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.
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A post at Dr. Spencer’s blog points out an interesting GRL published study:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/09/a-primer-on-our-claim-that-clouds-cause-temperature-change/#comment-22904
I’m sure well covered here in past but new to me:
…. in 2007, Kiehle published a paper that assessed 9 GCMs and two energy balance models. (ref. Kiehl JT,Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity. GRL vol.. 34, L22710, doi:10.1029/2007GL031383, 2007).
Kiehl found … that each model he assessed used a different aerosol ‘fix’ from every other model.
Kieh says in his paper:
”One curious aspect of this result is that it is also well known [Houghton et al., 2001] that the same models that agree in simulating the anomaly in surface air temperature differ significantly in their predicted climate sensitivity. The cited range in climate sensitivity from a wide collection of models is usually 1.5 to 4.5 deg C for a doubling of CO2, where most global climate models used for climate change studies vary by at least a factor of two in equilibrium sensitivity.
The question is: if climate models differ by a factor of 2 to 3 in their climate sensitivity, how can they all simulate the global temperature record with a reasonable degree of accuracy?
Kerr [2007] and S. E. Schwartz et al. (Quantifying climate change–too rosy a picture?, available at http://www.nature.com/reports/climatechange, 2007) recently pointed out the importance of understanding the answer to this question. Indeed, Kerr [2007] referred to the present work and the current paper provides the ‘‘widely circulated analysis’’ referred to by Kerr [2007]. This report investigates the most probable explanation for such an agreement. It uses published results from a wide variety of model simulations to understand this apparent paradox between model climate responses for the 20th century, but diverse climate model sensitivity.”
And, importantly, Kiehl’s paper says:
”These results explain to a large degree why models with such diverse climate sensitivities can all simulate the global anomaly in surface temperature. The magnitude of applied anthropogenic total forcing compensates for the model sensitivity.”
And the “magnitude of applied anthropogenic total forcing” is fixed in each model by the input value of aerosol forcing.
Thanks to Bill Illis, Kiehl’s Figure 2 can be seen at
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/8167/kiehl2007figure2.png
Please note that the Figure is for 9 GCMs and 2 energy balance models, and its title is:
”Figure 2. Total anthropogenic forcing (Wm2) versus aerosol forcing (Wm2) from nine fully coupled climate models and two energy balance models used to simulate the 20th century.”
It shows that
(a) each model uses a different value for “Total anthropogenic forcing” that is in the range 0.80 W/m^-2 to 2.02 W/m^-2
but
(b) each model is forced to agree with the rate of past warming by using a different value for “Aerosol forcing” that is in the range -1.42 W/m^-2 to -0.60 W/m^-2.
In other words the models use values of “Total anthropogenic forcing” that differ by a factor of more than 2.5 and they are ‘adjusted’ by using values of assumed “Aerosol forcing” that differ by a factor of 2.4.
Therefore, each model emulates a different climate system. But the Earth has only one climate system. Therefore, at most only one of the models emulates the climate system which exists, and it is probable that none of them do.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Dr. Pielke Sr. get so worked up. He’s got good reason to be concerned. Climate science, or at least a significant part of it, has been taken over by a brutish mob.
As near as I can tell – each climate model simply “cooks the books” – with an adjustment to “total anthropogenic forcing” – different in each one – that allows these widely disparate models to all come up with same conclusion …
Trenberth has now slipped into unprofessional conduct. It will be interesting to see if certain places of employment will protect them. It might be time to start writing some letters to bosses.
Peter Stone,
Personally, instead of reading media accounts of science, I like to actually go to the websites of highly reputable and prestigious scientific organizations to read about the state of climate science.
Does this mean, for instance, that you’ve never read any of the Climategate emails?
peter stone
Re: Roy is a “scientist” who believes in creationism and intelligent design “theory . . .”
Resorting to ad hominem attacks of association and libel you obviously have nothing to say on the scientific validity of Spencer’s research. You further show comprehension of the principles of intelligent design. Your actions are contemptible and destructive of the integrity of science and of civil society.
