Earlier today I checked in to the WUWT dashboard and was surprised to see that WUWT had the #1 story on all of WordPress.com this morning:
Tonight, checking in again, I discover not only is WUWT still near the top with a follow up story, but the Spencer and Braswell story is dominating the top 10, labels mine:
The last time I’ve seen anything like this, where climate blogs dominated the top ten, was just after Climategate broke. And it’s a significant feat, as these numbers from the wordpress.com home page illustrate:
The best of 367,768 bloggers, 338,405 new posts, 290,328 comments, & 78,762,938 words posted today on WordPress.com.
I’ll bet the editor Wolfgang Wagner of Remote Sensing had no idea this sort of viral reaction would happen. On the downside, it’s a bad move for them and for the integrity of the peer review process, because IMHO, this was handled almost as badly as CRU/UEA handled Climategate itself. As Dr. Roger Pielke Senior says:
The place to refute a published paper is in peer-reviewed papers, not in blogs (or the media). If the paper is not robust, it appropriately should be responded to by paper, not by the resignation of the Editor. In my view, he made a poor decision which has further damaged the scientific process of vetting new research results.
On the upside, this debacle has placed thousands more fresh eyes on the Spencer and Braswell paper, as well as on the folly of the “failed peer review” process claim by the resigned editor of Remote Sensing.
And yet, we have no peer reviewed rebuttal or comment, just a lot of hand waving and noisemaking and claims the paper is “flawed” without any peer reviewed rebuttal to back up those claims. Pielke says:
Moreover, if there is a fundamental flaw in their work, then publishing a Comment in Remote Sensing would have resolved the issue. That is how science is supposed to work. As it is, Wagner has further politicized climate science.
I have a feeling that this won’t end the way Wagner thought it would.
Pielke Sr. has a new post up on an exchange between him and Peter Glieck of the Pacific Institute. It is well worth a read to get some perspective on how the other side thinks.
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FYI, a conservative blog call Power Line has a story on this issue so it is getting out in the bloggosphere. Unfortunately, it doesn’t reference WUWT.
Well the good old Beeb have now weighed in with it’s standard bias and an ad hominem attack on Spencer at the end.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14768574
I particularly like the “Publishing in “off-topic” journals is generally frowned on in scientific circles, partly because editors may lack the specialist knowledge and contacts needed to run a thorough peer review process.” statement.
Isn’t the journal concerned the one that deals specifically with subject in hand?
As per the MSM response beggars belief whilst at the same time being entirely and depressingly predictable.
How does Wagner like having what’s left of his fragile credibility resting in the hands of a future Dessler paper.
I bet Andrew mentions Venus cloud cover.
The scientific implications of Spensor and Lindzen’s papers is that planetary clouds increase and decrease to resist forcing changes rather than to amplify forcing changes.
The extreme AGW hypothesis assumes the planet amplifies forcing changes.
Lindzen calculates based on an analysis of top of atmosphere radiation changes that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will result in 0.7C warming as opposed to the IPCC’s predicted 3.5C warming.
If Spencer and Lindzen are correct a significant portion of the 20th century warming was due to something else besides CO2.
The something else that caused the 20th century warming is ironically solar wind bursts that remove cloud forming ions via the mechanism called electroscavening.
Now the solar wind bursts have abated and the sun is moving towards a deep multi decade magnetic cycle minimum which reduces the strength and extent of the solar heliosphere. The solar heliosphere deflects cosmic rays which create cloud forming ions. There are cycles of long term climate change that correlate with changes in cosmogenic isotopes that are produced by the cosmic rays in the paleo climatic proxy record.
So what will happen now to the planet’s climate based on what happened in the past is the planet will cool.
I am curious what type of back peddling will occur if the planet cools, How does one hide the decline?
Will Gore retract the comparison of climate skeptics to racists? Will the general press stop comparing climate skeptics to Holocaust deniers? Will scientific journals publish scientific papers that explain scientifically why cooling is occurring?
http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~dougla…ress_final.pdf
Recent energy balance of Earth
Recently Lyman et al. [1] have estimated a robust global warming trend of 0.63 ± 0.28 W/m2 for Earth during 1993–2008, calculated from ocean heat content anomaly (OHC) data. This value is not representative of the recent (2003–2008) warming/cooling rate because of a “flattening” that occurred around 2001–2002. Using only 2003-2008 data, we find cooling, not warming. This result does not support the existence of a large frequently-cited positive computed radiative imbalance (see, for example, Trenberth and Fasullo [2])
The detective work by davidmhoffer in the ‘BREAKING’-Thread is, imho, outstanding:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/02/breaking-editor-in-chief-of-remote-sensing-resigns-over-spencer-braswell-paper/#comment-735950
His conclusions make sense, I think, and outweigh anything we’ve heard from the ‘other’ side.
