From Climate Audit, more on the ongoing Antarctic kerfluffle.
By Ryan O’Donnell
Subsequent to my post on Feb 7, 2010 here, Eric Steig informed me by email that he had not seen our Response to his Third Review, as I had previously assumed. I apologize for my misunderstanding on this point, which was, however, incidental to the major concerns expressed in my post. A more detailed response on matters raised in Steig’s most recent RC post and other issues will be forthcoming.
My misunderstanding over whether Steig received the Response to the Third Review does not alter the fact that Steig acting as Reviewer A, in his Second Review, had asked the editor to “insist” that we present the “most likely” West Antarctica trends, specifically proposing iridge, although, in an email yesterday, Steig expressed “total surprise” that we had complied with his iridge proposal and, in his Feb 1 RC post, even criticized us for complying with his proposal. We will have more to say on this near the future, as his explanations remain insufficient.
Nor do I agree that the criticisms in his RC posts of the methodology have any merit. In his Third Review, Steig had raised similar points against iridge, notwithstanding his Second Review proposal of the approach and his Third Review comment that “use of the ‘iridge’ procedure makes sense to me, and I suspect it really does give the best results”. We responded fully to these concerns in our Response to his Third Review, although we were unaware until Feb 8, 2011 that Steig had not received a copy of our Response.
In any event, Steig knew or ought to have known that our response must have satisfied the editor of Journal of Climate and should have familiarized himself with our response before condemning the method that he had previously encouraged. Had Steig informed me that he had not seen a copy of our Response to his Third Review, I would have been delighted to send it to him. Instead, he chose to publicly disparage our paper using arguments that were both irrelevant and satisfactorily addressed – which was, unfortunately, no different than the tactic he used during review.
Steig’s recent outbursts are merely his most recent effort to obfuscate the underlying point of our critique: that whatever was original in Steig et al 2009 was based on faulty mathematics; and that whatever was correct in Steig et al 2009 was already known.
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@ur momisugly Phil, so that means that O’D wrote 64 pages in their ‘subsequent responses’. They must have been really p*d off at having to write all that plus the 96 pages to start with plus four revisions. No wonder they are so mad at the scientists. I bet they don’t make the climate scientists jump through hoops like that.
It’s probably better to not try to write in those journals when even after all that you still get criticized for not properly explaining one tiny little thing that doesn’t even matter much compared to all the right things in the paper. I still think SPPI is much higher standard.
The exact wording of Mencken’s quote makes it better:
——–
I know, but i like mine better 😉
This cross-posted from BishopHill, but its my take on what went on with SO9:
Although somewhat overlooked, RyanO makes a very important point very clearly at the start of his rebuttal to Steig. I put that point like this: Steig in S09 claims to be making a “reconstruction” of Antarctic temperatures and of course this makes the cover of Time and everyone shouts “OMG – Its worse than we thought”. O’Donnell et al does not make this claim and RyanO is very clear about it: they are not proposing their result is a “reconstruction” of temperatures they are testing the validity of the method used in S09. Steig makes the mistake on RC of trying to assert that his reconstruction is better by comparing to some measurements.
Note that philosophically there are very strong parallels here between Mann et al (MBH98), McKintyre/McKitrick (MM) and the Hockey Stick. Mann claimed a “skillful reconstruction” of past temperatures. MM showed the method was statistically flawed. MM made no attempt at reconstruction, they simply criticised the method/algorithm, showed how the result changed if their method was followed and that little or no confidence could be placed on the MBH98 “Hockey Stick” result.
In both cases Steig and Mann miss the point of the papers (probably willfully). Steig and Mann claim their “reconstructions” are “skillful”. What MM and now O’Donnell et al are asking is whether given this data, method and uncertainties is any reconstruction likely to be reliable?
