewed? Sounds like an old book written by a mathematician about rabbits and their lives
to Duae Quartunciae
To be fair, if the normal process for all papers published in the quarterly is to receive only editorial review by a physicist who is unqualified to review the papers, then Monktons papers should be treated as all the rest. They all should have the disclaimer.
Who else has the temerity to claim the paper was peer-reviewed, other than Lord Monckton? Why should everyone else suffer for his hubris?
[…] sticking with the science. As Wattsupwiththat notes, The APS’s PeerGate scandal may well prove to provide much greater publicity and serious […]
To peer reviewer, 00:17:51…
Implicitly, all the articles do have that disclaimer, in my opinion. It would be rather precious to put an explicit rider of the bleeding obvious over every article in what is plainly a informal newsletter with lots of freely contributed opinion pieces.
What makes Monckton’s article stand out as needing this disclaimer to be explicit is not that it is any less reviewed or less of an opinion piece. It is rather that half the internet immediately fell over themselves to misrepresent the status of the paper. It appears to have started, as far as I can tell, with a press release from the SPPI, on July 15. which described the newsletter as “mathematical proof” in a “major, peer-reviewed paper” within a “learned journal”. This is simply false on all counts, for an informal apropriate argument (with errors), in a minor opinion piece within a newsletter. From there it exploded across the internet.
In my view, the whole thing shows a lot of naiviety. It would have been sensible to recognize in advance that this was going to spill over beyond the P&S newsletter; and announce right from the start that these were opinion pieces by individuals wanting to contribute a viewpoint. But they obviously did not anticipate the sheer scale and speed of the distortions. Not only was it being spoken of as “peer reviewed” and in an APS journal; it was almost immediately inflated into an indication that the whole 50,000 strong APS was shifting position. A straightforward clarification of the obvious was entirely in order; and there is nothing in the disclaimer which is inappropriate, or insulting. It was a necessary clarification to help stem a rapidly spreading distortion of this one specific paper’s status.
David L. Hagen: “Similarly, what basis is there for stating: “The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.”
The basis is the misperception that the APS supports Monkton’s paper. For example, the DailyTech lead: “The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming.”
http://www.dailytech.com/Myth+of+Consensus+Explodes+APS+Opens+Global+Warming+Debate/article12403.htm
As to how this misperception arose, Monkton and his associates can share some of the blame: “Mathematical proof that there is no “climate crisis” appears today in a major, peer-reviewed paper in Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 10,000-strong American Physical Society, SPPI reports.”
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/press/proved_no_climate_crisis.html
This puff piece was released on 15 July. It implies that the APS supports Monkton’s paper, which is not the case. Monkton has paid his hosts a discourtesy, and has now compounded it by publicly demanding an apology. It’s quite clear that this man is parlaying the publicity for all it is worth.
But ultimately, this fracas will rebound on him and his cause, because other scientific bodies will think twice before having any dealings with him.
Ummm.
Leaving aside the introductory and closing remarks, Bienenstock’s letter comprises four paragraphs.
The first three address a claim that was not made by Monckton – that his paper was censored. I don’t think that anyone claims this literally, though you could assert that presenting a paper in a ‘poor’ way is tantamount to censorship…
The last paragraph seems to me to be the only one which adresses an issue of substance. It suggests (in my view reasonably) that people might think the APS had changed their view of AGW, and thus it was important to stress that this was NOT the case.
I can therefore see why Bienenstock has done this. It is true that many blogs have misinterpreted the paper as describing an APS position. But in doing it, he has left himself in a very peculiar position. He is now holding a ‘debate’ on AGW, but has stressed that the APS has a fixed position on this matter!
This is a situation more usually found in religious discussions. The Roman Catholic church has exactly this problem when it needs to address a doctrinal change – I am not entirely sure how the logic works when a previously defined position needs to be discussed and altered. Usually, I think, this is done by ‘revelation’, and re-interpreting the words of the original doctrine – so perhaps we should all be praying for the APS to receive divine guidance?
And the winner is…
aps.org and dailytech.com by all the measures reported at Alexa. Just type them in the appropriate box and see how both sites experienced a major spike in traffic resulting from this incident.
As a layman I was lazy and tended to believe the MMGW alarmists, however when Gore’s movie was released I smelt a rat and did what Richard Dawkins asks his readers to do in God Delusion: ‘raise their conciousness’.
I’ve done a lot of desktop research and read up as much as I can on the subject, including reading a number of books sceptical of MMGW. My opinion is now firmly one of being extremely sceptical of the MMGW alarmists.
We need sites like this and the people that use them to keep questioning the science behind the MMGW claims and push for a much more more open non- politicised debate.
This recent article is extremely good at questioning the basis of the MMGW protaganists claims: http://www.hindu.com/2008/07/10/stories/2008071055521000.htm
Duae Quartunciae
I understand your reasoning. And the daily tech june 15th assertions are quite impolitic.
I think it would be fair therefore that the disclaimer above Monktons papers should include the phrase this paper and all others in this quarterly have not undergone any scientific peer review. This would make things a lot clearer to the world
However the qualifier “scientifically” begs the question further. If Dr. Saperstein, as a professional editor and reviewer and scientist saw an error in Monktons paper, shouldnt he have pointed it out? And if he saw it and purposely didnt isnt this quite disgenuous? On the other hand was the reviewer incapable of even seeing faults discerned by blogosphere freshman physicists?
