Guest post by Michael A. Lewis, Ph.D
In a New Year’s Day post, Anthony mounted the Abstract from a Paper titled Warming Power of CO2: Correlations with temperature change. Subsequent comments raised some questions about the Journal citation, International Journal of Geosciences, and the publisher, Scientific Research Publishing.
A commenter wrote that he (or she) had called the listed number for SRP and had not received an answer. I had the same experience. I wrote to the author, Professor Paulo Cesar Soares, and received a nice reply saying that yes he is a retired professor and researcher at the Federal University of Paraná, and he did write the article and published with SRP because they have free access to all Journal articles available to researchers and students alike.
So, the article can be judged on its own merits, and the legitimacy of SRP can be judged on the quality of articles it dispenses.
===================================================================
Note: the journal’s first edition can be seen here (PDF)
I would note the list of the editorial board members on Page 2 – Anthony
Politeness? He will be ejected from the AGW community immediately. But good for him. Polite debate on the science is what makes for good science. After all, science has advanced only because people showed other people where they were wrong.
Scientific arguments are always judged on their own merits, even if written in pencil on the back of an envelope.
Civility and open disclosure, from a published professor whose expertise lies in atmospheric CO2 science…. How refreshing!
Well……….. let’s hope the manage to tick all the important boxes. If they do, they stand a chance of displacing the current popular list of coffee table mags.
The boxes?
!. Well written articles backed up with real-world data
2. A fair and open review process that authors and the audience can respect and trust
3. A open and fairly moderated response forum that can deal with criticism as well it accepts bouquets
More??????
A brave venture.
Best of luck to them, and success assuming they play a fair game to embrace all scientists, and not allow any of the clique behaviour that spoiled their competitors.
john r
“Note: the journal’s first edition can be seen here (PDF)”
There was an error opening this document. The file is damaged and could not be repaired.
Downloaded the document a second time. Same error message.
REPLY: System issues then, I have no trouble- A
Not surprised. I’ve long wondered at the lack of secular correlation in the ice cores between T and CO2. The millennial correlation is easily explained as a tandem response to ice sheet extension–the apparent multi-century lag of CO2 behind T did not seem relevant in light of the lack of short term correlation, mere icing on the cake.
And as Walter Munk noted a decade ago, length of day tracking argues strongly against serious sea level rise–at least it presents a paradox. And since his paper appeared we have seen only two leap seconds.
The Soares paper itself, Warming Power of CO2 and H2O: Correlations with Temperature Changes, is available free online here:
http://www.scirp.org/Journal/PaperDownload.aspx?FileName=IJG20100300002_69193660.pdf&paperID=3447
On its website it makes the following statement:
Aims & Scope
International Journal of Geosciences is a peer reviewed journal dedicated to the latest advancement of geosciences. The goal of this journal is to keep a record of the state-of-the-art research and to promote study, research and improvement within its various specialties.
Looks like Chinese scientists do not buy the western AGW myth…
What? No paywall? Outrageous!
“I would note the list of the editorial board members on Page 2 – Anthony”
Sorry Anthony. I am a little thick today. I do note the prevalence of Chinese scientists, as well as Russian, South American, and scientists that apparently don’t prescribe to alarmism as a tenet of good science. These are all relative “unknowns” vis a vis Hansen, Jones, and Mann. Is that what you wanted us to note?
REPLY: Only that it has one, as any proper journal would, and I’ll point out that the US no longer has a monopoly on climate science, in fact it lags much of the world now. It also doesn’t look like it will get any better. If your point is that you think that a new journal on Geosciences must have well known celebrity scientists to be of any value, then I pity your distorted view of science journals. – Anthony
Is it the same Soares who wrote this article?
PALEOESTRUTURAS E PETRÓLEO NA BACIA DO PARANÁ, BRASIL
ojs.c3sl.ufpr.br/ojs2/index.php/rbg/article/download/10446/7619
dbleader61,
Perhaps you think Chinese, Russian and South American scientists are’nt as good as US scientists? Maybe you haven’t heard so much about them because they don’t necessarily try to publish in West centric journals such as Nature, Science etc.
Here is the link to the journal.:
http://www.scirp.org/journal/ijg/
I read several of the papers and they are refreshingly candid. There are many other Journals available covering a wide range of disciplines from this organization.
http://www.scirp.org/journal/ijg/
It seems that some of the posters on WUWT might be able to publish in at least one of them. I have certainly read commentary here that is as good, and often better than many journal articles I have read.
