UPDATE: Sept 6th Hot off the press: Dessler’s record turnaround time GRL rebuttal paper to Spencer and Braswell
(September 4) Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. continues his discussion at his blog: Hatchet Job on John Christy and Roy Spencer By Kevin Trenberth, John Abraham and Peter Gleick. And I’ve added my own rebuttal here: The science is scuttled: Abraham, Gleick, and Trenberth resort to libeling Spencer and Christy
Dr. Judith Curry has two threads on the issue Update on Spencer & Braswell Part1 and Part2 and… Josh weighs in with a new cartoon.
UPDATE: Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. weighs in with his opinions on this debacle here, additional updates are below from Dr. Spencer.
UPDATE: Dr. Spencer has written an essay to help understand the issue: A Primer on Our Claim that Clouds Cause Temperature Change and an additional update Sept 5th: More Thoughts on the War Being Waged Against Us
September 2nd, 2011 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
SCORE:
IPCC :1
Scientific Progress: 0
It has been brought to my attention that as a result of all the hoopla over our paper published in Remote Sensing recently, that the Editor-in-Chief, Wolfgang Wagner, has resigned. His editorial explaining his decision appears here.
First, I want to state that I firmly stand behind everything that was written in that paper.
But let’s look at the core reason for the Editor-in-Chief’s resignation, in his own words, because I want to strenuously object to it:
…In other words, the problem I see with the paper by Spencer and Braswell is not that it declared a minority view (which was later unfortunately much exaggerated by the public media) but that it essentially ignored the scientific arguments of its opponents. This latter point was missed in the review process, explaining why I perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal
But the paper WAS precisely addressing the scientific arguments made by our opponents, and showing why they are wrong! That was the paper’s starting point! We dealt with specifics, numbers, calculations…while our critics only use generalities and talking points. There is no contest, as far as I can see, in this debate. If you have some physics or radiative transfer background, read the evidence we present, the paper we were responding to, and decide for yourself.
If some scientists would like do demonstrate in their own peer-reviewed paper where *anything* we wrote was incorrect, they should submit a paper for publication. Instead, it appears the IPCC gatekeepers have once again put pressure on a journal for daring to publish anything that might hurt the IPCC’s politically immovable position that climate change is almost entirely human-caused. I can see no other explanation for an editor resigning in such a situation.
People who are not involved in scientific research need to understand that the vast majority of scientific opinions spread by the media recently as a result of the fallout over our paper were not even the result of other scientists reading our paper. It was obvious from the statements made to the press.
Kudos to Kerry Emanuel at MIT, and a couple other climate scientists, who actually read the paper before passing judgment.
I’m also told that RetractionWatch has a new post on the subject. Their reporter told me this morning that this was highly unusual, to have an editor-in-chief resign over a paper that was not retracted.
Apparently, peer review is now carried out by reporters calling scientists on the phone and asking their opinion on something most of them do not even do research on. A sad day for science.
(At the request of Dr. Spencer, this post has been updated with the highlighted words above about 15 minutes after first publication.- Anthony)
UPDATE #1: Since I have been asked this question….the editor never contacted me to get my side of the issue. He apparently only sought out the opinions of those who probably could not coherently state what our paper claimed, and why.
UPDATE #2: This ad hominem-esque Guardian article about the resignation quotes an engineer (engineer??) who claims we have a history of publishing results which later turn out to be “wrong”. Oh, really? Well, in 20 years of working in this business, the only indisputable mistake we ever made (which we immediately corrected, and even published our gratitude in Science to those who found it) was in our satellite global temperature monitoring, which ended up being a small error in our diurnal drift adjustment — and even that ended up being within our stated error bars anyway. Instead, it has been our recent papers have been pointing out the continuing mistakes OTHERS have been making, which is why our article was entitled. “On the Misdiagnosis of….”. Everything else has been in the realm of other scientists improving upon what we have done, which is how science works.
UPDATE #3: At the end of the Guardian article, it says Andy Dessler has a paper coming out in GRL next week, supposedly refuting our recent paper. This has GOT to be a record turnaround for writing a paper and getting it peer reviewed. And, as usual, we NEVER get to see papers that criticize our work before they get published.
Or Steig’s?
Bernard J.
It appears you need to study Einstein’s Razor
Attributing all “climate change” to “anthropogenic CO2” is more than one simplification too far.
