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
Peer review has become the stuff that middle school is all about. And middle schoolers do it better!
KR
No matter the merits [or lack thereof] of the LC paper, NAS proposing Trenberth, Schmidt and Salomon as reviewers on a paper from a confirmed skeptic, is like suggesting three senior Catholic Church cardinals review a paper by a confirmed atheist providing evidence that the immaculate conception is biologically impossible. That is not peer review, but the a good rendition of the Inquisition.
Stupid move, as all it does is further undermine the NAS’ already serious wing-shot reputation as a scientific journal. But then again we knew from the Climategate emails how “climate science” “peer review” is “managed” to produce the desired papers.
I had exactly the same problem – I submitted a paper proving that the use of rare earth magnets in windmills is increasing the magnetic field of earth.
This is then attracting the iron core of the sun towards the earth.
The increase in solar radiation totally explains the increasing temperature.
Would they publish – NO they would not. Such bias is unacceptable!
PS
If you write rubbish why should it get published as a scientific treatise. There has to be a validity check. There of course is always WUWT and your paper will be seen by many more
A simple graphic showing how climate peer review works in the journal world: click
KR
Again, the merits of the LC paper aside or for that matter the implications of e.g. Spencer’s or Svensmark’s work on sensitivity, the inconvenient reality is that that based on a couple of decades of land based and satellite data [ e.g. HadCru and UHA ] climate sensitivity appears to be considerably lower than what the IPCC and its contributors have told us to expect. Why that is the case aside for the moment, those observations are hard to simply brush aside.
harrywr2 – “The Board may choose someone who is or is not on that list or may reject the paper without further review” And this is actually extremely lenient – most publications do not permit this much freedom.
Mark – Nope, I just hate bad science. Lindzen has put out the same crud since his 2001 paper with Chou and Hou; this is a repeat of that.
tetris – Actually, the climate is behaving exactly as expected for a sensitivity of ~3C and a significant thermal lag due to ocean mass. See http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity-intermediate.htm for a list of about a dozen papers and summaries thereof, or for that matter the last IPCC report (http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch8s8-6.html) – Lindzen’s extremely low estimate is very much an unsupported outlier.
If his revisions had addressed the major criticisms of LC09, the reviewers at PNAS would have noted that (as they specifically criticized those lacks, those missing bits). Apparently LC11 did not include the needed material – it fails, in and of itself.
Who’s KR? The familiarity with the Literature, and the writing and debating style may inspire some speculation. Perhaps the guy knows more about the reviewing process of this particular paper than most of us.
I think the more we read from him, the more hints will unwillingly pop up pointing in the right direction.
Interesting that KR is telling us the “Peer Review” process is working in Lindzen’s case. The paper got lots of scrutiny, good or bad, and after taking a good amount of time, rejected it.
For Mann, Steig, Ahman, Wall, Trenberth, Schmidt, etc.. the process completely missed all the bad statistical stuff and everything sailed right through in short order. Where was KR when all those other papers needed the same rigorous review?
I guess when we talk about “Peer Review”, it mean different things to different people..
Hey, KR: if you feel so strongly that Lindzen & Choi 2010 is flawed why don’t you ask Anthony for a guest post to lay out your criticisms where everyone can read it and the paper and see if they agree?
KR says:
“Actually, the climate is behaving exactly as expected for a sensitivity of ~3C…”
Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong.The real world is falsifying that preposterous model-based number.
KR says: “I just hate bad science.”
Then KR should repudiate Mr Bad Science himself, Michael Mann. But he won’t, because he’s Mann’s apologist.
“Lindzen’s extremely low estimate is very much an unsupported outlier.”
Wrong again. *Sheesh* The outlier is the UN/IPCC’s ridiculous and unsupportable estimate [see the link above]. Lindzen gives a sensitivity estimate of ≤1°C per 2xCO2. Spencer gives under 0.5‚, and Miskolczi estimates zero.
My advice: stay away from Skeptical Pseudo-Science, it will rot your mind. It’s already happening, don’t let it get any worse.
Folks, how about a little calm here? We claim that people of any side of the fence can come here and present a point of view. KR has done so, and made statements based on reading papers and their reviews. At no time has he attacked Dr Lindzen or Choi personally, but has drawn (and presented) conclusions based on his reading of the material provided. What more could we ask for?
I think all parties (including those suggesting reviewers) have a reasonable idea of who is “peer” and who is “pal”, so I would expect or hope that Dr Lindzen’s suggestion of reviewers contains the genuinely agnostic and/or neutral. Granted, those on our side of the fence have to jump through more hoops to get there, which is a travesty, but at the end of the process they know they have done the right thing.
People can make mistakes. Even the good guys. Maybe, out of frustration (with the Team or a corrupted process or whatever), they rush to the conclusion without bulletproofing the body. KR hasn’t taken exception with the authors, or, indeed, any of us, but has tried to show that sometimes there is merit in the rejection. KR has admitted and apologised for an error in his numbers; that alone should put him on the good guy list.