Roy Spencer provides an excellent summary of the critical issues underlying this research.
A Primer on Our Claim that Clouds Cause Temperature Change
Are Trenberth, Abraham, Glieck referring to the 11years of errors listed here: https://esg.llnl.gov:8443/about/errata.do
REPLY: From Anthony I won’t open this link, do yo have another? I get this:
This Connection is Untrusted
You have asked Firefox to connect securely to esg.llnl.gov:8443, but we can’t confirm that your connection is secure.
Normally, when you try to connect securely, sites will present trusted identification to prove that you are going to the right place. However, this site’s identity can’t be verified.
@roger Knights September 4, 2011 at 5:26 pm
Obscurity popped up at Stoat’s little schoolyard shortly after to claim brownie points. Looks far too juvenile to be Trenberth, ego size and type mismatch. Mind you there’s a severe lack of regular expression in all this so who knows 🙂
I’ve had a number of link-containing replies to this threa disappear into the æther, so I will just have to give up on retyping them yet again.
However, when the thread descends to this sort of pseudo-philosophy:
it’s probably time to cut losses and go elsewhere and find sensible people with whom to speak.
Really, it’s “unscientific for believing that such a being/force does not exist”? Hopefully, because there are so many armchair scientists here who have tried to tell the professionals how their profession works, someone at least should be able to figure out why this is a completely bogus statement.
Failing that, my question is – who created the creator?
Or is it turtles all the way down?
peter stone
Re: Roy is a “scientist” who believes in creationism and intelligent design “theory . . .”
———————————-
I have to laugh every time I see this, S&B11 is not a paper on creationism in case anyone hasn’t noticed. If he were to run for office, ok, this is a valid area to include in his total construct, but this is a scientific paper and the science can be addressed and a rebuttal formulated. This is the beauty of “science”, that it is much less subjective than politics or policy decisions.
Motives for writing a paper are irrelevant. Just because Dr. Spencer’s beliefs are different than someone else’s, the satellite data don’t magically change; unlike highly subjective model assumptions.
When you have an editor who objects that the reviewers all shared some “alleged” skeptical notions, what does he propose, only select reviewers who disagree with the paper and would likely reject it? Can a group become so deluded they can’t see what they are doing. They block any paper that brings the IPCC conclusions into questions from the major climate journals and then frown upon a “lesser” journals that they weren’t policing when a paper gets published.
What Mr. Wagner has done is appalling. He has tried to discredit a scientific paper with a publicity stunt with no coherent challenges to the science itself, only vague references to blog comments and “water cooler” criticism.
I am continuously shocked at the behavior and failing of basic logic in the academia and editorial boards.
“So, the dirty little secret is that there is no way to test the models’ long-term warming predictions with short-term data. We can see a big ‘disconnect’ with short term data, but it does not necessarily disprove the models’ long term predictions.” Dr. Roy Spencer
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/09/a-primer-on-our-claim-that-clouds-cause-temperature-change/#comment-23211
If this is what they are objecting to, wait until the read the Salby paper.
REPLY: I agree, Peter Stone is full of it.For example, Sir Issac Newton was deeply enmeshed in religion, from http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109N/lectures/newton.html :
I don’t see anyone whining about that when they discuss Newtonian physics. – Anthony
5 Sept: ABC: Stephan Lewandowsky: Climate sceptic science: read with caution
Stephan Lewandowsky is a Winthrop Professor and Australian Professorial Fellow at the University of Western Australia. His research addresses the distinction between scepticism, cynicism, and denial.
Although most so-called climate “sceptics” prudently avoid peer review – preferring the internet as an outlet for their pseudo-science – very occasionally a “sceptic” paper does appear in a peer-reviewed journal…
The answer appeared two months ago, when it became public that Dr Soon has been lusciously funded by the fossil-fuel industry for the last two decades: Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, the American Petroleum Institute, the Koch brothers, and all the other usual suspects. (By the way, coal-fired power plants emit mercury.)…
Thankfully, Dr Spencer has made every effort to clarify his political agenda. His book Fundanomics explains why the free market “should be celebrated by all social classes” and also reveals the “fallacies” which allow governments to “get away” with “tricks” such as “job programs”.