The more critical point from RyanO, and very well illustrated by the maps showing the response to sensitivity tests, are that the S09 model is sensitive to data changes (tests if you like) and the consequence of these sensitivity tests is to produce absurd results. Eg introduce slight simulated cooling on the top left of the plot on the peninsula actually results in the “reconstruction” showing substantial cooling at the South Pole. The model of O’Donnell et al is more robust to these simple tests and yet even then they do not claim to be able to “reconstruct” temperature trend maps for Antarctica.
To me the message that I take away from all this is that Steig S09 is like the Hockey Stick: it is a piece of propaganda, unsupported by the data, made to look like science by dressing it up in a highly complex statistical model. It has made the cover of Time magazine, so its purpose is served. No matter how useless the reconstruction is, like the hockey stick it will become the image that is remembered. Even now, on Horizon, years after it has been dropped by the IPCC, the Hockey Stick still gets shown.
All of these are Poster Children. Although I have neither the statistical skill or knowledge of O’Donnell, McKintyre etc (or possibly even Mann or Steig), I do have enough related scientific training and experience to see very clearly when experts like the former dissect the problem for me, that really all the Team is doing is cherry picking the parameters that make a “reconstruction” look as dramatic as possible. And by making it very complex and hiding the data, algorithms etc it takes so long to unpick it all that the propaganda damage is already done. Ignoring stuff in blogs and then shouting it must be peer reviewed in Journals is another delaying tactic. And then of course voluminuous review comments also delays publication. By all these means the dramatic image is left unchallenged for longer. That cover for Time magazine was probably primed and ready to go months before S09 was published.
And then when the result is challenged by the likes of O’Donnell et al and MM, enquiring minds, whether with or without science training, can see a result like MBH98 and now S09 are not valid as reconstructions. But the Team quickly moves on and the MSM blithely ignore it all.
Phil:
You have raised some very interesting points. Have you written to Dr Comiso to seek clarification? His listing as an author may simply reflect that they used his data.
Macaulay remarked that in the English Navy in the time of Charles II there were gentlemen and there were seamen. But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen.
Once the form of insult is mastered, ingenuity can make up further examples…..
That quote could apply to the entire warmist campaign. And probably does.
Bernie,
I have not tried to contact Dr. Comiso directly. Based on all the back and forth at the time and since then, it is my impression that Dr. Steig is the gatekeeper of the data and methods used in Steig 2009. You may be right about Dr. Comiso being listed as a co-author based on his providing data.
Ah well RC says it’s “case closed” and they are the “Real Climate Scientists” so I guess they know… (is sarc even needed? I mean seriously…)
Methinks they have been weighed, measured and found wanting.
Can anyone point to any ‘peer reviewed, Climate Science paper published anywhere which was subsequently shown to UNDERestimate warming?
Just thought I’d ask….
Phil:
My experience has been that writing polite non-confrontational emails directly to authors of papers or books generally elicits an equally polite response. Your post suggests that you could readily ask an interesting question that deserves a substantive response.
Is a correction going to appear on the cover of Nature?
Louis Hooffstetter says:
February 11, 2011 at 10:10 am
“I have four relevant questions that have probably been already covered in previous articles (forgive me). I tried to post them at RealClimate before the thread was closed, but my attempts were denied. Ryan, would you mind recapping by giving concise straightforward answers to these questions?”
1) Were Steig’s data and methods (algorithms, statistical methods, code, etc.) freely available so others could replicate his results?
2) After all was said and done, did you and Steig end up processing the same data using the same methods (algorithms, statistical methods, code, etc.)?
3) If not, why not? (rhetorical question). As ‘Reviewer A’, Stieg made 88 pages of comments about O’Donnell’s paper. There’s no excuse whatsoever for mis-communication between the author and peer ‘Reviewer A’.
4) Is it possible (legal) to post Steig’s data and methods on WUWT so anyone who wishes could reprocess the same data, using the same methods?”
