How IPCC scientists interfere with publication of inconvenient scientific results
By David H. Douglass, Professor of Physics, University of Rochester, New York, and John R. Christy, Distinguished Professor, Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama at Huntsville
- In this article, reprinted from The American Thinker, two eminent Professors reveal just one of the many seamy stories that emerge from the Climategate emails. A prejudiced journal editor conspires with senior IPCC scientists to delay and discredit a paper by four distinguished scientists demonstrating that a central part of the IPCC’s scientific argument is erroneous.
The Climategate emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England have revealed how the normal conventions of the peer-review process appear to have been compromised by a Team of “global warming” scientists, with the willing cooperation of the editor of the International Journal of Climatology, Glenn McGregor.
The Team spent nearly a year preparing and publishing a paper that attempted to rebut a previously published paper in that journal by Douglass, Christy, Pearson and Singer. Our paper, reviewed and accepted in the traditional manner, had shown that the IPCC models that predicted significant “global warming” in fact largely disagreed with the observational data.
We will let the reader judge whether this team effort, revealed in dozens of emails and taking nearly a year, involves inappropriate behavior including (a) unusual cooperation between authors and editor, (b) misstatement of known facts, (c) character assassination, (d) avoidance of traditional scientific give-and-take, (e) using confidential information, (f) misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of the scientific question posed by us in our paper, (g) withholding data, and more.
The team is a group of a number of climate scientists who frequently collaborate and publish papers which often supports the hypothesis of human-caused global warming. For present purposes, leading members of the Team include Ben Santer, Phil Jones, Timothy Osborn, and Tom Wigley, with lesser roles for several others.
Introduction
We submitted our paper to the International Journal of Climate on 31 May 2007. The paper was accepted four and a half months later, on 11 October. The page-proofs were accepted on 1 November. The paper was published online on 5 December. However, we had to wait very nearly a year after online publication, until 15 November 2008, for publication of the print version of the paper.
Ben Santer and 17 members of the Team subsequently published a paper intended to refute ours. It was submitted to the International Journal of Climate on 25 March 2008. It was revised on 18 July, accepted two days later, published online on 10 October, and published in print on 15 November, little more than a month after online publication.
This story uses various of the Climategate emails and our own personal knowledge of events and issues. References will be made to items in an appendix that are arranged chronologically. Each of the emails has an index number which comes from a compilation at http://www.eastangliaemails.com/index.php
2. The story
Our record of this story begins when Andrew Revkin, a reporter for the New York Times, sent three Team members an email dated 30 Nov 2007, to which he attached the page-proofs of our paper, which we had not sent to him. His email to the Team is dated just one week before the online publication of our paper. The subject of Revkin’s email,
“Sorry to take your time up, but really do need a scrub of Singer/Christy/etc effort”, implies that there had been prior correspondence between Revkin and the Team.
Carl Mears, a Team member, quickly responded with an email dated 4 December 2007 to fellow Team members Jones, Santer, Thorne, Sherwood, Lanzante, Taylor, Seidel, Free and Wentz Santer replies to all of these:
“I’m forwarding this to you in confidence. We all knew that some journal, somewhere, would eventually publish this stuff. Turns out that it was the International Journal of Climatology.”
Santer knew this because he had reviewed and rejected our paper when it had been previously submitted to another journal. Phil Jones, then director of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia, and now stood down pending an investigation of the Climategate affair, responded to Santer:
“It sure does! Have read briefly – the surface arguments are wrong. I know editors have difficulty finding reviewers, but letting this one pass is awful – and the International Journal of Climatology was improving.”
This exchange provides the first reference to the International Journal of Climatology.
The next day, 5 December 2007, the day on which our paper appeared on-line, Santer sent a email to Peter Thorne with copies to Carl Mears, Leopold Haimberger, Karl Taylor, Tom Wigley, Phil Jones, Steve Sherwood, John Lanzante, Dian Seidel, Melissa Free, Frank Wentz, and Steve Klein. Santer says:
“Peter, I think you’ve done a nice job in capturing some of my concerns about the Douglass et al. paper… I don’t think it’s a good strategy to submit a response to the Douglass et al. paper to the International Journal of Climatology. As Phil [Jones] pointed out, the Journal has a large backlog, so it might take some time to get a response published. Furthermore, Douglass et al. probably would be given the final word.”