The resignation report was in Saturday’s Toronto Globe and Mail. Straight report, no editorial conclusion either way. I’d say the MSM doesn’t know what to do about it, another sign that technically they are still light-weight. As always.
tallbloke says:
September 4, 2011 at 3:00 am
“They [the team] are losers, further undermining the pre-eminent position as a knowledge system science held in the eyes of the world before overarching considerations of money, politics and status started to destroy the trust people had in it. Shame on them.”
Brilliant post. However, keep in mind that this phenomenon is not new under the sun. Stalin did it with Lysenko. So, science under a communist system had lost its lustre by the 1940s. Science, like democracy, is a fragile little sprout. In my humble opinion, science in the free world is now suffering for the first time since the Enlightenment in the same way that science suffered under Stalin.
@ur momisugly Viv Evans, indeed Davidmhoffer’s comment is brilliant!
@ur momisugly Doug Proctor, usually the Globe and Mail will editorialize this with a green spin that would make your 1200rpm washing machine envious… LOL
I admire the many insights into THE defrauding of the scientific method via the biased academic(?) journals, debased peer review processes, and models that are knighted(sainted) to be equal to or above experimental or observational data. All unforgiveable and worthy of extensive discussion.
In addition to the scientific problem, the political is at least as important and political timing seems everything here. “Getting rid” of Roy Spencer’s (e.a.), and any other critical papers, by any method approved by apparatchiks, gives them the “right” to deny this science for the IPCC AR5 review, I understand. AGW triumphs once again. (Wish I could link to the commenter who mentioned this purpose. Sorry)
Commenter Latitude brings up another aspect of the issues: September 4, 2011 at 7:05 am “You would think a business that is based on selling subscriptions and advertising based on those subscriptions, would have a better business model. If they would open up the flood gates, turn it into a real debate……their business would boom.”
Unfortunately, we know it is not business (subscriptions) they are about, or the business of scientific journals — advancing science through the scientific method. It is about crony (not capitalism) bureaucratism (professors who defraud science for political purposes are just one cog in the bureaucratic-control wheel) They are willing to sell their souls for high salaries, grant packages, perks, never having to scientifically prove their “research”, pensions (often based on invested “funds” in cap-n-trade like schemes or “green energy”), etc.
Who “owns” these fraudulent journals, who is on the Board of Directors or Editors, who can require an editor to resign? Follow the money. When there are institutions involved, to whom do they make their political-lobbying contributions? (I believe all institutions of higher education should be forbidden in this area.) How much do they receive in the way of “scientific” grants (kick backs,) the majority of the funding of which is allocated to General Operating Funds, not to the “science”..
It is time not only to “air the scientific truths”, but to name names and to identify those who refuse to abide by the scientific method. We need additional information to the important focus on an editor who “chooses to” resign. Osrtracism can be a powerful tool.
My question is : Did he jump or was he pushed?
The Climategate emails referred to getting rid of editors who did not perform adequately in support of AGW. It certainly seems out of proportion to resign over such a matter as this.
The problem is not really peer review. It is what Pachari and his accomplises have tried to portray peer review as, in the media and public eye.
Peer review was never more than a preliminary fact check to try to stop ridiculous papers and catch a first round of obvious mistakes. It was the climate boosters that tried to paint it as the ultimate standard of scientific robustness. It never was and never will be anything like that. They did this only because they were fully aware they controled most of the climate journals. Over time they have lost control on occassion or had to deal with new journals. But incidents like this show the world just how agressive their campaign to control “peer review” is.
I have to wonder if Wagner simply penned this rant as a protest to being strong armed by the climate mafia. He practically spelled out exactly what happened in the piece, and he would have to be dense to not realize this would create a fire storm of outrage. He may have fired a very effective shot at the people who forced him out.
He just wrote a piece saying:
“we had high quality reviewers, the paper can’t be retracted on errors, and we followed all rules……but I’m still now not the editor, and the only real issue I can point to is the reviewers might have agreed with the “denier” author…”
He is spelling it out. I think he is very pissed he was told what to do and started this controversy as a protest. Or he is a complete idiot. But even an idiot should have seen this coming.
Anticlimatic
“…..My question is : Did he jump or was he pushed?……”
A simple exercise, look at the climategate emails when then are trying to discredit the other journal and paper. Now apply those tactics to a this journals’ editor and board, and think about how they would react to the pressure Mann and company were planning. I don’t think there is any doubt that they were pressured. I also don’t think Wagner went willingly. He could have easily written this editorial and remained editor, so why resign? He walked the plank. And I think he tried to tell the world exactly what happened without upsetting his career.
With all the attention this paper is getting, I hope maybe some neutral scientific society, or some scientific elder statesmen, can weigh the claims and issue a verdict.
