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.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
reply to: Robert E. Phelan says: September 4, 2011 at 10:25 am
DITTO. Thanks for bringing that doozy to our attention. It surely seems most unprofessional, self-serving, and petty on the part of Wagner, Trenberth, Abraham, and Gleick
I’m also a bit floor by the attempts of some (including 3 of the 4 named above) to paint “Remote Sensing” as ‘primarily for geologists.’ I just took a quick look at their current issue, and the Jan 2011 issue and there are all sorts of papers about remote sensing various issues such as sea and land biota, UHI effect, deforestation, soil moisture content, etc. All things that just happen to be studied by ‘climate scientists.’
At this point it sure looks to me as if Wagner wanted to retract the paper but was unable to and so resigned instead in one of the most convoluted public unprofessional bizarre ways I’ve ever heard of. Talk about a very weird and unusual situation all the way around.
peter stone says:
“The alleged ‘Climate Gate’ scandal was presented by some media as smoking gun proof that anthropogenic climate change was an elaborate hoax, perpetrated by a global conspiracy of climate scientists who faked data and with the devious collaboration of the world’s governments and most respected scientific organizations.”
The only inaccuracy in that statement is the word “alleged”. Apparently peter stone is not up to speed on the Climategate scandal. He should read The Hockey Stick Illusion to see for himself the shenanigans that go on in the climate pal review clique. [For a shorter version of pal-review fraud, see here.]
In the Harry_read_me file leaked along with the Climategate emails, we read: “Here, the expected 1990 – 2003 period is missing so the correlations aren’t so hot! Yet the WMO codes and station names /locations are identical (or close). What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh, yeah – there is no ‘supposed’, I can make it up. So I have.”
Thirteen years of invented temperature data, fabricated to push the alarmist agenda. And the emails themselves reveal intent to defraud the IRS, and deliberately conspiring to inflate the number of published papers, and other devious hijinks. Maybe AGW didn’t begin as “an elaborate hoax,” but it is certainly one now.
Peter stone also quotes the preposterous anti-science NAS statement: Strong evidence also indicates that recent warming is largely caused by human activities, especially the release of greenhouse gases through the burning of fossil fuels. What “strong evidence”??
Since the NAS hides out and refuses to respond, I challenge peter stone to provide empirical, testable evidence, per the scientific method, directly connecting the [very mild] warming trend since the LIA with the use of fossil fuels. peter stone either knows that no such evidence exists, or he is simply winging it and hoping no one notices. If there were direct evidence that fossil fuel use was causing rising temperatures as is claimed, we would hear it trumpeted 24/7/365. But all we hear about are the outputs of always-inaccurate computer models – which are not evidence.
I sincerely hope this peter stone is not the same peter stone at MIT, which would be strong evidence that tenure trumps competence. When it comes to MIT I will defer to Prof Richard Lindzen, who has probably forgotten more about climate science than peter stone will ever learn.
I am busy reading up about the difference between cosmic and solar rays, apart from the origin which is pretty obvious. I came across this snippet on Wikipedia: –
…Eugene Parker realised that the heat flowing from the Sun in Chapman’s model and the comet tail blowing away from the Sun in Biermann’s hypothesis had to be the result of the same phenomenon, which he termed the “solar wind”.[7][8] Parker showed that even though the Sun’s corona is strongly attracted by solar gravity, it is such a good conductor of heat that it is still very hot at large distances. Since gravity weakens as distance from the Sun increases, the outer coronal atmosphere escapes supersonically into interstellar space. Furthermore, Parker was the first person to notice that the weakening effect of the gravity has the same effect on hydrodynamic flow as a de Laval nozzle: it incites a transition from subsonic to supersonic flow.[9]
Opposition to Parker’s hypothesis on the solar wind was strong. The paper he submitted to the Astrophysical Journal in 1958 was rejected by two reviewers. It was saved by the editor Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (who later received the 1983 Nobel Prize in physics)…
Full article here: –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_wind
So almost fifty years ago somebody published a paper that did not suit and fit the prevailing dogma of the day. What progress have we made in 50 years?