The most critical point throughout these emails is the goal of preventing us from providing what is considered normal in the peer-reviewed literature: an opportunity to respond to their critique, or as they put it, “be given the final word.” One wonders if there is ever a “final word” in science, as the authors here seem to imply.
The next day, 6 December 2007, Melissa Free responded with a cautious note, evidently because she had presented a paper with Lanzante and Seidel at the American Meteorological Society’s 18th conference on Climate Variability and Change, acknowledging the existence of the discrepancy between observations and models – the basic conclusion of our paper:
“What about the implications of a real model-observation difference for upper-air trends? Is this really so dire?”
Santer responded on 6 December 2007 with his key reason for attacking our paper:
“What is dire is Douglass et al.’s wilful neglect of any observational datasets that do not support their arguments.”
This “wilful neglect” of “observational datasets” refers to the absence of two balloon datasets RAOBCORE v1.3 and v1.4. We had explained in addendum to our paper that these datasets were faulty.
A further email from Jones, dated 6 Dec 2007, discusses options for beating us into print. Wigley, a former head of the Climatic Research Unit, enters the story on 10 Dec 2007 to accuse us of “fraud”, adding that under “normal circumstances” this would “cause him [Professor David Douglass] to lose his job”.
We remind the reader that our paper went through traditional, anonymous peer-review with several revisions to satisfy the reviewers and without communicating outside proper channels with the editor and reviewers.
Tim Osborn, a colleague of Jones at the Climatic Research Unit and a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Climate, then inserted himself into the process, declaring a bias on the issue. He said that Professor Douglass’ previous papers “appear to have serious problems”.
Santer responded on 12 December 2007 with gratitude for the “heads-up”, again making the claim that our paper had ignored certain balloon datasets, when in fact our paper had not used these datasets because they were known to be faulty.
The same day, an unsigned report appeared on the Team’s propaganda website, RealClimate.org, attacking us especially about not using the RAOBCORE 1.4 balloon dataset.
This prompted us to submit a one-page Addendum to the International Journal of Climatology on 3 January 2008 to explain two issues: first, the reason for not using RAOBCORE 1.4 and secondly, the experimental design to show why using the full spread of model results to compare with observations (as Santer i. would do) would lead to wrong conclusions about the relationship between trends in the upper air temperature vs. the surface. A copy of the addendum may be found at http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/.)
Osborn wrote to Santer and Jones on 10 January 2008 to discuss the “downside” of the normal comment-reply process in which we should be given an “opportunity to have a response.” He explained that he has contacted the editor of the International Journal of Climatology, Glenn McGregor, to “see what he can do”. According to Osborn, McGregor “promises to do everything he can to achieve a quick turn-around.” He also wrote:
“… (and please treat this in confidence, which is why I emailed to you and Phil only) that he [McGregor] may be able to hold back the hardcopy (i.e. the print/paper version) appearance of Douglass et al., possibly so that any accepted Santer et al. comment could appear alongside it. He [McGregor] also intends to “correct the scientific record” and to identify “in advance reviewers who are both suitable and available”, perhaps including “someone on the email list you’ve been using”. Given the bias of Osborn and McGregor as expressed in the emails, one could wonder what it means to be a “suitable” reviewer of the Santer paper.
Santer responded with his conditions, highlighting his intent to have the “last word”:
“1. Our paper should be regarded as an independent contribution, not as a comment on Douglass et al. … 2. If the International Journal of Climatology agrees to 1, then Douglass et al. should have the opportunity to respond to our contribution, and we should be given the chance to reply. Any response and reply should be published side-by-side, in the same issue of the Journal. I’d be grateful if you and Phil could provide me with some guidance on 1 and 2, and on whether you think we should submit to the Journal. Feel free to forward my email to Glenn McGregor.”
This Osborn email and the response by Santer essentially lay out the publication strategy apparently agreed to by Santer, Jones, Osborn and editor McGregor. Santer accepts Osborn as a conduit and defines the conditions (having the “last word”). This is exactly what he seeks to deny to us, even though it was we who had published the original paper in this sequence in the Journal, and should, under customary academic procedures, have been entitled to have the last word alongside any rebuttal of our paper that the Journal published.
