Lindzen-Choi ‘Special Treatment’: Is Peer Review Biased Against Nonalarmist Climate Science?
by Chip Knappenberger
[Editor’s note: The following material was supplied to us by Dr. Richard Lindzen as an example of how research that counters climate-change alarm receives special treatment in the scientific publication process as compared with results that reinforce the consensus view. In this case, Lindzen’s submission to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was subjected to unusual procedures and eventually rejected (in a rare move), only to be accepted for publication in the Asian Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.
I, too, have firsthand knowledge about receiving special treatment. Ross McKitrick has documented similar experiences, as have John Christy and David Douglass and Roy Spencer, and I am sure others. The unfortunate side-effect of this differential treatment is that a self-generating consensus slows the forward progress of scientific knowledge—a situation well-described by Thomas Kuhn is his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. –Chip Knappenberger]
From Dr. Lindzen…
The following is the reproduction of the email exchanges involved in the contribution of our paper (Lindzen and Choi, “On the observational determination of climate sensitivity and its implications”) to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The editor of the PNAS follows the procedure of having his assistant, May Piotrowski, communicate his letters as pdf attachments.
full story here
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Smokey, I suspect that KR has a CV that outshines Dr. Lindzen’s but he (KR) is remaining anonymous to avoid humiliating Dr. Lindzen even further. (Sarc, if needed)
What exactly do you think “peer” means………………..
You want them to approve something that contradicts the peers?,,,,,something they all think is wrong?
Smokey:
You seem to be on the right track re KR.
A followup to my previous post – It could well be said that the “rather petulant” description in my previous post was a personal attack, and as such I apologize.
I will note that writers do not get to choose sympathetic reviewers in the general case, although there’s some traction for objecting to a notable dissenter to your opinions. Editors choose their reviewers from people in the field, folks with a publishing history and some knowledge of the issues – the writer does not get to make that choice. If they did, every piece of junk written would get published, as anyone can find a few people sympathetic to their view. Lindzen’s objections to not being allowed this unexpected privilege are, therefore, curious. And not by themselves a reasonable issue – most papers don’t get published.
Given that L&C haven’t addressed issues raised since Lindzen, Chou, and Hou 2001 (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.88.129&rep=rep1&type=pdf), the current paper is seriously lacking. Again, it’s not surprising it has had difficulty getting published.
A quick comment on KR’s credibility and quantitative skills.
He says: “0.42, less than one citation every four years.” 1/0.42 is actually 2.38 not 4. So KR can’t do division at a first grade level, but he feels competent to comment on Lindzen. Quite amusing.
KR,
You misunderstand the Argument from Authority. It is only a logical fallacy when the authority cited is not an authority on the specific subject. In this case, Prof Lindzen is more of an authority on the subject than his detractors. Thus, there exists no logical fallacy.
Michael Mann, on the other hand, has his papers routinely hand-waved through pal review. And Mann was handed a $1.6 million grant to study “mosquito vectors”, something completely outside of his area of expertise. Of course, it was simply a morale-boosing bribe, coming on the heels of Climategate.
If you want to point out the mote in someone else’s eye, be aware of the beam in your own eye.
Smokey – “Argument from authority (also known as appeal to authority) is a fallacy of defective induction, where it is argued that a statement is correct because the statement is made by a person or source that is commonly regarded as authoritative.”
Hmmm – nope, you’re still using Argument from Authority wrt. Lindzen. And this paper sucks on multiple levels, as I pointed out (and as did the four reviewers from NAS).
Smokey,
Not to be pedantic, but Maria T. Zuber is the head of MIT’s atmospheric sciences department: http://eapsweb.mit.edu/about/headquarters.html
To detail my issues with the most recent L&C paper, going from the preprint I have seen:
To make it an excellent paper, it needs:
* Sensitivity analysis of the start/end dates for their temperature transitions – peak to valley (which they don’t use) is reasonable, as are regular fractions thereof (1/2, 1/3, etc.). Why choose offsets of a couple of days? Especially when the results appear to change drastically with small changes in start/end points?
* Explanation of the x2 factor for tropical to global extrapolation. It’s a single line assertion in an appendix, despite multiple published critiques of this assumption.
* Run the same analysis with global ERBS or the follow-up CERES data (an improved platform), and see what results they get.
They did none of this, despite multiple requests for it. Perhaps they are cherry-picking there data to get the results they want (which is quite frankly a natural conclusion from the approach), or perhaps they are wedded to the 2001 approach used again here. I don’t know – but this paper does.not.address.the.problems.
What is this “pre print ” all about? If KR has seen this paper in pre print does this mean the people at the Journals it was submitted to have just handed it out to their mates ( I would have thought there was some sort confidentiality , implied or otherwise, when you sent a paperto a journal) ? Or if this is standard practise why bother about getting it in a Journal in the first place?
I think the days of the “prestigious ” Journal are over. With the ease of finding information on the internet with all the various search engines available one could have a paper published anywhere , it doesn’t matter –people will find it to read, if they want. I believe the prestige will transfer to the paper away from the journal and the standard of review will be what matters NOT the brand name of the Journal. ( It will be a matter of working on more effective , transparent ways of getting proper reviewing done ) . This will not happen quickly but over time it will occur especially as we see more of the activist bias of the journals being exposed.
KR,
Your source misrepresents the fallacy. Find the correct explanation here. Further, your own link explains: “The more relevant the expertise of an authority, the more compelling the argument.”
Zeke, thanks for that correction. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Dynamical Meteorology and Climate at MIT.
Smokey
By definition 2 of your source (The “authority” cited is not an expert on the issue), you are correct. But that’s not the only definition of Argument from Authority.