That was my take too. I wrote, “I suspect that the journal (one that is just getting started) received many subscription cancellations and cancellation-threats from college libraries and warmists, and the editor resigned to head them off and keep his publication afloat.”
(Or maybe the publisher pushed him off the sled to slake the wolves.)
DirkH says:
September 3, 2011 at 12:13 pm
______________________________
To be sure, it is the individual and not the initials after the name that matters.
It is a logical fallacy to claim otherwise.
Please don’t berate people for speculating, and then profusely speculate yourself.
Since you are obviously struggling with this, I’ll repeat it Jeff.
We have no idea why Wagner resigned. We cannot know because we do not have enough information. Nevertheless lots of people are speculating wildly.
I showed that I could make speculations that were the direct opposite of stories above, but still fit the facts as we know them. I wasn’t saying I was correct or likely or anything — I was attempting to show that almost any story could be made to fit what we know. For all we know he could have fondled and intern and need a convenient excuse to cover his rapid departure (almost certainly untrue, but it still fits the paltry facts we have).
It is better to examine his statements and see if they are true. Attempting to put motivation to a person about which we effectively know nothing is useless.
As for the what kind of pressure people can be put under, look no further than Steve Bloom’s comment at Connolley’s:
Seems far worse than simple ostracism, and absolutely personal. Boy Wagner must have been horrified by a lifetime of the same.
ps as a bonus, keep reading in the comments until good old Connolley declares what is Truth and what isn’t.
Some of the climate emails discussed getting rid of an editor (of GRL) who allowed publication of results contradicting the dogma. But up to now, it has not been done. This is intimidation pure and simple. Think about how the next editor will react to a submitted publication of a skeptical nature, and you will understand why this is being done.
One thing is for sure. If this paper had legs before…it now has wings.
Matthew
I can understand a publisher wanting to establish the credibility of a publication before publishing but I don’t understand peer review,this publication was clearly credible by a reputable scientist.
Weird for me.
I do not understand WHY the Editor resigned,
Because…
1, He was who endorsed the paper and now resigns as he is under pressure?
or
2. He was not aware about the explosive force of the paper, and the paper passed through his sub-editor? Now the sub-editors revolt and fire the editor-in-chief?
Very weird, but looks like gate-keeping at work.
Roger Kinghts: “That was my take too. I wrote, “I suspect that the journal (one that is just getting started) received many subscription cancellations and cancellation-threats from college libraries and warmists, and the editor resigned to head them off and keep his publication afloat.”
*****************************************************************************************************************************
Lots of speculation, guesswork, and assumptions there.
Are you aware that “Remote Sensing” is a free, online open access journal? College libraries don’t need to subscribe to it. “Remote Sensing” doesn’t collect subscription fees. Its free and available for everyone to read, with publishing fees paid by the authors.
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing
I suggest before speculating, guessing, and making assumptions, its always prudent to do a little bit of fact checking. Google can get you to the “Remote Sensing” web page in about three nanoseconds.
Or he has some other personal agenda, one which will be fully revealed in the course of time and which is well-served by this very public resignation.
‘Isaac Newton’s work on gravitation into the crapper because of the effort he put into discerning secret messages in the Book of Revelation.’
Newton was an alchemist (and if my memory serves), an astrologer. All perfectly “consensus” activities of his time…
Have to agree the BBC article was a total hatchet job. Does every article that is in line with the IPCC have the caveat about the author’s religion and political leanings? It really doesn’t matter which way your beliefs fall on ‘climate change’, when you see a smear like this it should make you pause. ‘Move along people, nothing to see here’
David H.: Attributing all “climate change” to “anthropogenic CO2″ is more than one simplification too far.
*******************************************************************************************************************
Please don’t attribute statements to reputable scientific organizations that they never said.
No reputable scientific organization has ever said “all” recent warming is because of anthropogenic CO2. The correct characterization is that most recent warming is likely due to human activities.
This is easily verifiable by going to the U.S. National Academies of Sciences website, the IPCC web page, or any other reputable and internationally recognized scientific body with expertise in climate.
**********************************************************************************************************
“Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for—and in many cases is already affecting—a broad range of human and natural systems.”
“Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.”
-SOURCE: U.S. NATIONAL ACADEMIES OF SCIENCES, 2010
The hysteria from “man-made global-warming” scientists is shredding their own credibility in the public eye.