We were never informed of this process, even though it specifically addressed our paper, nor were we contacted for an explanation on any point raised in these negotiations. Santer’s allegations regarding our paper and his conditions for publication of his response to it were simply accepted by the Journal’s editor. If our results had indeed been so obviously and demonstrably in error, why would anyone have feared a response by us?
The same day, 10 January 2008, Jones told the Team (Wigley, K. Taylor, Lanzante, Mears, Bader, Zwiers, Wentz, Haimberger, Free, MacCracken, Jones, Sherwood, Klein, Solomon, Thorne, Osborn, Schmidt, and Hack) a “secret” he had learned from Osborn: that one of the recipients on the Santer email list was one of the original reviewers of our paper – a reviewer who had not rejected it:
“The problem! The person who said they would leave it to the editor’s discretion is on your email list! I don’t know who it is – Tim does – maybe they have told you? I don’t want to put pressure on Tim. He doesn’t know I’m sending this. It isn’t me by the way – nor Tim! Tim said it was someone who hasn’t contributed to the discussion – which does narrow the possibilities down!”
Does Santer start wondering who the original reviewer is? Does Osborn reveal this part of McGregor’s secret?
Then, on the matter of paying for expensive color plots, Jones adds, “I’m sure I can lean on Glenn [McGregor] to evidently deal with the costs.” Obviously, no such assistance had been offered to us when we had published our original paper.
The final approval of the strategy (Santer’s conditions) to deny us an opportunity to respond in the normal way is acknowledged by Osborn to Santer and Jones on 11 January 2008. Osborn writes that McGregor, as editor is “prepared to treat it as a new submission rather than a comment on Douglass et al.” and “my [McGregor’s] offer of a quick turnaround time etc. still stands.” Osborn also reminds Santer and Jones of the potential impropriety of this situation:
“… the only thing I didn’t want to make more generally known was the suggestion that print publication of Douglass et al. might be delayed… all other aspects of this discussion are unrestricted.”
Santer now informed the Team that the strategy had been agreed to. We were never notified of these machinations, and it is clear that Santer’s story of the situation was never investigated independently. In this long email, the issue of radiosonde errors is discussed, together with the fact that one dataset, RAOBCORE v1.4, is missing from our paper.
To explain briefly, Sakamoto and Christy (accepted in 2008 and published in 2009) looked closely at the ERA-40 Reanlayses on which RAOBCORE v1.3 and v1.4 were based, and demonstrated that a spurious warming shift occurred in 1991 (a problem with a satellite channel: HIRS 11) which was then assimilated into RAOBCORE, producing spurious positive trends in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere.
Sakamoto and Christy had been working on this since 2006 when they had first met, and so were aware of the problems at that time. Later, on 27 May 2008, Sherwood – a member of the Team – comments on this evidence during the deliberations on Santer’s publication, so the Team was aware of the problem too. Even though McGregor had sent Santer our Addendum explaining the RAOBCORE problems as early as 10 April 2008, their published paper contains the statement:
“Although DCPS07 had access to all three RAOBCORE versions, they presented results from v1.2 only.”
Another interesting comment here is that Santer does “not” want to “show the most recent radiosonde [balloon] results” from the Hadley Center and Sherwood’s IUK. In short, he was withholding data that did not support his view, probably because these two datasets, extended out in time, provide even stronger evidence in favor of our conclusion. The final version of Santer’s paper cuts off these datasets in 1999.
Professor Douglass became concerned that McGregor had not responded after receiving the Addendum sent on 3 January 2008. The Professor wrote on 1 April 2008 to ask about the status of the Addendum. On 10 April 2008 McGregor responded that he had had “great difficulty locating your Addendum”, and Douglass responded with the International Journal of Climatology’s file number acknowledging receipt of the Addendum on 3 January, and attached the Addendum again. That very day, McGregor sent the Addendum to Santer to “learn your views.” Santer was afforded the opportunity to comment on our Addendum, but we never heard about it from McGregor again.