My point, if you have survived this far and missed it 🙂 , is that we doom ourselves to become the very thing we despise if we keep up the ad hominems against KR. As we Aussies say: give him a fair go.
Randy micro biologist snufs Lindzen on climate. Where does it all end? When does the money stop?
KR,
The problem is, Spencer states clearly in his evaluation of LC2009 that his review could be “worth what you paid for it” yet you want to use it as a template on which we judge the peer review… of his 2011 paper, no less. Would you reject any future paper by Mann based on the final finding that his MBH98 paper was fatally flawed?
Also, you tread a dangerous path when you start throwing around accusations of others using “argument from fallacy” when a staple of the AGW side of the debate is that they MUST be right because they are “climate scientists”.
“Argument from Authority” is the Achilles heal of the AGW side of the debate. SO tied are they to the supremacy of their conclusion that they will claim their superior understanding of statistics over statisticians, better understanding of geology than geologists, and so forth on the grounds that they are “climate scientists”.
Climate Science from the outset has been a Jack-of-all-trades discipline, and master of none. For example, why is Michael Mann, a Geophysicist by training, counting tree rings? Why is he performing complex statistical modeling?
Creating a global body of work to explain the Earth’s Climate using “climate scientists” Like Mann, Aman, Hansen and Jones is akin to building a skyscraper using 2,000 handymen.
KR says:
June 9, 2011 at 12:51 pm
“Given the reviewers comments (http://www.masterresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Attach3.pdf), I find myself in complete agreement with them. This paper fails to address extra-tropical heat transport (ENSO, anyone?), using a simplistic factor of 2 to extend tropical results to the globe – that was a major point in all of the critiques of earlier versions of this work, and L&C don’t even discuss it. Given that extra-tropic heat transport is an order of magnitude larger than the sensitivity measures they are discussing, that’s a very serious issue.”
Are you very confidently asserting that there is no climate scientist who is not a member of the The Team who would disagree with you about the importance of this extra-tropical heat transport? You seem to be. I would really like to know because that would make you the first scientist I have known who is willing to judge another scientist, Lindzen, with such confidence. You are a scientist, right?
You are aware that the charge against the journal is that Lindzen’s paper is pal-reviewed where all the pals belong to The Team who we know would do anything to keep Lindzen out of print. Given the charged political atmosphere and corruption in which journals now operate, how do you justify the claim that there is something suspicious about Lindzen’s request for a reviewer that he knows to be practicing science rather than members of The Team who are known to be practicing politics.
KR says:
June 9, 2011 at 1:25 pm
“My impression is that Lindzen and Choi shopped the article out to a journal needy enough to publish it despite it’s flaws.”
Your claim is irrelevant. We are not discussing whether the article should be published; we are discussing whether it received a fair review from members of The Team. Stay on point.
KR says:
June 9, 2011 at 1:56 pm
“Smokey – Well, then, Smokey, 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 and http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2010/2010GL042911.shtml among others), read the L&C paper itself, and read the reviewers remarks – all of which I have done. See if you can detect _any_ addressing of the major problems with Lindzen’s earlier works.”
Again, you are irrelevant. Address the question of whether Lindzen could recieve a fair hearing from The Team. What The Team read and what they said about it is all that matters, not older versions of the article. Stay on point. Well, try to get back to point.
KR says:
June 9, 2011 at 2:12 pm
“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.”
All of the reviewers were dissenters from Lindzen’s views and all of them hold to the same old, boring pro-AGW metaphysics. Address the point at issue.
KR says:
June 9, 2011 at 2:33 pm
“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.”
So, what are you saying about the reviewers and the editor who accepted it? Are you saying that they made errors that should be recognized as errors by everyone in the field? Do you really want to make such a strong claim? If you are not asserting they made such errors, what are you asserting?
KR says:
June 9, 2011 at 2:48 pm
“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.”
You have been giving us third hand information? How darned insulting to you intend to be? Go back and make your points with regard to the rejected paper in a side-by-side comparison with the accepted paper. Otherwise, you are just jerking our chains.
KR says:
June 9, 2011 at 3:32 pm
“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…”
Stop changing the subject. The topic is Lindzen’s complaint that he was shafted by The Team. Are you going to address that point or do you concede it?
A measure of the relative threat to CAGW of any post here is the number of reactive comments from Trolldom. This post obviously reveals something that CAGW proponents would rather keep hidden: Climatologists have been gaming the system for years. The system is corrupt, rotten to the core, beyond saving.
Theo Goodwin
Lots of comments, I’ll try to address what I see as the major points.
I read Lindzen, Chou, Hou 2001 (the ‘iris’ theory, in a very similar paper) – very interesting work, although later papers (and Lindzen himself) indicate that the ‘iris’ effect is not present. That paper used the same x2 scaling of tropical only measures to estimate global climate sensitivity, and the critiques then indicated that didn’t give consistent results. So no, I’m certainly not the first person to note this.
