Gatekeeping at Geophysical Research Letters

Richard,
Thanks. I agree with your statement:

Whether or not Nick Stokes were right, then there is a clear bias in the publishing criteria adopted by GRL. Clearly, WHO publishes and not WHAT is submitted is being adopted as a publication criterion.

I tried to make the point earlier that certain commenters seemed to blindly be making the same mistake as the reviewers with their various ‘shoot from the hip’ criticisms of the paper, but probably I expressed it poorly. But what else should we expect from the reviewers, who after all are possibly merely a subset of the population also represented by commenters, who exhibit the same behavior? Still, it’s a little ironic.
Best regards sir.

Judith Curry said,
[. . .]
Well, it seems like ‘skeptical’ papers require a larger number of reviewers (2-3 is typical), especially after one of the original reviewers ‘defects’ and ends up as a coauthor on the paper. I’ve gone through the reviews and discussed them with Michaels and Knappenberger, and we’ve agreed on the following summary of the second round of reviews:
[. . .]

And

JC message to James Annan: kudos, and thank you.

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First, I found very noteworthy that Judith Curry closed her post on GRL’s rejection of Michaels et al paper with a heartfelt thanks to Annan, across the perceived skeptic chasm. She shows one can interact with those who you may have current disagreements without name calling and rude behavior that is seen all too often. We can all learn from her example.
Second, the anonymity of reviewers begs the kind of gate keeping (skeptic filtering) behavior Judith investigates and that we have seen in CG1 & CG2. If reviewers knew their reviews and names would eventually be made public after the decision to publish a paper or not, then It would be less likely for there to be systematic long term gate keeping.
John

Nick,

Nick Stokes says:
September 21, 2013 at 2:52 pm …

To cross the t’s and dot the i’s, I expect you are correct about the second submission. There is no question of gate keeping in the case of the second submission. I don’t think this is disputed by anyone, and I’m not disputing it here.
Talking about the first submission, Lucia says:
As for what reviewers seemed to not like: They seemed to not like the result. One reviewer suggested there must be some extra uncertainty we weren’t accounting for and that we could call in Zwiers to settle the argument about this extra uncertainty. Now in 2013– 3 years after we wrote our paper, this extra uncertainty happens not to be included in a paper whose co-author is Zwiers (as it should not be included because including it would be double counting.)
Furthermore, she says :Zwiers published almost essentially the same thing but at a point in the cycle where the rejection is less obvious that at the time we were submitting.
The problem here had nothing to do with an editor saying come back when it’s clearer. It apparently was not clearer when the paper Z coauthored was published.
You’re correct that I got sidetracked off of your main point. This happened because it doesn’t bug me that we disagree about the gate keeping. It bugs me that you offer arguments about the statistics that you know perfectly well are so misleading that they might as well be false. I mean really Nick; the flicker between accept and reject involved is entirely due to our arbitrary convention about what level of confidence we call certainty. But knowing as you do how this stuff works, you pretend that hitting 95% confidence and then dropping back to 93.2% confidence (or whatever the numbers were) means something. It’s something warmists often complain about skeptics doing; people start saying things like ‘Merchants of Doubt’ when the skeptic side uses tactics like this for some reason. Yet here you are, using the same tactics. Yeah, it bugs me, but I guess that’s my problem. I just don’t understand why somebody with your obvious intelligence and education indulges in crap like that.

Nick,
Let me add, I appreciate the time you spent discussing this with me. Thanks.

Judith Curry said,
“As the IPCC struggles with its inconvenient truth – the pause and the growing discrepancy between models and observations – the obvious question is: why is the IPCC just starting to grapple with this issue now, essentially two minutes before midnite of the release of the AR5?”
{bold emphasis by me-JW}

– – – – – – –
Why? My most favorite of all questions.
The crisis at the IPCC related to AR5, that is sufficiently traumatic to themselves that they procrastinated until it is too late to deal with it, is not the problematic climate models. Their AR5 crisis is not the potential for falsification of the models. Look at the history of climate models from the 1960s until now. Modeling efforts are still viewed as principally just a long term work in progress; a work in progress is not a crisis for them.
For the IPCC the AR5 crisis is in their own lack of confidence in continuing to sell fossil fuel alarm due to their self imposed isolation from independent, open and transparent dialog. Their crisis is they do not know how to engage with the broader community that includes skeptics; with skeptics that have succeeded spectacularly in engaging and communicating well with everyone.
The models only pose an interesting dilemma scientifically, but the AR5 crisis is its inability to handle criticism because of the IPCC’s self-imposed isolationism.
John

When the money runs out or is worthless, they will be swinging from the Windmills!! Unfortunately it will be too late for us as well because the world will be in Anarchy thanks to these SOB’s.