On 24 April 2008 McGregor informed Santer that he had received one set of comments and, though he “… would normally wait for all comments to come in before providing them to you, I thought in this case I would give you a head start in your preparation of revisions”.
That day, Santer informed the Team of the situation. Ws there ever any possibility that Santer’s paper could have been rejected, given the many favors already extended to this submission? McGregor now knew, because he had the Addendum, what the main point of our response to Santer et al. might be, yet evidently dropped the Addendum from consideration. At this point, we were unaware of any response by Santer to our Addendum, as we were dealing with the RealClimate.org blog on this matter.
Santer was worried about the lack of “urgency” in receiving the remaining reviews and, on 5 May 2008, complained to McGregor. He reminded McGregor that Osborn had agreed to the strategy that the “process would be handled as expeditiously as possible”. McGregor replied that he hoped that the further comments would come within “2 weeks”. The following day, Osborn wrote to McGregor that Santer’s 90-page article was much more than anticipated, implying that Santer was being rather demanding considering how much had been done to aid him. One wonders why it should take 10 months and 90 pages to show that any paper contained a “serious flaw”, and why Santer et al. needed to be protected from a response by us.
A paper by Thorne now appeared in Nature Geosciences which referenced the as-yet-unpublished paper by Santer et al. (including Thorne). On 26 May 2008, Professor Douglass wrote to Thorne asking for a copy and was told the following day that Thorne could not supply the paper because Santer was the lead author author.
Professor Douglass replied that day, repeating his request for a copy of the paper and reminding Thorne of Nature’s publication-ethics policy on the availability of data and materials:
“An inherent principle of publication is that others should be able to replicate and build upon the authors’ published claims. Therefore, a condition of publication in a Nature journal is that authors are required to make materials, data and associated protocols available …”
At the same time Professor Douglass asked Santer for a copy of the paper. Santer responded by saying, “I see no conceivable reason why I should now send you an advance copy of my International Journal of Climatology paper.” From the emails, we now know that the Santer et al. manucsript had not been accepted at this point, even though it had been cited in a Nature Geosciences article. What is very curious is that in the email Santer claims Professor Douglass “… did not have the professional courtesy to provide me with any advance information about your 2007 International Journal of Climate paper …”.
In fact, Santer had been a reviewer of this paper when it had been submitted earlier, so he had in possession of the material (only slightly changed) for at least a year. Additionally, Santer received a copy of the page-proofs of our paper about a week before it even appeared online.
In further email exchanges the following day, 28 May 2008, Santer and his co-authors discussed the uncomfortable situation of having a citation in Nature Geosciences and being unable to provide the paper to the public before “a final decision on the paper has been reached”. Santer stated they should “resubmit our revised manuscript to the Journal as soon as possible”, implying that Professor Douglass’ point about the ethics policies of Nature, which required cited literature to be made available, might put Santer et al. in jeopardy.
On 10 July 2008, Santer wrote to Jones that the two subsequent reviews were in but reviewer 2 was “somewhat crankier”. Santer indicated that McGregor has told him that he will not resend the coming revised manuscript to the “crankier” reviewer. This was another apparent effort by McGregor to accommodate Santer.
Conclusion
On 21 July 2008, Santer heard that his paper had been formally accepted and expressed his sincere gratitude to Osborn for “all your help with the tricky job of brokering the submission of the paper to the International Journal of Climatology”. Osborn responds, “I’m not sure that I did all that much.”
On 10 October 2008, Santer et al’s paper was published on-line. Thirty-six days later Santer et al. appeared in print immediately following our own paper, even though we had waited more than 11 months for our paper to appear in print. The strategy of delaying our paper and not allowing us to have a simultaneous response to Santer et al. published had been achieved.
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Joel,
If it was as easy as you say to refute the original Christy et al paper, then why did it take Santer 90 pages? And why did he did to conspire with the Journal editor to delay Christy’s paper? And why did he need to get his submission expedited? And why did he feel it was so important to deny Christy the last word while ensuring it for himself? What was he afraid of? The fact that you are silent on these and so many other behaviors of Santer and the team speaks volumes.