Paul Deacon says:
September 3, 2011 at 12:10 am
surely the secret star of the piece is actually the Managing Editor, Elvis Wang. If he is from the People’s Republic of China, I would guess that he is more or less untouchable, politically speaking.
Of course he is untouchable. In a totalitarian regime like Communist China it is utterly impossible to get into a position like the one Mr. Elvis Wang has got (Managing Editor of an international scientific journal) without being an officer of the Secret Service (Ministry of State Security of the People’s Republic of China) or at least working for it, sending in regular reports and following instructions.
It is also unimaginable that Mr. Wang (and his superiors) were not aware of the political swamp they were driving Remote Sensing into by publishing a paper from a controversial figure like Dr. Spencer. It means it was done intentionally, following well considered (albeit possibly secret) official Party guidelines.
It also explains why all three American referees chosen by Mr. Wang happen to “share some climate sceptic notions of the authors”. It was not a bit unintentional as Prof. Dr. Wagner reckons, far from it. Just the opposite.
It can be anybody’s guess, why?
Incorrect. Editors have been forced to resign before for permitting publication of papers the hockey team didn’t like, and promptly replaced by `team players’. I’d give details, however unfortunately I loaned my copy of the Hockey Stick Illusion to somebody and can’t easily look it up.
Peter Stone’s interventions would carry more weight if he referred to Dr. Spencer and not to Mr. Spencer. In trying to belittle Dr. Soencer he belittles himself.
“Because their gatekeepers filter out all papers that even hint at contradicting the ‘consensus’.
There’s literally no hope of publication there.
Sad, isn’t it?”
Must be the WagnerGate in action!
Hi Solomon,
Roy is a “scientist” who believes in creationism and intelligent design “theory, and has discounted the basic tenets of evolutionary biology. I am not at all surprised that he is one of the very few PhDs with training in climate who still doesn’t accept the widely-held scientific consensus on recent global warming. His contrarian (and even biblical) views on evolution and climate science I think speak directly to his credibility as a competent scientist.
BTW: you should head over to his blog. He is ranting about conspiracy theories, about how people are out to get him, and he’s getting angry and TYPING IN CAPS and banning a commenter. I think the reasonable person can surmise that the rants and paranoia are very telling about Roy.
If Roy had wanted to, he could have submitted this paper to a reputable and internationally recognized paper that explicitly deals with climate science, instead of an obscure online geography journal. The reasonable person can conclude that Roy wasn’t confident about getting it published in a reputable climate journal, and that his intended audience really wasn’t research scientists who work in the field of climate. In fact, I think he had agendas that are not really scientific at all.
Or, as Roy said on his on web page:
“I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government.” — Roy Spencer
To see the Editors and Editorial Board of Remote Sensing:
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/remotesensing/editors/
For the biography of Wolfgang Wagner – Institute of Photogrammetry & Remote
Sensing – Vienna University:
http://www.ipf.tuwien.ac.at/index.php/staff/187-biography-of-wolfgang-wagner.html
The Vienna University of Technology bio doesn’t mention Wagner’s participation
in Remote Sensing , as a founding Editor, a contributing editor, or an author.
Wagner’s for-real day job is with the Vienna University of Technology.
“it says Andy Dessler has a paper coming out in GRL next week, supposedly refuting our recent paper. This has GOT to be a record turnaround for writing a paper and getting it peer reviewed”
Wouldn’t you just love to have ‘RC’ release emails covering THAT rapid organisation of a response? Climategate had some very illuminating detail on the desperation to head-off/answer the slightest variation on the accepted theme. The more things change…..
Folks need to take a little more times sometimes to understand what they comment on – a case in point those who took offense at Spencer’s comments about ‘an engineer’ … had those folks actually read the article Spencer’s is referencing they would have found out exactly WHO (no, he wasn’t disparaging engineers on the whole) that engineer was:
John Abraham, an associate professor at the University of St Thomas’s school of engineering in Minnesota who criticised the Spencer paper upon its publication
Look up Abraham – who he is and what he stands for
I also love the attacks on Dr. Spencer’s for his Christian views – that they somehow create a bias in his scientific findings …. yet we never seem to see a similar comment or attack on things like Hanson’s outright fanaticism