Thank you Michael A. Lewis,
I posted some of the conclusion comments from the above paper on one of my Facebook postings. In response a seemlingly resonable request was made to provide a “peer reviewed paper” to support the comments I had made about CAGW and a new paper that showed no correlation between temp and CO2 anymore. So I supplied the above paper.
Then all heck broke loose after I posted a link to the paper, as I was assaulted with vicious personal attacks against me (at least 15 by one of the cementers alone) and vicious attacks against the papers author. Rather than any actual criticisms of the science contained with the paper all that spewed forth were personal attacks of one sort or another.
One of these people even criticized the Journal saying it had a low “Impact Factor” (IF)…
“I asked that it [the paper] be from a credible journal with an impact factor that wasn’t laughable. The journal you cited has an IF of 1.73… Nature by comparison has an IF of 34.5 and when combined with PageRank it’s a 52.” – David Smith BEFORE he had any chance to read the paper!!!
My response was:
“The jury is OUT on ALL scientific papers. Double sigh. Clearly you believe the anti-scientific nonsense you are uttering. Let’s be clear. The journal that a scientific paper is published in has no bearing upon whether or not the paper has any scientific merit. ‘Prestige’ aka ‘impact factor’ of a journal is politics and not science. To think otherwise is unscientific and political.”
So now it’s not enough to be published in a peer reviewed journal but the “Impact Factor” of the Journal determines if the science is correct or not? It’s just stunning arrogance on the part of people like David Smith who think with a “social credibility” aka “consensus” mindset that is picky about WHERE a paper is published rather than a scientific mind set that looks at the actual content of the science within the paper and it’s evidence, claims, methods and conclusions. It’s a strange kind of “scientific snobery” that people like David Smith exhibit and has them “believing” the claims rather than having “vetted, verified or refuted” the claims and being able to support their verifcations or refutations with actual scientific arguments.
It’s been a long while since I’ve directly encountered anyone so vicious in their CAGW hysteria as David Smith. I’m still waiting for his promised response to the content of the paper.
Michael A. Lewis, Anthony Watts, Professor Paulo Cesar Soares, et. al. it’s very refreshing to know that there are people who appreciate the methods of science and more importantly the philosophy of science that has a spirit of validating science claims and not just accepting them carte blanc as if they were dictates of high tech priests in some religious cult.
Keep up the great work asking excellent questions that cut to the heart of the matter! You guys are keeping the flame of science alive!
____________________________________
“Journal Impact Factor is from Journal Citation Report (JCR), a product of Thomson ISI (Institute for Scientific Information). JCR provides quantitative tools for evaluating journals. The impact factor is one of these; it is a measure of the frequency with which the “average article” in a journal has been cited in a given period of time. ”
http://www.sciencegateway.org/impact/
“The impact factor, often abbreviated IF, is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to articles published in science and social science journals. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field, with journals with higher impact factors deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. The impact factor was devised by Eugene Garfield, the founder of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), now part of Thomson Reuters. Impact factors are calculated yearly for those journals that are indexed in Thomson Reuter’s Journal Citation Reports.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
I do note the prevalence of Chinese scientists, as well as Russian, South American,
Is that infering that those scientists are less capable than US and UK scientists? They too were once “unknowns”. Where would Mann be today if not for AGW? An unknown.
Oh, at the time not really knowing what an impact factor was I looked it up and Wikipedia had this little tidbit that supports my point that the science is what matters and not the “reputation” of the journal: “they are obliged to assess the quality of the content of individual articles, not the reputation of the journal in which they are published”!
“Incorrect application of impact factor
The IF may be incorrectly applied to evaluate the significance of an individual publication or to evaluate an individual researcher.[22]
This does not work well since a small number of publications are cited much more than the majority – for example, about 90% of Nature’s 2004 impact factor was based on only a quarter of its publications, and thus the importance of any one publication will be different from, and in most cases less than, the overall number.[23] The impact factor, however, averages over all articles and thus underestimates the citations of the most cited articles while exaggerating the number of citations of the majority of articles. Consequently, the Higher Education Funding Council for England was urged by the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee to remind Research Assessment Exercise panels that they are obliged to assess the quality of the content of individual articles, not the reputation of the journal in which they are published.[24]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor#Incorrect_application_of_impact_factor
I love new scientific journals. Just like magazines, if they’re good, they’ll survive, if they’re not, they won’t. In medical literature the old, highly regarded journals become somewhat stodgy and they’re taken over by physicians practicing in academia. About 20 years ago clinical pharmacists started publishing some new journals focusing on pharmacotherapy (i.e. drug therapy). They were consistently better and more clinically relevant to a practitioner than the esoteric, pure research articles published in the well established pharmacology literature. Further, they had a quite rigorous peer review process.