Yes, jobs programs are a “trick”…
It is not surprising, therefore, that the publication of Spencer’s paper in Remote Sensing was met with a storm of publicity.
Actually, it was not publicity.
It was propaganda…
In the case of Dr Spencer, the flaws of his paper will be detailed in a peer-reviewed rebuttal by Professor Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University, which is scheduled for publication in Geophysical Research Letters – a journal with expertise in actual climate science – on Tuesday, September 6.
Alas, those flawed papers matter cognitively.
They matter cognitively because regardless of how thoroughly every single “sceptic” paper to date has been debunked within the scientific community, we know from much research in cognitive science that people cannot update their memories as easily as science can correct itself, when they are misinformed. Once people have acquired misinformation, they find it difficult to discount it even if they acknowledge and believe a subsequent correction…
Ideology, subterfuge, and propaganda. That is all there is to climate denial.ww.abc.net.au/unleashed/2870492.html
don’t know why but the url is not complete above… here it is:
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2870492.html
I urge everybody to read Roger Pielke’s piece linked in the Sept 4 update. The Trenberth et al article is breathtaking in its arrogance and nastiness. It is on a par with some of nasty comments by the know nothings at Roy Spencer’s site. It is sad and disappointing.
pat says:
September 4, 2011 at 9:23 pm
“we know from much research in cognitive science that people cannot update their memories as easily as science can correct itself, when they are misinformed. Once people have acquired misinformation, they find it difficult to discount it even if they acknowledge and believe a subsequent correction…”
—————————————————–
Exactly. This is THE reason for Wagner’s resignation. The public do not spend time reading thousands of blog comments much less scientific literature including all its comments and rebuttal papers. What was done here was to combat the “skeptics propaganda” in the news headlines by creating their own plethora of headlines about the resignation in protest. This is the propaganda you are pointing out and it is far from balanced.
This Dessler paper is not even out yet and is already used as a DeFacto repudiation of S&B11. This paper may or may not point out major flaws in S&B11 but I tell you this, the Dessler paper will dominate the news headlines as totally discrediting S&B11 and you will have to dig very deep on the internet to read the forthcoming response from S&B.
I just wonder if any courtesy will extended by Geophysical Research Letters for S&B to defend themselves as they weren’t allowed to publish there in the first place (not enough of Wagner’s skeptical reviewers); oddly no rebuttal was presented to Remote Sensing.
This is not about the science as much is it is about maintaining public perception of the debate.
Sir Issac Newton was deeply enmeshed in religion… I don’t see anyone whining about that when they discuss Newtonian physics. – Anthony
=============
Newton was also an alchemist:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/newton-alchemy.html
Probably been said already, but its worth repeating Ghandi’s quote:
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”.
These ignoramuses are just digging their own graves deeper and deeper (scientifically speaking of course).
pat
You appear to be completely in denial. The sceptics you malign are clearly and overwelmingly winning the argument on the basis of the actual observation. The high sensitivity models have less chance of being right than you have of winning the lottery.
Paul Nevins –
it wasn’t me who wrote the piece, it was a fanatic, a zealot, of the first order – the arrogant stephan lewandowsky. it’s posted here merely to show up his inevitable ad hom attacks.
To: Wolfgang Wagner
Sir,
It is increasingly obvious what you have done and why you have done it. You stand at the cross roads of a precipitous moment in history. The case for CAGW is in tatters. With your resignation in the face of obvious peer pressure, you have managed to set it aflame, and your career with it. You have the opportunity for redemption. Will you take it?
Will you go down in history as the man who attempted to pull the wool over the eyes of an entire planet by attempting to assert that computerized theoretical models should take precedence over actual observations? Will you join the ranks of those in history who would have had us believe the earth to be flat, the sun to circle the earth, blood letting to be a miracle cure, and that witches float?
Or will you be a “real man” and speak the truth? Tell the real story, tell it loud and tell it publicly?