While this paints a disgraceful picture, it is hardly surprising. Reading the comments and responses that are allowed to stand on the RC blog is like reading one of those “Ask the Imam” websites. It would be funny if it weren’t so terrifying.
Anthony Watts says:
Actually, I can’t say that I even read the comment in detail since I don’t usually find “he-said, she-said” stories particularly enlightening, particularly when told by only one side. I am more interested in the science and the fact is that I know that in this case the science in the original paper by Douglass et al. was extremely flawed and the more interesting question is why such erroneous papers get published at all, let alone complaints that the environment is such that these “skeptics” somehow have things stacked against them.
This whole thing is presumably supposed to illustrate how the only reason why the overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed scientific literature points in one direction is that there is such inherent bias that good papers are being rejected or treated unfairly in some way. To illustrate this by talking about a highly erroneous paper that nonetheless was published seems to me more to undermine that point than to re-enforce it!
Frankly, I have no idea why you brought my comment to OMB into the picture other than perhaps your general desire for “outing” individuals here who post views you do not like by bringing in facets from their life outside of this venue. (In the cases of others, you have done this by revealing information that only you have access to; in my case, since I have not been posting under a pseudonym, I suppose you are not exposing me any more than anyone could do with a little bit of googling.)
The OMB issue concerned peer-review in the venue of government regulatory policymaking, not in journals. And, the issue was frankly an attempt by the Bush Administration to try to bring another level of review into the picture that could be more directly influenced by the political powers-that-be.
At any rate, I have said many times that peer-review is an imperfect filter and there is probably little that can be done to correct that without making the system worse. And, in the scientific community, I don’t think the Douglass et al. paper, with its major flaws, is likely to have a very big impact anyway. The goal of publishing such papers seems to be to issue press releases that then go beyond what is even claimed (on the basis of some quite blatant errors) in the original paper to make overarching statements about climate change (and, then, subsequently, write articles in political journals like “The American Thinker” explaining how you were unfairly treated). It is more public relations than science.
philincalifornia says:
***Chuckle.*** I hadn’t heard that one before and will have to remember it! It is nice to be loved.
Smokey says:
What do folks say about correlation and causation? Believe it or not, I do have a life outside of WUWT and holiday trips, new jobs, and other such things sometimes distract me for a little while. To the extent that the nature of the thread topics may also have played a bit of a role in my lying low for a while, I do prefer to discuss issues of science rather than issues of what people say in their private e-mail communications, as titillating as some of those might be.
REPLY: “Frankly, I have no idea why you brought my comment to OMB into the picture other than perhaps your general desire for “outing” individuals here who post views you do not like by bringing in facets from their life outside of this venue.”
Joel. I was only interested in what you may have said elsewhere on other blogs about peer review, because your comment here is so far off base. Google “joel shore peer review” and the OMB document is the fifth link. It’s a public document of your own making. Just that simple. Again not impressed since you can’t see the relevance. Since you only addressed my question obliquely We’ll just say then for the record, that Joel Shore is OK with the sort of behavior exhibited in the story. – A
FOR ALONG TIME NOW, I HAVE THOUGHT OF IPCC IS A CONTRACTION FOR IPECAC ,THE EMETIC,IP’C’C CERTAINLY MAKES ME WANT TO PUKE THESE DAYS.
WALT CAMACK
Joel Shore: “The best that can be said about the Douglass et al. paper is that it is so wrong that you can arbitrarily (and without justification) ignore one fatal flaw and it still fails due to another fatal flaw!”
Nah….that sounds like pure PROJECTION, Joel.
You have one big-ass red herring eating an even bigger red-herring….and so on.
Amazingly….you make no mention whatsoever of the obvious impropriety of your teammates Santer “et al” [that “et al” statement gets old].
You just bury that in your extreme invective and sophistry.
[And I am thinking….this…..THIS….is the type of individual who is running our science/physics programs today???]
Is your reply written in the stone cold objectivity of a physicist…or by some bickering, emo, cliquish, teenage girl??
Well don’t worry, when reading this, I am not “tempted”, like Ben Santer.
I will not stoop that low.
However….there are plenty of rational minds would love to see a normal CIVIL debate on the issue….in real time….and from behind the smokescreen of the climate models.
What say ye?