Louis, I can try to answer your questions, using the same numbering:
1) Steig made his cloudmasked satellite data available, and gave information about how to obtain the other data and the main RegEM computer code he used, at http://faculty.washington.edu/steig/nature09data/data/ . But it is not trivial to replicate his main results using this data and information (even assuming you have access to the Matlab software package); little information is given about how to actually replicate the main reconstruction from the Steig et al. paper.
For a considerable time Ryan, Jeff, myself and the others involved were unable to achieve more than a close approximation to Steig’s reconstruction results (also available at his data page). It turned out that there was a step involved in preparing the satellite data for use in RegEM that had not been mentioned in Steig’s description of the methods used. I don’t blame Steig for this – he responded helpfully to Ryan’s enquiries, insofar as he was able. It seems that Steig was unaware of this step; his co-authors Michael Mann, Scott Rutherford and David Schneider are listed (alongside Eric Steig) as being responsible for their paper’s reconstruction and statistical calculations. Mann and Rutherford, in particular, had used RegEM extensively for paleoclimate reconstructions.
2) Yes, essentially. We accurately replicated Steig’s method, porting the RegEM algorithm to the open source R programming language rather than running it in Matlab (but the results were benchmarked against the Matlab version). We couldn’t use exactly the same weather station data, since Steig didn’t archive the data he had used, and some minor subsequent revisions had been made to the source dataset by the time it was archived (at Climate Audit, if I recall correctly).
4) The well documented, turnkey R-code that Ryan wrote, which is available at http://www.climateaudit.info/data/odonnell/, along with archived weather station data, can freely be used to replicate Steig’s reconstruction.
Bernie,
Under other circumstances, I would agree with you. In this case, however, things have become very charged and the stakes have become very high. I have tried to limit myself to posting as factual and well-documented a comment as I could, so as to not raise the temperature any further while raising some, I think, substantial issues. I think that I have found enough documentation that some sort of reply to at least some of the issues that I have raised should be forthcoming, if there is no merit to them or if they can be easily explained, especially given the wide reach of this august forum.
ThinkingScientist says:
February 11, 2011 at 12:51 pm
Absolutely magnificent. Think you should team up with the Bishop else you’ll be rival authors for future books.
Michael D Smith says:
February 11, 2011 at 12:18 pm
I don’t see it that way at all. It was almost guaranteed to pass review.
* It had cool looking graphics,…
Perhaps you could call your list the ‘Mann formula’. We should be on the lookout for the next ‘Mann formula’ paper.
NicL_ UK said…
“his co-authors Michael Mann, Scott Rutherford and David Schneider are listed (alongside Eric Steig) as being responsible for their paper’s reconstruction and statistical calculations.
How did i know that was going to pop up, Mann’s sticky fingers all over it….. again.
This guy doe’s not learn. He had his fingers burnt over the Hockey Stick fiasco and now he’s tried it again..please some one take this guy to court,or give him a proffesional statistician who knows what he’s doing!
Ged says:
February 11, 2011 at 12:23 pm
@Phil
No, it isn’t misleading. They said the sum total of the reviewer’s pages and their pages in response to the reviewer came out to 88 single spaced, dense pages. If you want to put it in math sum(reviewer A, O’Donnall Response) = 88.
Clearly it is misleading otherwise we wouldn’t have so many posts claiming that Reviewer A wrote ’88 pages’ both here and elsewhere!
You are also forgetting formatting differences (line spacing, font size, margin size) and space taken up by figures when counting the page number of the paper itself compared to the reviewer and responses.
No I’m not but clearly the originator of the “was 88 single-spaced pages, or more than 10 times the length of the paper” certainly did.
The troll, D Nyall (sic), has had a fun time on this thread with four childish posts dripping with sarcasm. I see that he has appropriately been ignored by all but one commentator.
Real Climate closes down its thread but a minion “In Denial” makes use of the more open moderation policies here to keep up RC’s “good work”.
“Well done, thou good and faithful servant”.
