Nicolas Lewis and Matt Ridley have written a scathing article in the Spectator (UK) regarding the treatment of O’Donnell et al during the peer review and post peer review process.
I’ve been privileged with receiving an advance copy. Since this is a subscription only magazine, I can’t show you the entire article, but I can say, I think they got it right. There is however, an op-ed by Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator, which you can read in full here.
I expect there will be some damage control in Real Climate tomorrow, or perhaps a letter of rebuttal to the Spectator, or both.
The Team, and climate science in general, comes off looking badly. Here’s an excerpt:
“Nature’s original peer-review process had let through an obviously flawed paper, and no professional climate scientist then disputed it – perhaps because of fear that doing so might harm their careers. As the title of Richard Bean’s new play – The Heretic – at the Royal Court hints, young scientists going into climate studies these days are a bit like young theologians in Elizabethan England. They quickly learn that funding and promotion dries up if you express heterodox views, or doubt the scripture. The scripture, in this case, being the assembled reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
…
“Papers that come to lukewarm or sceptical conclusions are published, if at all, only after the insertion of catechistic sentences to assert their adherence to orthodoxy. Last year, a paper in Nature Geosciences concluded heretically that `it is at present impossible to accurately determine climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide’ (high sensitivity underpins the entire IPCC argument), yet presaged this with the (absurd) remark: `Earth’s climate can only be stabilized by bringing carbon dioxide emissions under control in the twenty-first century.’Likewise, a paper In Science last month linking periods of migration in European history with cooler weather stated: `Such historical data may provide a basis for counteracting the recent political and fiscal reluctance to mitigate projected climate change.’ Sceptical climatologist Pat Michaels pointed out that the sentence would make more sense with `counteracting’ removed.Science as a philosophy is a powerful, but fragile thing. In the case of climate, it is now in conflict with science as an institution.”
Note from Anthony: I highly recommend purchasing a copy to support the magazine’s efforts at making this issue known, you can purchase the most recent copy here:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/buy-this-issue/5324661/buy-the-current-issue.thtml
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Theo,
I am not ignoring the moral matter at all, it is just that from my perspective, I can not entirely justify finding one side or the other in this case to be guilty or innocent. I find it to be more of a repeat of the Mann vs McIntyre and McKittrick fiasco.
In both cases, if you find Mann entirely guilty and M&M entirely guilt-free or the opposite, then I find a lack of objectivity in that judgement.
And in this case, I find both Steig et al and O’Donnell et al, to find significant warming in West Antarctica.
And I spelled it right that time.
Hi Bob
Here is a quote from the Spectator article
“…So has Antarctica been warming? Mostly not – at least not measurably. The peninsula (2% of the continent) shows substantial warming. The rest is patchy: some parts are warming slightly, others cooling slightly. Over the continent as a whole, since 1957, O’Donnell et al found no statistically significant warming trend….”
I know what I would summarize from that and its not “…We have established that the Anarctic ice sheets are warming, now we are only arguing how much….”
Kind Regards
Michael
There have been a lot of posts on a number of sites working around this event.
The key focus of this post is the corruption of peer review.
However I would just like to observe that Steig appears to have won in this whole event.
After O’Donnell10 was published I noticed his very quick response on the Air Vent where he congratulated the authors on their paper and remarked on how it had backed up his conclusion in S09 that there was significant warming in West Antartica.
That was strange in itself, as it was clear that the authors considered their paper as a rebuttal of S09.
As more information has come out it becomes clear that a slick trick has been pulled.
The original paper using TTLS was a direct attack on S09 clearly showing that the use of 3 PCs produced Chladni patterns making the results completely artificial.
Due to Eric’s efforts as reviewer A, this paper will not be published.
After 3 reviews and 2 major revisions, the authors attempting to work their way through the gating procedure had surrendered this clear message and simply run with a clear statistical technique that was without the artificial features.