I would think the climate research community would welcome a new journal…unless, perhaps, it’s one where the “elite” don’t own the editorial board and the acolytes don’t serve as the reviewers.
“Consequently, the Higher Education Funding Council for England was urged by the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee to remind Research Assessment Exercise panels that they are obliged to assess the quality of the content of individual articles, not the reputation of the journal in which they are published.”
It sounds like the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Technology_Select_Committee] might actually being doing their job!
Now isn’t that astounding, politicians comprehending the scientific method! Could it be?
dbleader61 says:
January 13, 2011 at 1:01 pm
“Proof of the pudding is in the eating” so to speak. Does the editorial board select/clear papers presenting sound scientific research? Here is what one accomplished U.S. scientist (more than 350 papers/books authored/co-authored) has to say about another paper in the same issue of the IJG.
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/research-issues-on-the-missing-heat/
<
R. S. Knox, David H. Douglass 2010: Recent energy balance of Earth International Journal of Geosciences, 2010, vol. 1, no. 3 (November) – In press doi:10.4236/ijg2010.00000
with the abstract
A recently published estimate of Earth’s global warming trend is 0.63 ± 0.28 W/m2, as calculated from ocean heat content anomaly data spanning 1993–2008. This value is not representative of the recent (2003–2008) warming/cooling rate because of a “flattening” that occurred around 2001–2002. Using only 2003–2008 data from Argo floats, we find by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from –0.010 to –0.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of ±0.2 W/m2. These results fail to support the existence of a frequently-cited large positive computed radiative imbalance.
is a solid scientific study on these questions. The paper could, of course, be in error [although it is robust in my view], or the Argo data could have errors that Josh Willis (or others in that community) has not communicated to us. The blogosphere and peer reviewed papers are the venue to debate these questions.
<
As opposed to this millennial prognosis.
“[Kielh]warns that, if carbon dioxide emissions continue at their current rate through the end of this century, atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas will reach levels that existed about 30 million to 100 million years ago, when global temperatures averaged about 29 degrees Fahrenheit (16 degrees Celsius) above pre-industrial levels.
Kiehl said that global temperatures may gradually rise over centuries or millennia in response to the carbon dioxide. The elevated levels of carbon dioxide may remain in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years, according to recent computer model studies of geochemical processes that the study cites.”
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110113141607.htm
Yup. Those models again. This time adjusted to allow for a doubling of CO2 heat storage capacity and running it through a few thousand years. Why? Because he could.
Was there an earlier version of this post? I thought I had seen earlier that someone had returned his call.
It is somewhat funny* to note that there isn’t much of any “western” doctor in that list and which is why the crazed hippie crowd, mostly, will try and debase the journal by, which becomes scary.
The subdued sneaky racism is still racism.
*The funny thing is that my country, a EU country, and EU actually have decided that doctors’s, real or philosophical, education isn’t worth the same depending on where they come from in the world. It is funny because every country within the european union forgot about science all together for about 1500 years after the fall of Rome to christian fanaticism, but most of the doctors that come to countries within EU but are put down as not having an equal qualitative education, and so has to start all over pretty much from scratch, are from countries that for those about 1500 years actually embraced science, and still had time to go with religious fanaticism.
Now the hippies want to take the “western world” into religion again, forgetting, again, about science, whilst the rest of the world gets ahead by embracing science. Of course “western hippie world” will deny the rest of the world as having qualitative doctorates. Although, I’m thinking the “western hippie world” won’t outgun the rest of the world, to decide the agenda, this time around due to the fact that all them countries with lesser qualitative doctorates are well having nukes too and space programs and what have we not.
Dandytroll’s “Christian fanaticism” is the only thing that kept science and scholarship alive during those “dark ages.” Few events in history were more anomolous than the burning of the Alexandrian library. Tell me what script you use, and I’ll tell you what religion your ancestors were–their religion is the only reason you are literate. –AGF
Poor dbleader61 got pounced on pretty quickly.
I couldn’t see that he was anything more than puzzled as to what he should take note of.
I’m sure he meant ‘subscribe’ instead of ‘ prescribe’ but “…alarmism as a tenet of good science” doesn’t bring me to conclude that he’s a fan of Hansen.
