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.
Ryan Maue at September 2, 2011 at 10:18 am
The only high in Guardian readers and writers is grass induced. Hence the quality of their thinking. I know. 🙂
Felton: “Something is very wrong here … I’m fairly confident that the entire letter, and subsequent resignation has been STAGED.”
Eggscellent observation.
It is an act. There was an American pilot captured by the North Vietnamese. They used him for a propaganda film. He participated, but tricked his masters by communicating the word “torture” in morse code using his eyelids.
Here, the good editor, under the forces at one side cultic, another very dependent on money, had to take the fall. To much money goes to NASA and other rent takers. The resignation letter is brilliant (I think!). He uses the typical calumny and illogic of standard warmist agit-prop, yet communicates through it, to the aware public, that something is not straightforward with the story,that there is a subtext to be examined. A brilliant subversion of warmist sentimentalities and self-money-serving reasoning. When the AGW bubble finally bursts in the future and he applies for a job or grant and is asked about the resignation business he can joke, “hey, don’t you see what I was really saying?”
A resignation with no seppuku.
It must have not been that big of a deal.
Hmm, curious. Seems to me after having done some research that Dr. Wagner is heading up what could be called a “new” scientific journal. As it has yet to establish itself in the scientific community, it has a fragil place in getting and publishing papers, especially anything that tries to contradict the dominant paradigm in any given field (in climatology, it is the Greenhouse Paradigm). As such, having published a controversial paper by a skeptic with a well known streak for going against the mainstream (not a knock on Spencer, but he is not part of the IPCC mainstream) and having recieved the full criticism from the non-silent majority, he sought to direct the lightning elsewhere so that his “baby” would not be so ridiculed as to be snuffed out of the peer review process before it even had a chance to get in. Heck, even the established journals have a hard time after these sorts of debacles (Journal of Climate, anyone?). I don’t think it is political (he doesn’t seem to be a strong alarmist about AGW) nor do I think he seriously dislikes S&B2011. He is afraid that if he stands by them even in the face of the ever growing criticisms (whether true or not by the likes of Trenberth, Abraham, Bickmore, ect) that the journal will suffer. It may not be the most brave and intrepid stance he could (or should) have taken, but it is what he opted for, given the real world and its various shortcomings. This probably isn’t an IPCC-run conspiracy, it is a sociologically (psychologically?) predicted outcome within the broader sociopolitical realm of science. The best thing Spencer can do is to continue to make his claims and defend them the best he can. It may be unfair, but the world is unjust – are we really at all surprised?
A comment about this, from Professor Jonathan Jones, stolen by me commenting at Bishop Hill. (Professor Jones, finally won the FOI battle recently with CRU/UEA over Crutem data)
in the comments:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/9/2/journal-editor-resigns.html?currentPage=2#comments
Professor Jonathon Jones (quantum Physics Oxford University)
“This is truly bizarre, and just shows how profoundly warped the climate science community has become. I make no judgement here on the correctness of the paper, but editors just don’t resign because of things like this.
Nobody resigned at Science when they published that utter drivel about bacteria replacing phosphorus with arsenic; they just published seven comments (IIRC) back to back with a rather desperate defence from the original authors.
Nobody resigned at Phys Rev Lett when I trashed a paper (on the evaluation of Gaussian sums) they had selected as one of the leading papers of the month: indeed nobody has formally ever accepted that I was right, but remarkably all the later papers on this subject follow my line.
I have been up to my neck for over a year in a huge row with Iannis Kominis about the underlying quantum mechanics of spin sensing chemical reactions, and either his papers or mine (or just possibly both) are complete nonsense: but nobody has resigned over Koniminis’s paper in Phys Rev B or mine in Chem Phys Lett.
Sure, my two controversies above never hit the popular press, but the arsenic stuff was discussed all over the place, far more than Spencer and Braswell.
What sort of weird warped world to climate scientists inhabit?
How have they allowed themselves to move so far from comon sense?
What is wrong with these guys?
The arm twisting will have been to try to force Wagner to retract the paper.
