Between this withdrawal and the Esper et al paper showing the MWP and RWP warmer than today, Mike Mann must be having a really, really, bad day. Even SuperMandia in tights can’t help. Thanks to Richard Tol (and Marc Morano) for this tip:
Readers may recall Steve McIntyre’s evisceration of Gergis et al. Steve’s question has now been answered. In retrospect, it looks like David Karoly’s puffed up legal whining was just that, puffed up.
Retraction Watch reports this update:
In June, we wrote about the withdrawal of a paper claiming that temperatures in the last 60 years were warmest in the last 1,000 years. At the time, we reported, following posts by others, that the authors had been made aware of errors in their work and were withdrawing it to correct their calculations.
For several months, the page housing the Journal of Climate study read:
The requested article is not currently available on this site.
It still does. But another page that should house the paper now reads, as commenter Skiphil notes:
Due to errors discovered in this paper during the publication process, it was withdrawn by the authors prior to being published in final form.
In June, one of the authors, David Karoly, told us and others he expected to resubmit the paper to the journal, and that’s what the University of Melbourne also reports on top of the original press release about the paper (also noted by Skiphil):
Scientific study resubmitted.
An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in the study, “Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium” by Joelle Gergis, Raphael Neukom, Ailie Gallant, Steven Phipps and David Karoly, accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate.
The manuscript has been re-submitted to the Journal of Climate and is being reviewed again.
========================================================
For all that posturing and mannian bluster displayed by Gergis and Karoly, in the end, it was simply bad science that required retraction. Given the screening errors Steve has pointed out, I wonder if retooling it can make it publishable again.
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Ye cannae polish a turd, but ye can cover it in glitter.
Seriously though, well done. Well and truly done
Gergis et al., had an interesting way of getting rid of the MWP; their two continuous series showed a hump that looked like some sort of MWP, so they added a third ‘U’-shaped series that was discontinuous.
They will be forced to do something about the MWP in the new paper, so just look at how they get rid of it.
“For all that posturing and mannian bluster displayed by Gergis and Karoly, in the end, it was simply bad science that required retraction.”
I wouldn’t put it quite that way. Once the errors were corrected, the paper showed that very few – too few – SH proxies could satisfy a statistiical significance test that was a bit more rigorous than the metric usually used in climate science. It actually should have been published; the problem was that the conclusion was contrary to the desired one. And since I am commenting, I will take credit for correctly predicting that the paper would be retracted. This did permanent damage to Gergis, not because she made a mistake, but because her corrected paper showed that the climate proxies that constituted the life’s work of many of her SH colleagues do not show a statistically significant correlation to temperature.
Wish we could clone Steve and put one of him in charge of review of all climate papers. The IPPC reports would look radically different.
I might have some sympathy for a scientist so throughly “owned”. However this is the woman who wrote Steve so rudely:
“Gergis has an activist past which she has recently tried to hide. She was proud to mention in her biography that her data has been requested from 16 nations: So requests from Tunisia, Cuba, and Brazil are OK; but Canada — not so much. Apparently she didn’t appreciate his expertise with statistics and told him to get the data himself from the original authors, and added ” This is commonly referred to as ‘research’. We will not be entertaining any further correspondence on the matter. “ ” jo nova
So it was resubmitted to peer review? I’m curious if they kept the same title for the paper or revised it and the abstract before resubmitting for review. It seems it would be very difficult to show anomalous late 20th century warming without their full-force screening fallacy in place. I can also imagine some reviewers being a lot harder on them the second time with such a bold claim.
“In the question of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.” ~ Galileo
“…her corrected paper showed that the climate proxies that constituted the life’s work of many of her SH colleagues do not show a statistically significant correlation to temperature.”
Which is a “significant” finding itself!
krischel asks about whether the paper should still be published as a negative result.
Absolutely, negative results should be published. Negative results are every bit as important as (and often, more important than) the positive results that get all the headlines.
Negative results, however, are situations like “I looked for X but failed to find it” (undermining the hypothesis about X) or “I looked for X using Technique Y but failed to find it” (undermining the hypothesis about Y at least). Those would be legitimate examples of dead ends that others can learn from and avoid.
This paper, however, was more like reporting “I used Technique Y to show X” when actually you didn’t use Technique Y at all. Could someone learn from their errors? Only what the reader should have learned in his/her basic statistics classes. “Garbage In, Garbage Out” is hardly a novel finding that requires yet another example in publication.
Now, you can make an argument that the corrected paper should have been published instead – maybe that would have shown negative results. That would be an entirely different paper, however.
And are the peer reviewers being questioned why they allowed it through in the first place?
The low calibre of the preachers, and of the researchers and their research, for climate alarmism is remarkable, and will, I suspect, be featured in analyses of this period of alarm for centuries to come. Future generations will mystified about how we came to this sorry pass with huge economic, educational, and political decisions being based on little more than speculations and poorly understood computer models. They’ll think we were pretty dumb.
krischel says:
October 18, 2012 at 8:55 am
So, they wrote a paper, that came to a conclusion based on faulty design and process.
Shouldn’t this paper be published, with the faulty design and process admitted to (therefore invalidating the conclusion, or at least indicating a method that doesn’t work)? It seems like retracting it is like hiding a negative result -> in this case, a clear sign that the choices they made developed an artificial hockey stick.
Not only the paper should be published, with an appendix exposing its errors fully, but the original peer reviews as well, which gave green light to publication of deeply flawed crap. What is more, I would also consider withdrawing the grant on which this hatchet job was done or else this type would never learn discipline.