Twitchy trigger fingers?
I read a chat on another forum where a PhD student had been invited onto the editorial board of a scrips journal. He wroter back to point out he was a PhD student. This seemed to count as a yes from the publishers and he ended up on the editorial board listed as a professor.
This is just one example but it suggests a rather low level of scutiny. But I agree with others comments there is serious elitism and to some extent imperialism in the science publishing process which sees scientists from developing countries often excluded from the better journals.
As Antony says judge the science, from what I’ve seen the scrips journal articles that have been highlighted by WUWT have lacked a certain amount of rigor.
Re : dbleader61
I think he is being unfairly berated in these posts.
Read him again. He’s asking, thats all.
I think we have seen the gist of this paper before, in that you look at the changes in CO2 and the changes in temperature and look for correlation. This method amplifies a noisy signa when what you want to do is minimize the effects of noise.
Plotting annual averages for CO2 vs annual averages for temp (from whatever source available) for the last 50 years, using a scatter plot in excel, will show that temperature correlates very well with CO2.
Try it in excell before you slam me. Use Spencer’s temperature data if you like.
dbleader61 says:
January 13, 2011 at 1:01 pm
“I would note the list of the editorial board members on Page 2 – Anthony”
Sorry Anthony. I am a little thick today. I do note the prevalence of Chinese scientists, as well as Russian, South American, and scientists that apparently don’t prescribe to alarmism as a tenet of good science. These are all relative “unknowns” vis a vis Hansen, Jones, and Mann. Is that what you wanted us to note?
REPLY: Only that it has one, as any proper journal would, and I’ll point out that the US no longer has a monopoly on climate science, in fact it lags much of the world now. It also doesn’t look like it will get any better. If your point is that you think that a new journal on Geosciences must have well known celebrity scientists to be of any value, then I pity your distorted view of science journals. – Anthony
Russian agricultural and associated genetics work lagged the rest of the world when the whole field was politicised by lysenkoism. Climate science in the west will be no different, it too will fall behind while it remains locked into mediocrity driven by political needs.
I can’t download the PDF file, it says it is damaged and can’t be repaired. Someone else had the same problem, is there a trick to getting access?
I have the same problem. Can’t download the file. Says it is damaged and can’t be repaired.
I upgraded to Adobe Reader X (i.e. 10) recently and have had some trouble opening some pdfs online. I haven’t gotten that error message, though. When I tried opening the most recent one I had trouble with in Adobe Reader 9 (on my Windows XP Mode XP desktop) instead it opened fine. Perhaps you’re experiencing that or a related issue.
I had no problem downloading it on Windows Vista and Firefox.
Peer review? How about starting with a proof-read first! Step up… anyone with $800 can suddenly be a published scientist.
About SCIRP:
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100113/full/463148a.html
http://improbable.com/2009/12/22/strangest-academic-journals/
Check SCIRP’s ‘editor-in-chief’s’ current association with Bentham, another vanity publisher:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17288-crap-paper-accepted-by-journal.html
http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/a-new-model-for-open-access-the-pyramid-scheme/
Any particular reasons why this so-called open access journal wouldn’t be listed within DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals). Or why SCIRP isn’t a member of OASPA (Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association). Does it have anything to do with having to meet such prickly untoward requirements… such as peer review? Just sayin.
File opens, no probs, on my PC in Australia. No messages/warnings attached. Download rate was slow, that’s all.
Seems like your home/work system has a problem, maybe security settings.
To quote Frank Zappa…
“…a penguin in bondage….boing……”
Ed Moran says:
January 13, 2011 at 5:28 pm
Re : dbleader61
“I think he is being unfairly berated in these posts.
Read him again. He’s asking, thats all.”
I agree Ed. I thought when I read Anthony’s reply that it was a little harsh! Maybe the end of a tough day!
no problem downloading/reading…. but then again I dumped Adobe as over the years it turned into an excessively bloated resource hog. I’m very happy using Foxit 3.3.1.
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/downloads/
btw… Adobe was a real bugger to completely uninstall.
Try Foxit Reader; I had no trouble with the d/l and opening of the document. Foxit has a few issues of its own (seems to blow up recently with “Markup” errors when the document is copy/paste blocked), but overall is less hassle than Adobe, IMO.
The publisher’s web site is registered to Beijing Innovative Linkage Technology Ltd.
of Wuhan, China, which might explain the abundance of Chinese scientists.