CAGW is a farce, and always has been. A century from now, it will be just another odious chapter in history showing how far those who grasp for power and prestige will go to further their personal agendas. When your children’s children read those history books, what will they think about you? Will they read about their grandfather who was a coward and a shill?
Or will they read about a man who made a terrible mistake. And then set it right?
Bernard J.: I do not agree with your position on the Wagner matter, but you’re right about the spellings Occam, Ockham, Hockham, etc. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people “correct” other people who wrote “Ockham’s Razor.” I have a theory about it: “Occam” has a science-fiction or futuristic look, so it appeals to certain kinds of people, such as S-F fans. They think anyone who writes “Ockham” is an ignoramus who has heard the name and “naively” taken it to be an old English name. Unfortunately for them, it is an old English name.
I forgot to say: “Occam” is not actually new. AFAIK, it is the Latin spelling or close to the Latin spelling. Maybe it was revived in the 20th century by Russell or someone like that – I’m just guessing.
@ur momisugly Rational Debate says:
September 4, 2011 at 1:39 pm
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.’
—
At this point in time, we have no way to test for either the existence or absence of a ‘creator.’
Your first fundamental mistake is that you think yourself as logical, when in fact you’re compartmentalizing. There are no tests which can determine something which doesn’t exist. This logic is bait and switch to try and prove something which you don’t want to reject. If you have a null hypothesis, e.g. God exists, and you run your tests and find you can’t prove he is there, then that doesn’t mean ‘maybe he is there, we just haven’t found it yet’. What that means, is you have nothing to base his existence on. The fact that we are alive and talking, is not evidence of any sort that god exists, because anything equally preposterous could be claimed as to why we exist. We could be the off-shoot of another life-force, midichlorians are the universal energy but we can just never measure it, but they are there, it’s sufficiently ambiguous like ‘god’.
Rational Debate says:
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.’
—
Because you can’t create a project around something which doesn’t exist in the first place. Contemplating whether or not god exists is exactly the same as contemplating any other unsubstantiated preponderance.
Rational Debate says:
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.
—
Science most certainly does shape some peoples beliefs. Depending on whether or not evidence and rational thinking is your basis for belief. But being taught science from a young age, and developing the mental capacity to expand on mechanisms required to differentiate whether a certain statistical equation is more fitting than another required rope learning. It’s inherently complicated and requires a lot of self doubt to keep rebuilding the things you thought you once knew, because science changes to new findings e.g. proteins can guide other proteins to form new tertiary structures, which was hotly debated until and never thought possible, now it’s known that this is how Alzheimer’s and bovine encephalopathy, scabies etc are partly influenced.
Rational Debate says:
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.
—
I did contemplate it, as I read what you wrote. It isn’t a 50/50 chance because you can make something up that’s convoluted and I can’t prove it’s wrong because it’s beyond any measurement either quantitative or qualitative. In this instance, anybody who believes that it is unscientific to not believe in god, is not a critical thinker and severely lacks the processing ability to methodically evaluate reality.
1. There is nothing to measure
2. There is no provided principle based on any scientific theory to suspect the existence of a ‘creator’
3. God as an omnipotent, omniscient being is almost entirely defined as a ‘god of the gaps’. Believing in god just takes up room where science has not adequately uncovered another piece of the puzzle of life.
4. Trying to input that ‘god’ has any scientific case, is to not understand that the believe in ‘god’ adds nothing more to our elucidation of reality.
So, Alabama University knows what to do.
One may call me paranoid, but I fear that this may be the start of a new inquisition where Wagner either offered himself or was constrained to be the pawn sacrifice. I think that there will be less publications that differ from the IPCC “guideline” in the near future, especially from authors that don’t have the adequate reputation yet.
(I imploringly hope that the future will prove me wrong.)
Drew:
If you want to promote your religion of atheism then please do it somewhere else. There are plenty of places for you to evangelise but here is NOT one of them.
You are disrupting this blog with your irrelevant and illogical nonsense.
Richard