See Roy Spencer’s followup: A Primer on Our Claim that Clouds Cause Temperature Change September 3rd, 2011 …and Why Dessler, Trenberth, and the IPCC are Wrong
I came across this quote by Rosie Redfield regarding the poorly done work on arsenic-incorporating bacteria which seems also to apply in the present controversy…
No Science editor that I know of resigned over this, but it’s interesting that an editor would overrule reviewers, or that a first-rate researcher would believe they would do so, in order to garner publicity. The present instance is nearly a mirror image of what Dr. Redfield refers to–an editor actually resigning over not over-ruling reviewers. What I find as the most interesting parallel of the two stories however, is the apparent extent to which an agenda of a funding agency skews the science. We are warned endlessly about this and “Big Pharma”, but NASA?
YMMV, but this strikes me as being a highly unethical “strategy” on the part of the Gore machine that deserves some MSM attention and scrutiny.
Not just unethical but potentially illegal; it at least violates Twitter’s terms of service, I suspect.
And thanks for noticing that post btw.
I think Dr. Pielke Sr. rocks!
Dr. Roy Spencer is (in my not-too-humble opinion), the best climatologist we have.
Thank you Anthony
Hey, I know I’m way late to the conversation, but kudos to DN (September 4, 2011 at 2:46 am). That is the most succinct and best written synopsis of the whole climate science thing I think I’ve ever read.
Seems to me Wagner got scared from some tough pressure from the other side. Sure would like to see Wagner’s emails from them.
Don’t know if anyone has seen this, but Roger Pielke Sr. has castigated Kevin Trenberth, John Abraham, and Peter Gleick for posting a “hatchet job” on Roy Spencer and John Christy.
The essay of Trenberth, Abraham, and Gleick is little more than willful character assassination. Even the title of their piece, “In his bid to cast doubts on the seriousness of climate change, University of Alabama’s Roy Spencer … (bold added)” tries to miscast Roy Spencer as dishonest and biased. The authors are beyond shame.
In his commentary, RP Sr. mentions that Tom Karl, head of the NCDC, led a committee whose apparent “major goal … was to discredit [Spencer and Christy].” It’s hard to understand how such corruption could have spread so far, so fast, among scientists. In subverting science, these people are willfully attacking the very foundation of rational thought and liberal freedom.
Brandon:
“He just wrote a piece saying:
“we had high quality reviewers, the paper can’t be retracted on errors, and we followed all rules……but I’m still now not the editor, and the only real issue I can point to is the reviewers might have agreed with the “denier” author…”
Hi Brandon. Where did you find this comment?
Nick Stokes says:
September 4, 2011 at 3:35 am
“this was handled almost as badly as CRU/UEA handled Climategate itself”
Who handled what badly? Prof Wagner, who is not a climate scientist, resigned from his role as Editor-in-Chief
That’s true, he’s a climate modeler.
Prof Wagner resigned from his role as Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing He wrote a resignation letter in RS. Semantic analysis of that letter evaluates to: ‘it is intolerable because it contradicts the CAGW narrative’.
As many here have remarked, resignation seems an inappropriate action – but also, the letter itself conveys disapproval but in a half-hearted way – it is singularly devoid of ‘passion’ for such a dramatic gesture.
Conspicuously, there is no rational justification for wagner’s resignation. Conspicuously there was no attempt to explain it as a rational action. The ‘reasons’ he gives for resigning are basically none.
If he was not motivated by the contents of the paper, he was motivated by some other influence.
I just wonder whether which category of motivator it was. It appears not to be idealism or ego – lack of passion (his letter was hardly a rant) suggests it’s a kind of mask for something else that won’t be mentioned..
The other common 2 are money and compromise.
Was he paid to do this or was he blackmailed or both?
He didn’t do it out of concern for virtue. He makes that pretty obvious.
It really smells like he was ordered to resign under penalty…
I don’t think Wagner was mostly pushed. I think the warmists who contacted him convinced him that they were right, and he quit mainly because he didn’t want to be in the conflicted position of having to defend what RS had done while privately disagreeing with it. And also because he was embarrassed that he’d helped to de-marginalize the skeptics and thus hurt the chances of controling CO2 emissions–so he figured quitting would be an act of contrition.
I can see how this could have happened. The warmists have a marvelous way with the bafflegab–they’ve pulled the wool over many eyes. They SEEM to have all the answers.
(It would be tough for Wagner if he later gets unconvinced, or if some neutral panel rules in favor of S&B. Faked out!)
Stu
Sorry for the mix up, I was just paraphrasing the basic tenants of the rant from wagner to make a point, I should have left out the quotation marks, my mistake. Duh.
He did say the reviewers were respected, he never actually suggested retraction or pointed out any error and he did say they followed the rules for submission to the letter. He also really only laid out that the reviewers might have shared a similar view with Spencer as the real problem. I think he is pissed he resigned/got fired. But that is just my opinion. It would be hard to write a letter that would be better designed to trip the radar and outrage of the “denier” community.