It also might explain why no one answers the phone when you call. They’re all home in bed.
@ peetee
Until you admit that “peer review” as practised by Jones, Hansen, Schmidt, Mann et al, is biased, unscientific, and totally fabricated, please don’t clutter up the threads here and elsewhere
Peer review is what happens when the hypothesis is opened for discussion, as happens in WUWT
Please provide your hypothesis about anything.
People are waiting to discuss your ideas
This journal is not bad because it has a low impact factor, it is so because it’s not even listed as a peer-reviewed journal by ISI Thompson…
As already mentioned, anyone can just start a so-called scientific publication with some money, by attracting some low-profile scientists with a generous proposition to enter the editorial board.
It is good to see however that this is not enough to be considered a peer-reviewed journal.
“jrwakefield says:
January 13, 2011 at 2:06 pm
I do note the prevalence of Chinese scientists, as well as Russian, South American,
Is that infering that those scientists are less capable than US and UK scientists?”
And neglecting that often trained by these scientists?
People who are amazed that scientists outside the EU and USA are publishing papers, show to me that there is still a huge amount of snobbery, if not unconscious racism, going on in our science labs at our universities.
Little anecdote from some year back happening in my lab:
One post-grad came from Nigeria, doing an M.Sc. on freshwater snails. He’d been educated under appalling conditions, but he had a proper scientific attitude, and a wonderful mind. His project showed he’d understood the scientific method perfectly, and he worked his socks off, doing everything himself, even getting down and dirty cleaning his tanks etc.
And then there was another post grad, doing a Ph.D in cell biology. He was English, he knew everything better than the other post grads, right after having done his first degree. He never cleaned up his stuff. The worst was that he had no clue about the decimal point. He kept transcribing 10 to the power of -6 with 6 zeros following the decimal point. Precision, especially when dealing with very small amounts, was b*llocks to him, admonition was constantly disregarded.
People like him are the reservoir from which those with that snobbish attitude described above (‘not in Nature? Gotta be junk’) are recruited.
It does seem incongruous that a US site that frequently slams what it views as ‘liberal’ views and ‘socialist’ views (often not distinguishing the two) would promote a chinese/russian publication. Times have changed and new alliances are formed, I guess.
Rob Vermeulen says:
January 14, 2011 at 1:42 am
This journal is not bad because it has a low impact factor, it is so because it’s not even listed as a peer-reviewed journal by ISI Thompson
Rob, how to completely misunderstand everything. A journal’s badness (or goodness) is not a function of whether ISI chose to list it – about a third of scientific journals are listed by ISI, (and as a function of that listing, have an impact factor) are we to infer that the other two thirds are all bad, worthless, that the publishers, editors, reviewers, contributors, readers are all wasting their time and/or engaged in some complex fraud upon the world at large. Rob, not being listed in ISI really does not mean a journal is not peer reviewed, it just means its not listed in ISI. And, in passing, we can assess the worth of ISI’s ranking when it gives high impact to journals which are prepared to publish the work of the likes of Michael Mann, a clear fail in any discipline apart from climate science. Where ISI have been very successful is in persuading the academic community (in particular library journal buyers and thise academics seeking career advancement) that its ranking and indexing really matters. Actually, it doesn’t.
In reply to Bob at 6:46PM:
So both are going up. Big deal. The point I tried to make is the ice cores show no such correlation over 400,000 years, as compared to your 100 years. The most basic evidence for the assumption of CO2 forcing is entirely lacking in the cores. All we see is the ineptly interpreted correlation where CO2 and T are “forced” in response to ice sheet extension.
Anthony’s reply to dbleader61 January 13, 2011 at 1:01 pm:
I’ll point out that the US no longer has a monopoly on climate science, in fact it lags much of the world now. It also doesn’t look like it will get any better.
Come on Anthony, you have to know that NY Times (ugh!) piece is nothing more than a cry of, “We want more money!” As if they don’t have enough already. I have never, ever seen a useful or true climate prediction from any source. The science is crap and so are the models.
http://climatequotes.com/2011/01/08/how-can-climate-scientists-spend-so-much-money/
On the education side, if you remove a couple particular minorities from the studies of US education, we are right up there at the top. And much of the problem with those minorities when it comes to education cultural, and has nothing to do with the schools. And I say that as someone who thinks public schools should be abolished and we go to a tuition voucher system.