Methinks your competition would be little more intense than just being able to post a sophistic response on a blog!
Let’s put you, Gavin, and Ben in a debate against John, Richard, and _______ [fill in the blank for the many].
Actually you, Gavin, Ben, Mike, against Lindzen. BIG TIME POWER PLAY.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Thanks Joel Shore
We are open and welcoming to the views of ideological fanatacism. You can get your feelings expressed here and not erased. Just don’t think hide the decline is science.
We are not that gullible.
As a Psychologist, it is easy to read deceptive behaviors. The last 30 days are only the beginning of a painful intervention.
The shame and pain have just begun
Power play the other way that is….. 4 defeated by 1.
The whole thing sounds exactly like “dirty cops”. The team probably started out with grand plans to ‘save the world’. But, somehow things didn’t work out. Of course, they knew in their hearts they were *right*. That allowed them to take the first immoral step. The second was easier. Finally, they lost all touch with their moral centers and anything was game.
Lady in Red (18:44:35) :
Your request is detailed and I doubt anyone can put together a comprehensive summary before this thread goes quite cold and all are posting somewhere else. Let me make a comment about a couple of your questions…
When was “climate science” invented as a discipline, separate from previous earth sciences? What are the course requirements, what universities confer degrees in “climate science,” instead of, or alongside, traditional earth sciences? How much math, statistics, and physics are required for a “climate science” degree?
You may find that many of the “climate scientists” have come to this “discipline” (if we can use that word right now) by various other routes–meteorology, geophysics, geology, physics, geochemistry, and so forth. This isn’t a bad thing, actually, and people coming from other disciplines often bring vitality to an endeavor. However, after a time the insiders in a discipline begin to obsess about credentials, theirs being perfect of course, and excluding the unwashed. Engineers, by the way, are just about as bad in this regard as anyone else. So, by all means open the field to engineers, but be prepared for more good-ole-boy behavior just the same.
Who were the first persons to attempt to do long-range, climate predictions? When? What were the predictions? In the 1970’s some folk were predicting a new Ice Age. The source most often referenced is a Newsweek article, which is derided by the AGW community as not authoritative, or peer-reviewed.
Bollocks! The most authoritative reference ought to point to a National Academy of Science (NAS) report dating from 1975–the reference is in a notebook of mine at school. Forget Newsweek. The Newsweek rap is a canard. There is a concerted effort to make lots of things disappear, MWP, Roman Warm Period, Holocene optimum, Little Ice Age, and authoritative concerns about global cooling in the 1970s. Believe me, there were reputable scientists worried about it, and they didn’t publish in Newsweek. At the same time the “modern” worry about global warming probably stems from a Science article in 1971–the reference now escapes me–but there were worries about this in the 1930s (when it was warm, by the way) and the 1950s–Gilbert Plass and G. S. Callendar are two names that come to mind. So, there have always been concerns about climate in both directions. In fact, W.S. Humphreys once said ( in 1920) that everyone talks about climate and the bulk of their testimony is that it is always getting worse. The difference at the present time is that there is so much money involved now that it has corrupted everything and the stakes are very high.
One problem the Joel Shores and Nick Stokes of the world need to start assimilating is something called “guilt by association”. Do they really want to go down with the *team*? Of course, maybe it’s too late already. Maybe that’s why Joel’s post here was so poorly thought out. He may very well be in panic mode.
Carlo, AdderW, Galen Haugh, Dev, Gilbert, TerryS,
re “The e-mails on http://www.eastangliaemails.com are not reliable, some txt in e-mails are missing.”
As stated e.g. in 1251384906.txt the end of the email is missing. Not sinister, just a bug.
Another problem as I’ve pointed out before is that when searching for a phrase, if the phrase extends over a line the phrase will not be found, because there is an invisible line feed inside the phrase when it is in the email. I’m not sure if the search can be fixed easily to avoid that. Perhaps the search program could replace the linefeeds with blanks before a search. But phrases containing two blanks in a row will not be found.
I think it all started when students in the ’60s went into Journalism “to change the world”. It now seems students went into Climate Science for the same reasons. They weren’t going “to change the world” by their creativity, hard work and discovery; that would have been too hard. They were going “to change the world” by corrupting science itself to fit a preconceived political agenda. Much less effort.