By resigning, he has ensured the paper will not be retracted, but instead will gain more publicity and the alarmists are painted into a corner where they have to attempt a rebuttal of the science Spencer and Braswell have presented.
Well done Wagner!
Good one Tallbloke. I had previously downloaded it when first possible; I did so again just for fun. 🙂 This will probably become The Most Popular Scientific Paper Ever – TMPSPE
Götterdämmerung. The twilight of the Team. Such Wagnerian drama…
Not that many will read this comment as it is #177 (or so), but …
Does anybody else consider it improper for an editor-in-chief to even mention MSM reaction in a resignation statement? Am I “out there” on that?
It seems very telling to me. FWIW, my opinion is that Mr. Wagner is not in The Team’s good graces right now. I think that comments along the line of “he’ll probably now have a cushy job in the IPCC” miss the mark. I read this resignation as a mea culpa for crimes against The Cause: I screwed up allowing this paper to be published, the resulting bad press is my fault, and now I’m falling on my sword as is my duty.
So, Tallbloke, your position is not that Wagner is a Wanker, but, rather, that he is sly. I can only hope so. But, he needs funding in whatever he does.
A minority view……a large body of work that disagrees………exaggerated by the media…….passed review by like minded reviwers….
He is surely talking about the “hockey stick” right?
Every single issue he has applies perfectly to the publishing of the hockey stick. Perfectly!
But lets be honest, he only resigned because he wanted to slap the paper with negative press and he was pretty sure he couldn’t get the paper retracted. It is a well planned move to give the media something negative to say about the paper without actually having to come up with any real science to back it up.
These clowns are reaching a level of ridiculous that is becoming delusional. There is probably a youtube clip of this guy yelling
BULLS—T over and over.
Robert of Ottawa says:
September 2, 2011 at 3:48 pm
glacierman says:
September 2, 2011 at 10:03 am
I wonder what his new position in the IPCC will be.
Prone.
Prostrate is more like it. 😉
My take if you don’t mind Anthony:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/345-4/
Obviously M. Wagner doesn’t really know the complexity (refinement) of the “scientific basis” of the “consensus” about AGW or he did not carefully read the Roy Spencer’s article. Poor Bishop Wangner, you are a really nut. By your auto-exclusion, you wins the Darwin’s Price of the year (2011)…
Keep up the great work Dr. Spencer. Tell the truth as you know it. You’ll be a happy man and the world will be better for your efforts.
Alan Clark of Dirty Oil-berta says:
September 2, 2011 at 10:00 am
7. Trenberth, K.E., Fasullo, J.T., O’Dell, C., Wong, T. Relationships between tropical sea surface temperature and top-of-atmosphere radiation. Geophys. Res. Lett. 2010, 37, L03702.
Nuff said.
So Spencer is castigated for not citing the activist high priest Trenberth? It would be curious to observe how many times Trenberth cites Spencer in his (automatically peer-review rubber stamped) papers.
A lot of people are condemning Wagner, and not without cause. But I’d like to offer an alternative scenario for consideration.
The journal is a relatively new one, hoping to make its reputation and get in the big indexes so it’s “impact” goes up. Journals are businesses, with an eye on the profits.
So maybe the editor publishes it for good scientific reasons – which he points out by saying it passed the normal peer-review – but all of a sudden they find themselves at the centre of the global warming political storm, with angry, semi-deranged letters flooding in condemning them for publishing it, and big names in science rubishing the journal. No doubt it’s the sort of thing that will come up in the decision to promote the journal (or not) up the impact ladder. No doubt it’s the sort of thing that already has – somebody having a word in somebody else’s ear, suggesting that it’s a problem. The process may have been followed to the letter, but nevertheless it is hurting the business.
The editor agrees to act as scapegoat and resign, penning a grovelling apology to try to mollify the attackers, in the hopes of defusing the threat to the journals ambitions. Wagner possibly knows it was the right decision to publish (he must have thought about it, at the time), and that the objections to publishing the paper are scientifically invalid, but business comes first, and as an employee his first duty is to his employers profits.