To me both sides have squashed the truth. and the accompanying papers to Monktons arent great shakes either. Who said that the atmosphere absorbs all the IR?
should be july 15th
Following is Lord Monckton’s 21st July 2008 email responding to Dr. Bienenstock’ 20th July 2008 reply:
——————————————————————————–
Arthur Bienenstock, Esq., Ph.D.,
President, American Physical Society,
Wallenberg Hall, 450 Serra Mall, Bldg 160,
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA 94305.
21 July, 2008 By email to artieb@slac.stanford.edu
Dear Dr. Bienenstock,
Physics and Society
I have had your notice of refusal to remove your regrettable disclaimer from my paper Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered. Since you have not had the courtesy to remove and apologize for the unacceptable red-flag text that, on your orders, in effect invites readers of Physics and Society to disregard the paper that one of your editors had invited me to submit, and which I had submitted in good faith, and which I had revised in good faith after it had been meticulously reviewed by a Professor of Physics who was more than competent to review it, I must now require you to answer the questions that I had asked in my previous letter, videlicet –
1. Please provide the name and qualifications of the member of the Council or advisor to it (if any) who considered my paper (if anyone considered it) before the Council ordered the offending text to be posted above my paper;
2. Please provide a copy of this rapporteur’s findings (if any) and ratio decidendi (if any);
3. Please provide the date of the Council meeting (if there was one) at which the report (if any) was presented;
4. Please provide a copy of the minutes (if any) of the discussion (if there was one);
5. Please provide a copy of the text (if any) of the Council’s decision (if there was one);
6. Please provide a list of the names of those present (if any) at that Council meeting (if there was one);
7. If, as your silence on these points implies, the Council has not scientifically evaluated or formally considered my paper, please explain 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 (let us have no more semantic quibbles about the meaning of “scientific review”);
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)? And, if the Council has not in fact met to consider my paper as your red-flag text above my paper implies, how dare you state (on no evidence) that the Council disagrees with my conclusions?
8. Please provide the requested apology without any further mendacity, prevarication, evasion, excuse, or delay.
Finally, was the Council’s own policy statement on “global warming” peer-reviewed? Or is it a mere regurgitation of some of the opinions of the UN’s climate panel? If the latter, why was the mere repetition thought necessary?
Yours truly,
THE VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY
I’d have no objection to the APS disclaimer above Monckton’s article explicitly indicating that all newsletter articles are in the same boat as far as review is concerned. However, only Monckton’s article should be identified as the one with which there is widespread disagreement. And that is only needed because of the contrary implication in many blogs and news outlets that the publication reflected some kind of change in the APS position.
On the other hand: given that Monckton himself precipitated the distortions as soon as the newsletter came out, there’s no cause to beat around the bush in deference to his finer feelings. He egregiously misrepresented the matter in the SPPI press release. I think the APS is entirely correct to give a short, firm, accurate and civil response. Further careful rewordings to imply some kind of equal standing of all parties would be misleading.
As for the matter of errors… full peer review intended to pick up all the technical errors is a very time consuming and onerous task, usually taking months. Monckton got a bit of a once over, but no assurance that all his errors would be found. Same for other articles in the paper … and generally this is well understood. Newsletter articles represent the author’s views.
I’m not a professional physicist; but even so, it is not that surprising to me that I was able to see errors in Monckton’s paper that were missed by a professional. It was pretty much sheer happenstance that I had been studying the very topic of feedbacks at this time. That’s really all there is to it, I think. I was lucky.
I had read in just the last couple of weeks many of the references that Monckton was using, and had been explaining on my own behalf the nature of forcing and feedback in another online discussion. I do have an undergraduate degree that helps, as well as a long standing interest in physics and maths. So I was primed to pick up the problems. An expert in that specific field would have picked them up at once as well. A competent physicist from another field? Not necessarily.
The other paper, by Hafemeister and Schwartz, is attempting something very different from what Monckton was attempting. Monckton was attempting a high level refutation of modern climate science, to refute it. Hafemeister and Schwartz, on the other hand, were attempting a basic introductory tutorial on the nature of radiative transfers. They certainly don’t say that the atmosphere absorbs all IR. They rather work through a series of successively more detailed simple cases to help show how energy balance works out.
For a sincerely interested onlooker, unsure of who to trust and where to go for good information, it’s as well to keep in mind the drastically different underlying presumptions of the two papers. One treats the matter as correcting incompetent errors made by experts. The other treats the matter as educating novices to have a better grasp of the underlying principles.
Frankly, even if you are inclined to think that pretty much the whole field of modern climatology is riddled with errors and incompetent physical analysis, it would still be a good idea to learn more about the technical details of that analysis from tutorial style articles that give a simplified introduction. It takes time, but struggling through the examples in the tutorial article puts you in a better position to evaluate more advanced treatments (and go on to more advanced tutorials!). There’s much not covered in the tutorial paper; before I started reading the papers on feedback and forcings I spent a month or so on a general undergraduate level textbook on atmospheric physics and radiative transfers to be sure I could follow the papers. This was all before Monckton’s paper came out… it was very serendipitous timing for me.
Extracts of cc emails responding to Prof. Bienenstock’s reply above:
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{stare decisis (From Latin, to stand by decided matters)
: a doctrine or policy of following rules or principles laid down in previous judicial decisions unless they contravene the ordinary principles of justice. Merriam-Webster}
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