Lady in Red (18:44:35) :
Many of your questions can be answered by others more versed in the recent history of the climate wars, than I am. However, I see a couple of other questions I can speak to…
I am confused, and there appears to be controversy whether the last decade was the warmest in history (excluding 1934, possibly…?), is getting somewhat warmer, or is cooling.
When you say “history” you must limit yourself to that part of history since the invention of a calibrated thermometer, which means since the mid eighteenth century. The thermometer became available during the Little Ice Age, and so there is some good reason why the present warmth according to the instrument record is not unexpected. However, until just recently most of us thought the warmest decade was the 1930s–it seems so in the raw temperature records, but the past few years have shown us that the temperature records are like shifting dunes of sand. They are “corrected” and “adjusted” endlessly. Are the 1930s the warmest decade? I think so. The instruments though are a mess as Anthony Watts has shown here. The mixture of types of data in the “raw” record has always been embarrassing — i.e. canvas bags of sea water and all that. The corrections and adjustments are suspicious beyond any ability to ignore as Willis E. shows. So we may never come to any agreement.
However, what does it matter if the 1930s were not the warmest decade and the last one was? There are tree stumps in Northern Canada dated to about 7000ybp that suggest the holocene was a lot warmer than now. There is plenty of evidence about MWP warmth in northern europe, Peru, and on and on. Temperature goes up and down, which is very inconvenient for one side of this war.
The “hockey stick” graph of temperature is a wonderful thing to point to if you are an advocate of man-caused global warming because it points a finger right at the industrialized world. But that graph is a fraud I have no doubt. The various investigators on this site can talk at length about Mann and his pals and the e-mails and so forth, but I saw the machinations myself involved in trying to concoct an earlier “hockey stick” out of borehole temperature records, and no scientist goes to such efforts unless judgment has given way to advocacy.
I found this interesting comment on an SMH blog…
“Recognition of human-induced global warming was by UK climatologist G.S. Callendar in the 1930’s; Callendar hoped that human-induced changes to atmosphere composition would forestall the next Ice Age. Callendar’s work was based on 19th century discoveries, from Joseph Fourier in 1820 to Svante Arrhenius’s 1896 Nobel Prize-winning work showing that doubling atmospheric CO2 would raise surface temperatures around 5 deg C.”
I’ve never heard of this person before in the debate of climate change and CO2.
Sadly, it is not only “the Team” that is culpable. A thorough house cleaning is in order for the corrupted leadership of the scientific journals (including especially Science, the standard bearer of American science) and of the learned societies who have failed to enforce rigorous ethical standards and transparent scientific debate. Resignations accepted.
Regarding comments by a “Joel Shore”. The statistics of DCPS are correct. See the explanation in Appendix A of the American Thinker. Santer (Schmidt and others) desire to compare apples with oranges – i.e. upper air trends of models v. observations when they have very different surface trends. The comparison of DCPS requires the same surface trend for both models and observations before the upper air trends may be compared because we were testing the surface to upper air relationship (which in models is quite rigid). There is no flaw, fatal or otherwise, with the design of this test. What is being promoted by “Joel Shore”, apparently, is that upper air trends of models associated with a surface trend of say only +0.03 C/decade should be compared with observed upper air trends associated with the observed surface trend of +0.125 C/decade. That is inappropriate as should be obvious. The statistical analysis is sound.
I thought I was sick before, but this really takes the cake. Oop, be right back, gotta run to the can and hurl again…
This is just disgusting stuff. And to think that the AGW crooks just about pulled it off in kookenhagen. Had it not been for Climategate and sites like WUWT, we may have been singing a different tune today.
A very sincere Thank you Anthony!
And thank ALL of you out there that continually contribute to this, the best blog site on the planet. May you all have the most wonderful of holidays and greatest of new years!
Merry Christmas to all .. and to all God Bless!
“The carboniferous effluent of the sacred cows of Pachauri’s homeland.”
You dont have to insult a whole country just because one person is an enviro-head. I am sure there are many examples of bovine-related humor that one can think up about the US and the UK, for example.