[Strong words, strong opinions. Are you sure you want to keep them published as your thoughts? Robt]
Strong words, strong opinions. Are you sure you want to keep them published as your thoughts? Robt
I assume you are referring to my comment about a couple of particular minorities. I refuse to be a part of the insidious lies of political correctness Robt. The facts are the facts and I am not making this up because I have a problem with someone’s skin color. I don’t. Those same minorities also have outliers on their bell curves who are top students, but until they overcome the cultural issues that are holding them back they will remain at the bottom. It’s their choice, and I wish them the best for them and their children.
For those with trouble downloading the pdf, try installing Foxit Reader to replace Adobe. It’s free and a lot quicker to kickstart.
dbleader61 says: January 13, 2011 at 1:01 pm
I wondered if that was someone Anthony has already crossed swords with. If you’re overloaded Anthony is there anything we can do to help?
BTW this looks like a great sideways move, a new journal with competent staff from places not mired in AGW, minus The Team, kicks off to one of the missing papers that skeptics know we need to see.
Wow the CO2 can now stay in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years; not just 200 years like it used to. So howcome the north polar CO2 drops catastrophically by 18 ppm in just five months; and does so every single year. So when was the last time that the atmosphere was free of CO2, if it only lasts 10,000 years now ?
Shows you how rong you can be; I always thought that CO2 and H2O were both PERMANENT components of the earth atmosphere; and they both vary with various and sundry emissions and uptakes; according to the usual Physical and Chemical laws (bio too). Of course there is always more H2O than CO2 even at the worst of times and places; well there was a whole bunch of CO2 over the Bay of Naples in 79 AD; but I wouldn’t be surprised if there still wasn’t a lot more H2O. We know there was plenty, because it made all that quickcrete marbles out of the ashes.
But it’s good to know that the CO2 will stay for 10,000 years or so, because what would we do for food, if that doesn’t stay there ?
Is there no end to the grasping at straws these guys try. The longer that they can project into the future, the inevitability of our demise; the less point there is in wasting ANY resources trying to stop what already is unstoppable. We certainly should stop wasting resources on further study; since the science is already settled, and both the late Sephen Schneider, and now Kevin Trenberth; say it is incontrovertible or whatever the euphemism for finality is these days.
I guess the Hype word du jour is unequivocal; not incontrovertible. Does anybody know just how many degrees of badness or goodness separate unequivocal and incontrovertible ?
Bill,
the choice of ISI peer-reviewed or not is based on a whole range of criteria concerning the way peer-reviewing is done, and the quality of the editorial board, among others. Look: I’m a scientist. I could open a climate journal with, say, $1000 – eventhough climate research is not my specialty. I could call that peer-reviewed, since I’m a “peer”. And I could in fact make it publish what I want, depending on my mood.
This is one of the reasons why ISI and others (couldn’t find it on PubMed either) carefully select journals they call “peer-reviewed”. Those not belonging to these lists can simply not be trusted!
IMO this is a stunningly awful paper.
The conclusions do not follow from the analysis – the analysis doesn’t detect what the author claims it does.
Water correlated to temperatures, therefore causing the global warming? Well, of course it’s correlated, that’s what Clausius-Clapeyron tells you. We also know it’s a feedback.
Warming caused by the Sun? Why didn’t the author try some correlation analysis for that and use that to explain how declining solar activity has caused the past 40 years of warming?
CO2 saturated? All because of some hand wavey excuse when proper radiative transfer calculations show it isn’t, and satellites have directly measured increased absorption in line with physics?
Short term temperature changes don’t follow CO2? Of course you aren’t going to detect it with this method, annual temperature changes of +/-0.4 C happen in ENSO all the time whilst the expected CO2 warming signal has been smaller than 0.02 C/year for the entire period looked at. Not to mention thanks to aerosols we expected significantly less (and possibly slight cooling in some areas) for decades.
The conclusions are beyond ridiculous and I’m not surprised that it hasn’t been published in a ‘proper’ journal – they would expect a conclusion to be supported by the evidence.
Quick further explanation lifted from SkS:
– looks at change in T vs change in CO2. Detrends any non-accelerating warming and hides it.
– quick look at GISTemp global has a standard deviation of just over 0.1 C. Assuming that we had 40 years of global warming expected at +0.017 C/year, then you would need 160 years of data to determine whether this exists with confidence. But there isn’t this much data and, furthermore, it assumes non-trended random noise and ignores other radiative forcings.
It’s simply shocking that the conclusions were allowed to be published… and it’s no surprise the journal isn’t on ISI because ISI tries to filter for quality.