The scope of the paper was still to demonstrate that a bad statistical method had been used in S09. It was commenting on appropriate statistical tools and not focussing on Antartic warming.
But Eric has managed to derail this message completely – both by his input as a reviewer and then by creating an explosion by attacking the paper “disingenuously” so that all the discussion is about the evil of revealing a reviewers identity.
Moreover, the bottom line on temperature, as RyanO keeps affirming, is that the warming pattern that comes out of better statistical methods is exactly the same as that which was commonly known before S09.
That is – that in all of Antartica, only the Peninsula was showing up significant warming.
The rest of Antartica was a neutral to cooling pattern, and S09 was completely wrong in challenging this common knowledge.
But having forced changes in the original paper and creating a storm afterwards, Eric really can say “mission accomplished”, even if he cops a bit of flack for being tricky with his peer review.
The message is being lost in the noise.
Eric trumpets O10 as backing his conclusions on Antartic warming, while protesting that it is still an underestimate. ie S09 is still the better conclusion!
And now he can mock the new guys as playing dirty with false accusations and betrayal of confidence.
The only way justice can come out of this is if some key “climate scientists” actually try to understand why S09 is a really bad paper that got huge public exposure and make a big public expression to acknowledge this.
DJ says:
February 17, 2011 at 9:38 am
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the inclusion of those same “catechistic” disclaimers exactly what happened in the paper on cosmic rays and clouds just covered here??
“…The climatic forcings resulting from such solar – terrestrial links may have had a significant impact on climate prior to the onset of anthropogenic warming, ..”
Be careful, DJ, you are stepping on Leif’s favorite corn.
“Papers that come to lukewarm or sceptical conclusions are published, if at all, only after the insertion of catechistic sentences to assert their adherence to orthodoxy. ”
Additional example in a study already covered by WUWT : http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/01/oh-snap-co2-causes-ocean-critters-to-build-more-shells/#more-13543
The WHOI scientists have everything to conclude that marine life appreciate very much CO2 increase. Then comes the catechistic conclusion:
“The bottom line is that we really need to bring down CO2 levels in the atmosphere.”
There is absolutely nothing in related experiment to support the conclusion!…
Rick Bradford says:
February 17, 2011 at 4:43 pm
I don’t see how ‘climate change’ can be characterized as a scientific debate when the response to a single established, but non-scientific event [Climategate] can be so polarised.
It sounds to me like you might think that, if your premise is true, you’ve just proven that Climate Science’s “climate change” science is not really scientific! That is one possible conclusion from your argument, right? Well, if that’s what you intended, thanks, but while I agree with that conclusion, I don’t agree that you’ve proven it, because your premise is totally irrelevant to the question of whether Climate Science climate change science is real, scientific method and principle, science.
Prior to Climategate it was already very clear that ipcc Climate Science is not real science.
Bob,
you will find the best answer about the Antarctica temperature trend here in the following table:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/02/28/steigs-antarctic-heartburn/
Reconstruction
1957 to 2006 trend
1957 to 1979 trend (pre-AWS)
1980 to 2006 trend (AWS era)
Steig 3 PC
+0.14 deg C./decade
+0.17 deg C./decade
-0.06 deg C./decade
New 7 PC
+0.11 deg C./decade
+0.25 deg C./decade
-0.20 deg C./decade
New 7 PC weighted
+0.09 deg C./decade
+0.22 deg C./decade
-0.20 deg C./decade
New 7 PC wgtd imputed cells
+0.08 deg C./decade
+0.22 deg C./decade
-0.21 deg C./decade
The most interesting result in connection with AGW is that all trends are negative after 1980, even with Steig’s “method”. The better reconstructions show a significant cooling trend of -0.2 deg C / decade. Antarctica is actually cooling significantly for over 30 years now.
[snip . . . off topic]
Ordered. It’s important to support this kind of thing- assuming they’ve got it right natch# (as i haven’t read the whole thing yet)
I’ll be picking up a copy in Smiths’ today.