To those who have been attempting to use a belief in a ‘creator’ (call it what you will) as supposedly being evidence of a lack of ability or credibility of Dr. Spencer or others wrt this particular paper, Wagners resignation, or science literacy in general, or who’ve been denigrating such beliefs as ‘unscientific,’ I have to ask if you have considered one really basic key aspect of this issue. I suspect the answer is a resounding ‘NO.’ Bear with me for a little bit of necessary set up to get to the question.
Science is a tool we have devised to remove human error from the equation and use empirical evidence to TEST various hypothesis, thereby divining how things really work. At this point in time, we have no way to test for either the existence or absense of a ‘creator.’ We can, of course, study things such as the theory of evolution (and I use the scientific meaning of theory here, not the common meaning), the length of time the Earth has existed, etc., all things which rather soundly refute a literal interpretation of some religious writings – but we have no way to test anything about the existence or lack there of, of a ‘creator.’
Science can certainly lean one towards believing that such a being/force is unlikely – but as science cannot (at least so far) study or measure the issue in any way, science has nothing to do with a belief one way or the other on this issue.
So, have you ever considered that logically and scientifically, a belief that such a ‘creator’ does not exist is every bit as much a leap of faith as a belief in such a ‘creator?’ Which basically means that the very people who ridicule others as unscientific for believing in a creator, are themselves every bit as unscientific for believing that such a being/force does not exist.
Updated link at top of post to Pielke Sr.’s blog : Hatchet Job on John Christy and Roy Spencer By Kevin Trenberth, John Abraham and Peter Gleick
Smokey says (September 4, 2011 at 12:33 pm): “The problem is not the electorate, which generally makes good decisions when all the facts are presented. The problem is the endless gatekeeping and whitewashes resulting in a deliberate lack of transparency. With only one side’s ‘facts’ spoon-fed to the electorate, the outcome is predictable.”
Colin in BC says (September 4, 2011 at 12:50 pm): “Quite right. We all saw what happened in the late 80s with the ozone hole scare.”
I have to disagree, respectfully, with Smokey and Colin. Any voter who doesn’t see his own government as his worst natural enemy–and fails to vote as if it is–is asking for everything he gets. Smokey’s “gatekeepers” and “whitewashers” are there because we put them there, no doubt with the best of intentions but with predictable results. We voted in Big Government with our eyes wide open, forgetting that the more government can do for us, the more it can do to us. Businessmen and scientists, no dummies, discovered they could make more money sucking the taxpayer’s teat than by doing real work, so now we have Big Government, Big Business, and Big Science collaborating in an unholy trinity against the little taxpayer, and doing quite well at it.
Gary Hladik,
I agree with most all of what you wrote. But I think there’s more to it than that. Certain special interests have learned to game the system, in cahoots with politicians.
I am never presented with someone who would be my choice as a representative. Not being one to just throw my vote away on a hopeless write-in candidate, I just vote for the person closest to my views.
I don’t agree that I’m getting the government I deserve. I certainly don’t deserve this one. But I agree with you that government is inherently evil, and that less is better. I would be happy to go back to the original Constitution and Bill of Rights, and forget all the subsequent amendments and Supreme Court decisions. They all caused more problems than they solved.
For the record, I was specifically responding to the last sentence in Smokey’s post, the part I bolded, which read, “Thank goodness for the internet.” I’ll leave the first portion of his post to the political scientists.
Perhaps this blog, or some other organisation, should compile an index on scientific censorship. A couple of examples to start off with.
Bjorn Lomborg and the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_Committees_on_Scientific_Dishonesty
Claes Johnson and his book on Mathematical Simulation Technology banned by KTH in Sweden.
http://claesjohnson.blogspot.com/search/label/KTH-gate
peter stone says:
September 3, 2011 at 4:39 pm
[Dr.] Roy [Spencer] is a “scientist” who believes in creationism and intelligent design “theory, and has discounted the basic tenets of evolutionary biology. […] His contrarian (and even biblical) views on evolution and climate science I think speak directly to his credibility as a competent scientist.
You probably do not know, but in fact Sir Isaac Newton spent most of his time contemplating on alchemy (and writing about a million words on the topic).
But now, that you are informed, you are left with only two alternatives (provided of course you stick honestly to your stance on what constitutes a valid foundation for judging credibility & competence):
1. Dismiss physics altogether as something based on the notions of an incompetent lunatic.
2. Endorse Alchemy as a legitimate science.
Which track do you choose?
