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.
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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
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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.