Jimmy Haigh says:
October 18, 2012 at 8:40 am
And we in the US are always looking for a shovel-ready job.
Literally.
Finnish Jean S, first pointed out of that papers fatal flaws in Climate Audit boards discussion. There is lot of talented people who help Steve. I hope we can help Anthony at the same way.
Another one bites the dust!
And another one gone
and another one gone
and another one bites the dust!
MtK
PS: Love the extended comments and variations on Jimmy Haigh’s observation “Ye cannae polish a shite!”
You can’t polish one? Sorry, guys. “Can’t” is a big word, and quite a challenge to the adventurous. Let’s look at the data. Adam of Myth Busters does precisely what you “can’t” do, using water and elephant dung, IIRC. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI , and other excerpts.
mikerossander says:
October 18, 2012 at 11:12 am
krischel asks about whether the paper should still be published as a negative result.
Absolutely, negative results should be published. Negative results are every bit as important as (and often, more important than) the positive results that get all the headlines.
One of the most famous scientific experiments of all time was the Michelson-Morley experiment in 1887. Since it had been known for many years that light, like other forms of electro-magnet radiation, is a wave, scientists believed that light must travel through an invisible medium, the ether. After all you could not have sound waves without a medium for the sound to travel through and you cannot imagine the waves in the sea existing without the sea.
Michelson and Morley assumed that the Earth must be in motion relative to the ether. Even if the ether happened to travel with the Earth around the sun relative motion would still exist since the Earth spins on its axis. Because of the relative motion of the ether the speed of light should vary depending on whether or not it was moving with or against the ether but Michelson and Morley found that the speed was the same irrespective of the direction. This negative result was not really understood until Einstein came up with his theory of relativity.
Most negative results are not nearly as significant as that of Michelson and Morley. However medical researchers realise that there is a real danger of bias in the literature on drug research because positive results are more likely to be published than negative ones.
At least medical scientists are aware of this problem. Is there any indication at all that climate scientists understand it?
In his July 8 2012 CA post ‘Gergis et al “Put on Hold” ‘ Steve McIntyre said,
Even to this day, Neither Karoly nor Gergis have the professional integrity to give credit to Jean S and CA for initially bringing the fact of the error to light.
John
I believe that the relevant remark is to be found in the last reel of ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ ….. ’till the next time anyways…
Olavi says:
October 18, 2012 at 11:42 am
I too think Jean S should get at least half the credit.
Markets announced skyrocketing world turd polish prices following huge demand by warmista and democrats in recent months. Manufacturer confirms fear that production will never meet demand due to co2 emissions taxes stunting expansion, “We simply cannot afford to expand the facility and pay the exponential increase in emissions taxes.” said Dr Guff. http://www.guffsturdpolish.com/
Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving, arrogant and snide group of people. And they call themselves “scientists”. They clearly didn’t know what research was, and it isn’t apparent that they’re laying open their methods and hypotheses to help future researchers avoid their mistakes. No, they are not scientists.
rather than Karoly being exposed by the MSM re the Gergis paper being withdrawn, he’s still being given space in the MSM as an authority on CAGW:
19 Oct: Sydney Morning Herald: Bianca Hall: Shock jock Jones told to get ‘factual accuracy’ training
The Australian Communications and Media Authority yesterday released a damning report on Jones’ show, finding he breached broadcast rules by falsely claiming Australians contributed just ”1 per cent of .001 per cent of carbon dioxide in the air”…
University of Melbourne climate change scientist David Karoly said Australians were in fact responsible for .45 per cent of total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. ”Obviously, we would much rather prefer that the comments of people like Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt were, in fact, correct, so it is pleasing to get this ruling from ACMA,” Dr Karoly said…
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/shock-jock-jones-told-to-get-factual-accuracy-training-20121018-27srs.html
19 Oct: Andrew Bolt Blog: Karoly throws stone in his greenhouse
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/karoly_throws_stows_stone_in_his_greenhouse/
“At present, more than 60% of the experiments fail to produce results or expected discoveries. This high percentage of “failed “ research generates high level knowledge. But generally, all these negative experiments have not been published anywhere as they have been considered useless for our research target.
“The main objective of The All Results Journals focuses on recovering and publishing negative results, valuable pieces of information in Science. These experiments are considered a vital key for the development of science and the catalyst for a real science-based empirical knowledge.”
http://www.arjournals.com/ojs/index.php?journal=index&page=index
There should be an All results Journal of Climate Science. Although some think that ‘Nature’, ‘Science’, PNAS etc already are…..
There are other journals of negative results including ecology, evolutionary biology and biomedicine;
http://jnr-eeb.org/index.php/jnr
http://www.jnrbm.com/
“I never allow myself to become discouraged under any circumstances. I recall that after we had conducted thousands of experiments on a certain project without solving the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, expressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed ‘to find out anything.’ I cheerily assured him that we had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn’t be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way. We sometimes learn a lot from our failures if we have put into the effort the best thought and work we are capable of.”
Thomas Edison in an interview with B. C. Forbes for American Magazine.
The most important words for CAGW activist science are, “if we have put into the effort the best thought and work we are capable of”, for in pursuing the cause of CAGW, failures of method, design, data, honesty and reasoning in research papers are commonplace. In CAGW the lightbulb never worked.
Isn’t it funny how a biased cargo cult pseudo climate scientist is eventually caught out being a biased cargo cult pseudo climate scientist?
Oh well, that’s statistics for ya.