My sincere thanks to everyone who has provided widespread review of our draft paper. There have been hundreds of suggestions and corrections submitted in comments and in email, and for that I am very grateful. That sort of input is exactly what we hoped for, and such input can only make the paper better, and so far it has.
Edits are being made based on many of those suggestions. My sincere thanks go to WUWT moderator Bob Phelan for help in collating the online comments to remove duplicates and group comments and corrections by category. Using that, I’m hoping to post up a revised draft, addressing many of those comments and corrections in the next day or two. I had hoped to have an update ready today, but the editing is taking more time than I thought initially. I will likely create a separate dedicated page for Watts et al 2012 so that it gets separated from the press release, and can be managed better.
An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in Watts et al. 2012 that was placed online for review. We thank critics, including Zeke Hausfather and Steve Mosher for bringing that to attention. Particular thanks go to Zeke who has been helpful with emailed suggestions. Thanks also go to Dr. Leif Svalgaard, who has emailed helpful suggestions.
The authors are performing detailed reanalysis of the data for the Watts et al. 2012 paper and will submit a revised paper to a journal as soon as possible, and barring any new issues discovered, that will likely happen before the end of September.
The idea of online pre-peer review, and likely peer review itself, is in my opinion where the future of science publishing lies. I think we’ll all learn useful lessons for that future from this experiment. As the saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
My sincerest thanks to everyone for their input and consideration.
Look for future updates, along with some technical discussions as we proceed.
UPDATE: A work page has been established for Watts et al 2012 for the purpose of managing updates. You can view it here.
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I’m laughing at a line in http://rabett.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/the-incidence-of-solipsism-among.html, by a blathering professor “Eli Rabett” who is distainful of many in the climate arena including Anthony Watts but sometimes alarmists.
In criticizing Richard Muller’s claimed flip from skeptic to believer in CAGW and other behaviour, Rabett says “This ain’t saying that the BEST project was useless, they have developed some interesting methods, and pushed the surface temperature instrumental record back somewhat. It wasn’t that others were unaware of such records, but the level of trust was, let us say, about where Michael Mann stands in Steve McIntyre’s mind.”
BTW, some support for the notion that Muller was a skeptic may be found in his 2004 “bombshell” article pointing to M&M demolishing Mann’s “hockey stick”, and his 2003 article http://www.technologyreview.com/news/402357/medieval-global-warming/.
Elsewhere in Rabett’s blather-blog is what seems to be an apt point, that many of the “adjustments” to surface temp data can be classified as “inter-calibration”.
Perlwitz says:
“My salary comes from government money.”
What a complete misappropriation of taxpayer funds.
I believe “waste, fraud and abuse” is the operative term.
Jan P Perlwitz says:
August 5, 2012 at 2:48 am
Ed_B, you wrote:
Hmm, I see a major flaw in your reasoning Mr P. The #1 and #2 sites were identified on the basis of the rating system, not on the basis of their temperature records.
I didn’t say that the class 1 and 2 sites were identified on the basis of their temperature records. I say that Watts et al. just assume that the temperature anomaly trends at the class 1 and 2 sites are the most accurate ones, compared to the class 3, 4, and 5 sites, and that the trends estimated using latter sites were wrong. . . .
The reasoning here is beyond shoddy. The sole rationale for 1) establishing standards for station siting, and 2) for grading site quality is to acquire as near an error-free control data set as possible. If the temperature records and thus the estimated trends from the “best” sites are not the most accurate, grading sites and adjusting data would be a massive waste of time from a scientific view. That would leave non-science justifications as the sole grounds for such adjustments. I do hope you really don’t mean that.
Duster said:
Why should one expect Dr. Perlwitz to do things differently than any other government funded climate scientist?