What Smokey said!
@Dave Springer
“Appeal to authority isn’t always a logical fallacy when the authority really is qualified. Particularly when:
1. The authority is a legitimate expert on the subject.
2. A consensus exists among legitimate experts on the matter under discussion.”
You remind me of the Church vs. Galileo, and also about some old hack writing about Paradigm Shifts.
Have you heard about that story involving Semmelweis and puerperal fever? You might want to study the history of witchcraft and voodoo as well – just so that we need not repeat the same mistakes again…
The Pielke peer posting is spot on. The Team is trying to build a case to defund him, place the satellite measurements in more secure hands. Lysenko would be proud of these guys. The Trenbeth et all tirade offers no science whatsoever; they simply attack and slur.
The five types and states of the CAGW muppets.
The
Enviro-communist: These doesn’t really care about the environment per se, it’s just a means to and end. Total and absolute authority to make the most global of decisions, everything else is moot, like people’s lives, what with the communist precautionary principle being the reason that was used to off tens and tens of millions of people during the last hundred years. They try and think about everything to, in their reality, assert the best possible tactical advantage to get to the throne of power and subdue others or keep it they feel they’re already their.
Enviro-STASI: They don’t really care all that much about mother earth’s environment, they are more interested in the controlling of a environment, any type of environment will pretty much do. They just want to know what people say and does and when and how and how it can be used against those people for their own financial gains. Like the self-proclaimed “guardians of true science” a.k.a. bloggers without a real amount of visitors, or organizations who rather prefer to act the lap dog to control stuff at the “evil” corporations themselves.
Enviro-Nazi: They are more interested in being the sole entity that can assert power. They don’t care about how they attain the feeling of being in power, the cause is moot. They’re the ones who would run to Al Gore’s defense claiming he was right even if he claimed to be the supreme God entity of planet Venus, as in they don’t think before they act.
Enviro-Fascismo: The only type of green socialist that incorporate the corporate world as preferably owners, and, in fact they’re are so in love with making the money they feel it would be best, since they’re, at least in their world, the bestests at running green companies so it would be rather the bestests ever if they also were the authority in the political policy making department on how everyone should live their life, less themselves of course, and preferably also on how and where all else should spend their money.
Enviro-nut: The general crowd of fanatics that goes ape shit over anything that is properly hyped up to be against, doesn’t really matter what it is so long it has appropriate media attention and at least could possibly be connected to the environment. Proof is based on whom-had-most-media-coverage says what and that they said it and it was in their general line of reasoning.
Common denominator of all types and states is that they all want our money, time, energy, resources, to, apparently, save us from our self.
Gary Hladik says:
September 4, 2011 at 2:08 pm
I never recall being given the opportunity to add instructions to my vote. Never. Had I been given the opportunity, I certainly would expect a different government that what we’re currently enduring.
peter stone… You quote:
And yet the earth has been cooling for the last dozen years. Tell us all, what human activities would explain that?
Or have you left the arena without a plausible explanation? (Perhaps you’re hoping the “authorities and experts” you quote will eventually get back to us on that one?)
Trenberth, Abraham, Glieck… right or wrong on the scientific issue, these three are a piece of work.
The hit piece from Trenberth,Abraham & Gleick is perhaps the most despicable bit of tripe I have come across in all my years dumpster diving through this virtual abbatoir of laughable “climate science”. Given the authors it is also a very large example of the pot and the kettle. I particularly liked their reference to the new paper from “Sluggo” Santer, which isn’t even available behind a paywall and has as the only available abstract this highly informative bit of nonsense.
Key Points
Models run with human forcing can produce 10-year periods with little warming
S/N ratios for tropospheric temp. are ~1 for 10-yr trends, ~4 for 32-yr trends
Trends >17 yrs are required for identifying human effects on tropospheric temp.
Models CAN produce 10-year periods with little warming! Maybe they actually name some which are operational in the IPCC repetoire which have done so for the last fifteen years. It’s hard to argue with such compelling logic. Not content with one phantom reference, they then go on to another prospective masterwork, the much anticipated “debunking” from Andy “the Devastator” Dessler. At least S&B didn’t receive their”impressive hype” until after their work was actually available. IMHO, Andy had better be able to demonstrate at least an order of magnitude leap in the quality of his work if he is going to come close to fulfilling the expectations that have been created for this piece.