🙂
Anand
Paul Penrose – further, if you’re a Team player and you are given a softball to swing at, a fatally flawed paper accepted for publication, I’d think the surest way to dissuade further pursuit in that direction is to slap it down publicly once it’s been published, not expend huge effort clambering up and down the back stairs to prevent it from being published in the first place.
I wish I had the time to do this, but could someone:
(1) Identify the U Pres and School Deans of the Universities of the key players in this manipulation (Santer, etc., etc.) and send them a copy of the blog above asking whether they condone this behavior of their faculty.
(2) send the letter and blog to the U Pres/ Dean to the editor of the student newspaper at each institution whether they consider this “news.”
(3) send the letter and blog to Sen Inhoffe and head of NSF, Dept Energy (or whoever the likely funding sources of these scientists).
(4) send letter and blog to WSJ, NYT (I know, why bother), etc.
Easy for me to ask — if I were retired with climate science as a focus of interest, I would gladly take the day or so required.
Anyone game?
An excellent description of exactly why “peerreviewedpublished” papers in the “right” journals is the mantra of the Team and their chorus line.
It used to be fun to infer collusive behaviour when there was suspicion of manipulation. Now it’s just trawling the garbage to confirm all the accusations that were levelled and so rigorously and righteously defended elsewhere. Keep it up – the trickle is becoming the stream is becoming the river.
Thank you to all those who have had the stamina to stay the course.
“A luta continua”
Mapou (15:13:44) :
This whole thing is making me sick. How do these people get away with such blatant criminal activities? Is there a grand conspiracy behind it all or is it just a case of dishonest human beings taking advantage of a corrupt system that lacks proper checks and balances? Mankind is screwed if our most trusted institutions can no longer be trusted. God, I wish there were a vaccine against dishonesty.
It is interesting that you would address that question to God.
The left wants to add another “freedom” to the FDR’s list; the freedom from religion. Religion makes them feel guilty about “such blatant criminal activities” and therefore religion must be removed from civic discourse. The USA founding fathers envisioned a society where religion could be followed without interference from the central government. The left has perverted this to remove religion from all aspects of civic society. What did people think would happen?
My two cents anyway.
Mike Ramsey
Joel Shore (15:47:41) :
Of course, missing from this whole discussion is any objective assessment of whether the Douglass et al. paper suffered from such a blatant error that it should have never made it through the peer-review process in the first place. Who is to blame the editors for trying to redeem their journal from the embarrassment of publishing such an erroneous piece of work?
All you are doing is repeating a red herring as discussed in the above article – the allegation that there was some kind of serious error in the DCPS paper that would have somehow precluded its publication, that the alleged error was not discussed, and that IGL was, snif, only trying to cover for its embarrassment.
There is no evidence that there was any “embarrassment” on the part of IGL as to the exact concern you allege.
Moreover, the idea that peer review results in a paper’s conclusions being the “given truth” is simply wrong in the first place. That’s never been the point of peer review, to leave it to a few selected reviewers.
Those people will never be treated like criminals because they belong to the system which created the myth.
On the other hand, I don’t know who was the first one who thought that treering of C3 plants could be useful like climate domains; however, these people gave the treerings an exaggerated importance for knowing paleotemperatures. We know the treerings are not adecquate for knowing the environmental conditions because treering growth is influenced by many factors, insolation in the first place. Plagues, diseases, RH, soil composition, etc., are factors that affect the development of any plant. C3 plants show a very special response towards insolation, temperature and humidity. As C3 plants, bristlecones for example, are exposed to low temperature, their growth slows; however, if they are exposed to high temperatures, i.e. above the optimum temperature which is about 23 °C, their growth is also slowed as if they were exposed to low temperatures.
I hope the readers of this blog can get a conclusion on why those people were very interested on presenting the treering growth of Siberian Larch trees like a trusty methodology for investigating paleotemperatures.
The climategate perpetrators would not have advanced so far, if they would have acted like normal and honest scientists.
Anand Rajan KD (21:22:15) :
“The carboniferous effluent of the sacred cows of Pachauri’s homeland.”
You dont have to insult a whole country just because one person is an enviro-head.
I caught that too, but only because I’m a peer-acknowledged expert on “gas”.