From your source, definition 3: The authority is an expert, but is not disinterested. That is, the expert is biased towards one side of the issue, and his opinion is thereby untrustworthy.
Definition 4: While the authority is an expert, his opinion is unrepresentative of expert opinion on the subject. The fact is that if one looks hard enough, it is possible to find an expert who supports virtually any position that one wishes to take. “Such is human perversity”, to quote Lewis Carroll. This is a great boon for debaters, who can easily find expert opinion on their side of a question, whatever that side is, but it is confusing for those of us listening to debates and trying to form an opinion.
So, yes, by stating that Lindzen is an “authority”, and hence to be trusted regardless of the virtues of a particular argument or paper, you are indulging in Argument from Authority.
I prefer to analyze each paper on it’s own. Again, this one sucks.
Ross – I got the pre-print from http://www.heliogenic.net/2010/05/03/lindzen-and-chois-new-paper-out-confirms-negative-feedback-unlike-agw-climate-models/, who link to http://www.eike-klima-energie.eu/uploads/media/Lindzen_Choi_ERBE_JGR_v4.pdf
I don’t know the provenance of how that website got hold of the paper, but I have been told it’s an accurate copy of the article L&C were trying to publish at that time. Again, I don’t know what changes were made for publication in Asian Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences yet.
cope – Quite right, I was typing fast from the only impact reference I had seen.
E&E -> averages one citation every 2.38 years
Asian Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences -> averages one citation every 2.8 years.
KR- you may have read all the Lindzen-Choi papers but that means nothing by itself and as far as I know you don’t have credibility to attack Lindzen and Choi’s work, painting them in language as basically sloppy and obvious. You say you’re not making persional attacks; what an obvious untruth! Please! Don’t insult the intelligence of all of us here who know a duck when they see one! Who are you and why should anyone accept you as an authority? What have you ever done besides read the papers? It’s quite clear that Lindzen was failed because his ideas threatened the CAGW house of Cards.
Forgot to turn on the “notify me” option…
KR.
You say ….’read some of the critiques of his earlier papers (I linked to just one above, I believe there were at least three, see also http://news.cisc.gmu.edu/doc/publications/Chung%20et%20al%202010.pdf ‘
From Chung 2010….. ‘ Meanwhile, for all-sky conditions, Lindzen and Choi [2009] derived a negative feedback process using net outgoing radiative fluxes over the tropics. However, it is difficult to directly compare our result with Lindzen and Choi’s [2009] due to the differences in dataset and analyzed conditions.
This is the only mention of Lindzen in Chung 2010.
I am suprised that you consider this comment by Chung to be a critique.
Zeke haus
What are you doing here? I thought you said WUWT is full of ‘denier’ idiots with whom engagement was not possible.
@KR
How many citations did Michael Mann get by publishing multiple times in the “prestigious” journal Nature and other and “high profile” journals that ended up being barf mulch? In fact, the worse he got, the more notoriety he received.
Steig?
Santer?
Hansen?
The list is long.
AGW drones never cease to amaze.
DavidG – Who am I? I’m a nobody, a ghost, an annoying voice, a nagging reminder 🙂
Now read Lindzen and Choi 2009 (essentially the same paper), read the critiques of Lindzen and Choi 2009, read the pre-print, read the reviewers comments. And then decide for yourself whether Lindzen and Choi 2011 answered any of the criticisms. Do the work – I did…
L&C stands or fails on it’s own merits, regardless of “authority”. This one fails as science, and Lindzen’s complaints linked above do not change that.
Hmmm. It appears that Lindzen et al is threatening to the alarmists. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the anonymous “KR” here posting critical jabs in very typical ‘team’ style. Usually only the most threatening new stuff gets such prompt attention. I’d also like to point out that the version of the paper pointed to by KR is well over a year old. A lot may have changed.
Also, the fact that some critiques were not adequately dealt with to the team’s satisfaction is rather meaningless. We all know that papers are subject to draconian size constraints and it might be that only the most salient points could be responded to (and those criticisms may have been far from salient).
I can’t wait to read the final published paper. If there are questions to be answered that aren’t addressed in the paper, I’m sure Lindzen will address them outside the paper.
KR says:
June 9, 2011 at 2:12 pm
I will note that writers do not get to choose sympathetic reviewers in the general case
Actually, members of the National Academy of Science are supposed to get quite a lot of deference and do get to recommend who shall review their papers. One is elected to the National Academy of Science for life. Lindzen was elected in 1977.
Rules here –
http://www.pnas.org/site/misc/iforc.shtml
Peer review and whatever standard that follows is no measure of the quality of the science contained within a paper.
I invite all of you to read a few pages of journals dating from the time before peer review became the gold standard – there was a lot of junk, but there was a LOT of great science too.
Today we get lots of junk in prestigious medical and science publications that have high impact numbers and peers with cv’s as long as your arm.
The IPCC has pimped the peer review system to pump its own balloon. I trust nothing that relies on anything peer reviewed by IPCC lead authors. The NAS appears to use only IPCC lead authors to review its papers on climate.
Its sad what Al Gore accomplished by stacking the deck while VP.
Tony Hansen – You’re correct, I should have referred to Lin 2010 (http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/1923/2010/acp-10-1923-2010.pdf); I had seen the mention of Lindzen in Chung 2010, and pulled the wrong paper out of memory. I’ll note that Chung’s estimates are hugely different from Lindzen’s – Chung found that they couldn’t even compare the techniques due to perceived limitations with Lindzen.
Lin more directly assesses climate sensitivity from TOA measures, and strongly disagrees with Lindzen.
Tony Hansen – Also see Roy Spencer at http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/11/some-comments-on-the-lindzen-and-choi-2009-feedback-study/.