Chris
Brian Eglinton says:
February 17, 2011 at 8:37 pm
Thanks much. You or someone should write this up as an article with references and publish it, preferably on this site.
bob says:
February 17, 2011 at 7:16 pm
“I am not ignoring the moral matter at all, it is just that from my perspective, I can not entirely justify finding one side or the other in this case to be guilty or innocent.”
Sorry, Sir, but moral matters have no escape clauses. There are no ties, no rainchecks, nothing of the sort.
“And in this case, I find both Steig et al and O’Donnell et al, to find significant warming in West Antarctica. And I spelled it right that time.”
If you want to say that the importance of getting an article published or stopping it from being published, presumably because of some ideas in it, outweighs the fact that egregious moral blunders were made during its evaluation for publication, then when push comes to shove you are likely to start acting directly and shooting authors before they submit for publication. With the exception of Jeremy Bentham, who was corrected by his student John Stuart Mill, the only folks in the Western tradition who have held that the end justifies the means are Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Alinsky, and their students.
Don’t need the copy.
Did my own research.
http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
There is no man-made global warming or man-made climate change.
I’m in the US, but was able to buy a digital copy for my Kindle for $2.49.
That was enormously helpful, thanks. One-click, Kindle in the bag next to me. I do wish I could throw it in my directory full of papers, though, but so be it.
rgb
Bought my copy today. £3.20 well spent for a good article.
I see “The Spectator” is staging a debate in London on 29 March:
http://www.spectator.co.uk/shop/events/6711083/spectator-debate-the-global-warming-hysteria-is-over-time-for-a-return-to-sanity.thtml
Re the Spectator debate: do poor Tim and Simon have any clue, I wonder, about just how badly outgunned they are by Nigel and Benny? I hope transcripts or videos are available shortly afterwards.
Thanks Manfred. Right on Target.
Thanks Brian Eglinton – that is how I understood it as well.
Reading Manfred and Brian together, there is some ‘splaining to do by the CAGW community.
The hype/coverion Nature 01/09 is an embarassment to science. Do y’all recall the headingline? “Antarctica is not bucking the trend…” That means they knew it was a problem for the AGW argument. Pointing out ‘a warming trend’ while ignoring 30 years of cooling is all you get from Nature articles, apparently.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: February 17, 2011 at 2:08 pm
Did you mean this type of cerebral depletion ?
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says: February 17, 2011 at 2:08 pm
Did you mean this type of cerebral depletion ?
Oops link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Broccoli_and_cross_section_edit.jpg
My copy arrived today, and that article seemed to be the most readable in the whole issue! To me, it seemed to sumarise the important parts of the story, including the insignificance of the actual result. Bob doesn’t find the distinction between the two pictures interesting because he is fixated on warming or not (as is one of the subscribers on the letters page who seems to believe that in 100 years we will be extinct as a result of IPCC projections). Warming exists in the peninsula, and justifications for that vary – but for the rest, it is still in the noise. Seems to me that many people who believe they understand the issues have a feeble grasp of noise, random processes and measurement uncertainty.
Anyway, does the Spectator article talk to the middle ground? Maybe. Is it persuasive for people who are finding the green taxes are becoming noticable (electricity, petrol, house surveys, condensing boilers etc.) – I doubt it to be honest. Do people who don’t already have a firm opinion read articles like this?
Digital version is available on Kindle. Single issue $2.49 but nil cost as part of a one month free trial. Worth a read but the paragraphs reproduced on WUWT and elsewhere include most of the content.
My printed copy arrived today. Good, simple read for the layman but, like Sean above at 5am, I doubt whether it’ll make many waves in the main dead tree press. 🙁
The article now appears to be free on-line (at least in the UK): http://www.spectator.co.uk/essays/all/6705193/breaking-the-ice.thtml