It’s clear he’s not a warmist – or he’d never have published it, and he doesn’t take a position in his letter. It’s clear he got these arguments from somewhere else since publication – he didn’t come up with them on his own. I think the most likely place for him to have got them is quoting the letters of protest, which the journal is caving in to. Whether he is persuaded of their validity or not – and there are hints in the letter that he might not be – is an open question.
ANTHONY, I think you should highlight the difference in treatment between the 2001 paper reported by Scientific American as More Proof of Global Warming and by the BBC as “evidence which they say proves unequivocally that global warming is real.”
As far as I can see this research is very comparable with Spencer, but is chalk and cheese in quality, but of course by the standard being applied by this editor it would have been utterly condemned by the warmists not trumpeted from the rooftops.
For what it is worth my twopence is here:
http://scottishsceptic.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/he-threw-the-rattle-out-the-pram/
JC says:
September 2, 2011 at 4:11 pm
“Does anybody else consider it improper for an editor-in-chief to even mention MSM reaction in a resignation statement? Am I “out there” on that?”
It is shocking! It is completely inappropriate. It is like mentioning that the author of a paper is one bodacious babe.
I think that the editor was beaten over the head by the Warmista. He published his complaints in his resignation letter. He saw no choice but to resign. As Pielke, Sr., has pointed out, the correct response would have been to publish some critical comments from some Warmista. But it is likely that the Warmista do not want to publish comments; rather, they insisted on retraction. In other words, they would settle for nothing less than smashing Spencer.
No. The editor’s main reason is not as suggested here by the author. The main reason is cleary stated rather at the top of the explanaition, where one would expect it. It says the following:
“Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims. Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell [1] that was recently published in Remote Sensing is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published.
After having become aware of the situation, and studying the various pro and contra arguments, I agree with the critics of the paper. Therefore, I would like to take the responsibility for this editorial decision and, as a result, step down as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Remote Sensing.”
So the main reason is that a bad paper had slipped through, for which the editor assumed responsibility.
Frank J. Tipler says:
September 2, 2011 at 3:00 pm
Beautiful! Nice to see a comment about Galileo and the Catholic Church by someone who has actually taken the time to acquaint himself with the history.
I wish I had an insight to add re this appalling resignation. All I can do at this point is to marvel at the breadth of insight as to motives provided here – especially those of Theo Goodwin and Hank H, who see Wolfgang Wagner’s resignation as being forced. Floor Anthoni also probably has a point about pressure coming from wealthy and powerful publishers, who want to preserve their stakes in this crooked global warming scheme.
Jeff Id says:
September 2, 2011 at 4:20 pm
My take if you don’t mind Anthony:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/345-4/
Interesting post, Jeff. I posted at your place.
Barry Woods says:
September 2, 2011 at 4:06 pm
“What sort of weird warped world to climate scientists inhabit?
How have they allowed themselves to move so far from comon sense?
What is wrong with these guys?”
Well, it is a pure power struggle and they are going to keep some papers from being published, or get them retracted, even if they have to redefine “peer review.” Some are money hungry, but most are the standard issue power hungry socialists and communists from faculty lounges all over the world. They are desperate. They cannot allow themselves to be forced into a discussion of scientific method because that would collapse their house of cards. Spencer’s work is so threatening because he presents pristine data that conflicts with the models. They are trapped in a discussion of scientific method. They have to destroy the paper.
I just downloaded the paper. Haven’t read anything but the abstract yet, but what I did read aligns with my own view of the issue: if the sensitivity question was resolved, the debate would be settled.
The current climate peer review system is as corrupt as anything in government. A self-selected, self-serving clique of grant-sucking charlatans have set themselves up as the gatekeepers of what gets published, and woe betide anyone who allows a skeptic’s paper to be published – as the editor-in-cheif found out. The only exceptions are climatologists at the pinnacle of their carreers like MIT’s Prof Richard Lindzen, who at 70 and with hundreds of publications to his credit, is difficult for the Team to keep out. Not that they don’t still try.
Dr Spencer gets tremendous credit for his persistence. And going by his abstract, he has exposed a glaring weakness in climate alarmism. No wonder they’re upset.
And the Dr. Floyd Ferris award goes to the IPCC.
Again.