D. Nyall: “It’s probably better to not try to write in those journals when even after all that you still get criticized for not properly explaining one tiny little thing that doesn’t even matter much compared to all the right things in the paper. I still think SPPI is much higher standard.”
Do you know Denny you may be right, certainly your contribution to the debate is intriguing, so let us go over the facts. Steig et al produced a paper in a scientific paper, that had, we must believe, been peer reviewed. At the time of its publication many people, myself included, observed that he had “interpolated” the temperatures for a vast part of the Antarctic. (For the non-cognescenti, that means he “made up” the temperatures using some pseudo-scientific method). O’Donnel et al read the paper and found the maths wrong, which isn’t a “little tiny thing” outside of climate science at least, but a FGBT. They told Steig, who invited them to publish their findings, which they duly did, but only after the editor of the journal they were publishing in removed Reviewer A, who, contrary to all practice, was the author of the paper being critiqued. With me so far?
Notice, neither WUWT or SPPI or any other blog site has yet been involved. Now Eric Steig had a number of choices, he could have acknowledged the error, you know like other scientists do when errors in published papers are pointed out, and re-submitted the paper with the error corrected. It seems that doing this would have thrown into doubt the main assertion of Steig et al 2009 that the Antarctic is warming. Eric could have rebutted the O’Donnel et al 2010 paper, but couldn’t because the paper had focussed on the mathematics he’d used and he’s no statistician, so he had nowhere to go, except to withdraw the paper. Quite common in scientific circles where mistakes are taken as part and parcel of the path to truth, but unheard of in climate science circles, at least those of the Team, where the papers are part of an ongoing propoganda campaign.
So what does Eric do, he goes to a blog, RC, to critique the O’Donnel 2010 paper, and on that blog castigates the authors for using a mathematical method he himself had suggested in the review process. You see the scientific journals had done their job, two peer reviewed papers were published and discussed in private when one party, with nowhere else to go, decided to open the debate on the blogosphere. Nothing to do with denialist websites, everything to do with climate science propoganda websites.
Nice monicker by the way Denny, but I don’t know if you read your own posts, they come over as very sinister, full of hidden malice. Bit Norman Batesy for me, don’t know what others think.
Not satisfied with repealing the Null hypothesis, it appears these guys wish to suspend the Commutative Law of Multiplication as well. 2+2=42? Quantum climate mathematics (Quazy Math for short) Where everything adds up to the same thing; global warming.
Ryan,
Give it a rest. It doesn’t make you look good to keep harping on this misunderstanding, which resulted in inappropriate personal accusations. The way you handled this made you look very poor.
Stick to the science and you may get some prestige out of this yet.
Let the scientists in the field chew on the scientific aspects of this. That should be what people focus on. That is the way to scientific progress.
REPLY: You should “give it a rest” too, take a few days off from having an opinion on everything posted at WUWT – Anthony
Anthony:
Quote from Ryan’s rebuttal;
” disparage our paper using arguments that were both irrelevant and satisfactorily addressed ”
Satisfactory? Was the word unsatisfactory intended instead?
Ted K:
Ryan is saying that he had already satifactorily addressed the arguments that Steig had raised.
Bernie:
Thanks for the response.
If that is what Ryan intended by that sentence, then that “satisfactory addressed” is an O’Donnell action afloat by itself since it sure reads as being part of Steig’s arguments and tactics used in his public disparagement. Surely, since Ryan displays talent for clear and succinct writing that can’t be the sentence Ryan intended.
TedK says:
February 11, 2011 at 4:40 pm
Anthony:
Quote from Ryan’s rebuttal;
” disparage our paper using arguments that were both irrelevant and satisfactorily addressed ”
Satisfactory? Was the word unsatisfactory intended instead?
=====================================================
The arguments referred were arguments during the review process. “Irrelevant” is Ryan’s depiction of the arguments Steig put forward. “Satisfactorily addressed” is a characterization of their(O’Donnell et al) response to the “arguments” of Steig.
Hope that helps.