I’ve also read Lindzen and Choi 2009, where many of the same claims are put forth – ERBE data of the tropics only, extrapolated geometrically to the globe with no acknowledgement of extra-tropical heat exchanges such as weather, Hadley Cells, the ENSO, etc. Critiques of that include that lack of extra-tropical exchange, extreme sensitivity to the exact date for their temperature changes (a day or two in any direction appears to change the results!), the availability of global rather than just tropical data, and the fact that running the same analysis with global data gave results conflicting with LC09.
And then I read the pre-print of LC11. I noted the same x2 from 2001 called out in a supplement, not discussed, not justified, no consideration of heat transport, polar ice effects, different responses of wet tropical versus drier subtropical air responses, etc. Based on that reading, and what the four reviewers picked out as issues, none of these items has been properly addressed in any revision of LC11. Multiple critiques over 10 years of major points of this work, and the majority are not only not addressed, but not even acknowledged?! Add to that the fact that the methods section is vague enough that I don’t think it’s possible to recreate the work independently – if it cannot be replicated, it’s not science.
I’ll note that the suggestions I made to turn this from a bad paper to an excellent one (in my opinion) are called out by the reviewers as well.
Perhaps a “cabal” of establishment reviewers exists, sitting in back rooms and shooting down dissent – I consider that a very improbable scenario, quite frankly. But this paper just does not address issues that have been pointed out repeatedly. It’s a bad paper, and should not have been published in the form I last saw.
“Cabal” or not, there’s plenty of reason for this paper to have been rejected. Enemy action is not required if you shoot yourself in the foot.
A few points.
1. Yes, pal review is bad, we know that. However pal review is a NAS etc problem and is not something that KR can be blamed for. Openly hostile review is also bad and the suggested reviewers from NAS were unacceptable.
2. I think there is a communication problem. Reviewer 3 especially notes that L&C and Trenberth come to opposite conclusions from much the same data. Both can’t be right and he/she notes that both could in fact be wrong. To resolve the issue one could produce more papers showing why a particular side is right but a better way is to also show why the opposition is wrong. The paper under discussion is an example of the first kind but what reviewer 3 (and I suspect KR) would prefer is something from the second group.
Otherwise you simply end up with two collections of mutually exclusive papers. The basis of science is argument, not affirmation.
3. Whether Mann et al get easy rides and miss details in their papers is beside the point. It is hypocritical to decry these faults in papers from the other side and to then complain that inadequate definitions are used against papers from our side. The important thing is good science. Inadequate definitions are bad regardless of which side they come from. Enough detail to understand the processes involved and to allow replicability is the standard and both sides must adhere to this. We know the other side won’t adhere to this principle and if we do then it only serves to highlight the difference between good and bad science.
4. Papers must stand or fall on their merits and arguments. The writer is immaterial. A paper by Dr. Lindzen is not automatically “right” and nor is a paper by DR. Schmidt automatically “wrong”. Smokey, KR is correct in this, you are using Argument from authority. In the case of the paper under discussion I suggest that all who comment actually RTFP and the reviewer comments before commenting further.
The paper is okay and it might be right, however if changed in line with suggestions from reviewer 3 I think it would be an extremely good paper that would leave Dr. Trenberh looking amazingly like the “Titanic”.
Nature, PNAS and Science, ever since their founding of “forming” editors – individuals who shaped the journals on the basis of respect for the fundamentals of scientific inquiry and discourse- passed on the “keys” a couple of decades ago to the present generation, all have become mouthpieces for various cliques and factions in a number of key disciplines.
What we have been seeing in the context of “climate science”, played out just as viciously in the life sciences 15-20 years ago. I know because I was in the middle of it. Nature and Science both even refused to consider papers by members of our scientific team whose work was putting conventional molecular genetic wisdom on its it head, and presented a serious threat to the academic and venture capital funding of those on the “inside” of those journals’ community. Even after we published our results in another high quality journal, providing incontrovertible evidence that our competition’s results were fatally flawed and not replicable, there was neither retraction nor response.
Don’t expect anything else when it comes to the core issue of actual sensitivity in the climate equation.
John B ignores the evidence, and so responds appropriately under the circumstances.
“Smokey, KR is correct in this, you are using Argument from authority.”
Wrong. Prof Richard Lindzen is an internationally acknowledged climate authority, whereas Michael Mann is a highly questionable authority who has been repeatedly debunked. It is, in fact, Mann who gets special treatment, as the Climategate emails made crystal clear.
John B completely misunderstands the Argument from Authority fallacy, as does KR. It is only a logical fallacy when the authority cited is not an authority on the specific subject. In this case, Prof Lindzen is certainly much more of an authority on the subject than his detractors. Thus, there exists no logical fallacy. Prof Lindzen’s papers go back to 1965 – well before the “carbon” scare, therefore Lindzen is a legitimate authority. If John B has a problem with that, he should fill out this form and submit it.
Michael Mann, on the other hand, has had his papers routinely hand-waved through pal review. Mann was also handed a $1.6 million grant to study “mosquito vectors”, something completely outside of his area of expertise. That was simply a morale-boosing bribe following the Climategate exposé. If it were not for the hypocrisy and projection by the alarmist crowd, they wouldn’t have much to write about.