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Due to errors discovered in this paper during the publication process, it was withdrawn by the authors prior to being published in final form.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.
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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.
dp:
At October 18, 2012 at 10:43 pm you say
No.
Gergis is typical of what passes for “serious climate science” and that is why her paper passed peer review. It is where the money is and, therefore, she will stay there and will not “move in another direction”: at her age she has to ‘make a living’.
Her paper was deconstructed by the blogosphere where real climate science is being conducted by the likes of Steve McIntyre who are revealing “serious climate science” to be advocacy dressed-up as science.
And your attempt to imply otherwise fails.
Richard
OT: This retraction reminds me: how is the Mann’s threatened lawsuit against Mark Steyn progressing?
TimtheToolMan wrote:
“I’d love to know what the revised result was. And I do wonder why the paper was retracted rather than published with corrections.”
The goals of this study were 1) show a SH hockey stick by meta-analysis of multiple climate proxies, 2) show consistency between NH and SH paleo with the 20th century most prominent, and 3) raise the bar on statistical significance validation by using detrended data. If I remember the numbers correctly, Gergis et al has something like 37 proxies that they claimed met the significance test after detrending. Jean S. at CA tried to replicate the results, but his math showed only 6-8 (depending on how you keep score) met the requirement. Jean S. was right.
Now look at Gergis’ position. She could not go forward with ~7 proxies and claim any hemispherical significance. She could not simply decide to use un-detrended data, since there was narrative in the draft stating that removing trends was important to prevent circular reasoning. The 37 climate proxies were developed by her colleagues. Publishing the paper meant that at least one peer-reviewed paper would exist stating that ~30 of the 37 most important SH climate proxies did not follow temperature well enough to be used after detrending. I would imagine that the authors of the newly downgraded ~30 papers were furious. She was boxed in.
This paper was a litmus test of the honesty of its authors.
They could have fixed the analysis and let the results speak for themselves. That would have been science.
Instead they’ve proven themselves the pandering hacks some of us expected them to be.
Matt Skaggs:
Thankyou for your excellent, clear and succinct summary at October 19, 2012 at 9:21 am.
I write to draw attention to it.
Richard
Matt writes “The goals of this study were 1) show a SH hockey stick by meta-analysis of multiple climate proxies, 2) show consistency between NH and SH paleo with the 20th century most prominent, and 3) raise the bar on statistical significance validation by using detrended data.”
So in essense the Gergis paper reconsidered, found the result that most (by far) of the proxies considered were not in fact proxies of temperature. That is an outstanding result and Gergis should have recast her entire paper around that. By rights she ought to be a skeptic now.
In the intererest of climate ethics I think it important we hear chief inspector Peter Gleick’s opinion on this matter before drawing any negative conclusions regarding intent. /