220mph says:
September 3, 2011 at 5:11 pm
“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:”
Dave Springer says:
September 4, 2011 at 7:34 am
It sure looked like Spencer was implying that engineers aren’t qualified to critque analysis of datasets to identify and characterized feedbacks. That’s actually a large part of what many engineers do for a living. Mechanical engineers are no exception.
“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”
Spencer could have, but didn’t, focus on Abraham’s experience and track record, but instead did a slothful and unbecoming thing by denigrating engineers in general. Obviously Spencer doesn’t have a clue about what engineers actually do in their jobs else he would have known that analysis of datasets to tease out what’s actually happening the real world with complex systems of all sorts is a large part of what they do and unlike unaccountable academics like Spencer they suffer more than embarassment when they get something wrong. Engineers aren’t in the business of publishing abstract papers where there’s no financial or physical harm done if they get it wrong.
“Look up Abraham – who he is and what he stands for”
That’s what Spencer should have done before commenting on it.
Dave – did you look up Abraham? Did you check out who he is and what he stands for? And I don’t mean his criticism of Spencer’s paper?
” In November, 2010, Dr. Abraham (and two colleagues, Professor Scott Mandia and Dr. Ray Weymann) launched the Climate Science Rapid Response Team”
“John Abraham of St. Thomas University in Minnesota, who last May wrote a widely disseminated response to climate-change skeptics, is pulling together a “Climate Rapid Response Team,” which so far has more than three dozen leading scientists to defend the consensus on global warming in the scientific community. Some are also pulling together a handbook on the human causes of climate change, which they plan to start sending to U.S. high schools as early as this fall.
“This group feels strongly that science and politics can’t be divorced and that we need to take bold measures to not only communicate science but also to aggressively engage the denialists and politicians who attack climate science and its scientists,” said Scott Mandia, professor of physical sciences at Suffolk County Community College in New York.
“We are taking the fight to them because we are … tired of taking the hits. The notion that truth will prevail is not working. The truth has been out there for the past two decades, and nothing has changed.””
Even his “partner” the AGU has run away from him
AGU backs away from “climate rapid response team” citing faulty reporting
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/08/agu-backs-away-from-climate-rapid-response-team-citing-faulty-reporting/
The American Geophysical Union distanced itself from Abraham’s and his group – yet here he is, arm in arm with his comrades – attacking Spencer’s paper by every means possible EXCEPT through NORMAL peer review channels
Time’s tickin, money’s slippin away,
Can’t keep hold of it anyway.
Goin down the river when the well runs dry,
Drowning in my sorrows cause I’m livin a lie. Livin a lie.
From the tone and style of the parts quoted by Pielke, it now seems likely to me that the noxious poster Spencer banned, Obscurity, was Trenberth, as Spencer suspected and inquired. I thought that couldn’t be, because Obscurity was such a jerk.
Incidentally, after issuing his excommunication, Spencer let Obscurity continue to post.
Kevin Trenberth has now boasted in public that he got the editor of a scientific journal fired, for allowing the publication of an article whose author displeases Kevin Trenberth.
Doesn’t he realize that this will be seen as massive overreach by nearly everyone outside his little faction?
@Peter stone September 4, 2011 at 11:50 am
So by your own admission the purpose of your contributions to this thread is to ensure that it leaves the realm of science and rational inquiry. What would you like for desert, pickled gherkins and cream? There is a rather sad irony in that admission, Peter. It says rather too much about motive and the man.
How to tell if you are a conspiracy theorist? When someone finds fault with your work you decide that he must be part of the conspiracy!
Re: David Wendt at September 4th, 2011, 5:03 pm (above)
David,
I’m not sure Andy Dessler is going to be right “Team” cheerleader to refute the
Spenser & Braswell paper…
See:
http://atmo.tamu.edu/profile/ADessler
Where Andy makes the candid statement in writing (as of September 4, 2011)
Everybody and his brother should copy or take a screenshot of his “know nothing”
self assessment in his Texas A & M bio before it gets morphed into something much
more indicative that he wants to be considered a heavy weight climate science
commentator/researcher.
To everyone on all sides, have a safe holiday.