The saga continues

Roy Spencer has indicated he will be preparing a paper in response to Dessler’s response to Spencer and Braswell’s original paper in Remote Sensing – although he jokes it will take longer than six weeks to get peer-reviewed (because sceptical papers are by definition heresy and must not be given any credibility, © K Trenberth).

However, his initial comments on Dessler are here. The following extract is interesting from the point of view of integrity:

Quoting Dessler’s paper, from the Introduction:

“Introduction
The usual way to think about clouds in the climate system is that they are a feedback… …In recent papers, Lindzen and Choi [2011] and Spencer and Braswell [2011] have argued that reality is reversed: clouds are the cause of, and not a feedback on, changes in surface temperature. If this claim is correct, then significant revisions to climate science may be required.”

But we have never claimed anything like “clouds are the cause of, and not a feedback on, changes in surface temperature”! We claim causation works in BOTH directions, not just one direction (feedback) as he claims. Dr. Dessler knows this very well, and I would like to know:

1) what he was trying to accomplish by such a blatant misrepresentation of our position, and

2) how did all of the peer reviewers of the paper, who (if they are competent) should be familiar with our work, allow such a statement to stand?

I can guess it’s because Dessler’s peer-reviewers are probably all on “the Team”, and they can’t be bothered to actually read the heretical paper Dessler is referring to (or if they did it was treated with contempt), and anyway, who cares if we misrepresent what he wrote? It’s only Spencer, after all.

Double standards at work, as usual.

You review my paper…

Whereas a sceptical paper could take up to TWO YEARS (e.g. Lindzen and Choi). I guess it’s all a question of who you know and what side you’re on, right?

WUWT has the full story.

UPDATE: Luboš Motl goes to work on the rebuttal here. Enjoy – here’s an extract:

Well, I am really amazed that people who have self-evidently no idea about physics – and about basic reality such as the impact of clouds on temperature – could have been accepted to the college: Dessler was allowed to study at Rice University. It’s just utterly incredible how hollow skulls like his might have been accepted to a university.

Let me summarize the basic errors in Dessler’s crackpot rants:

• he incorrectly assumes that clouds have to “trap” heat if they want to influence the temperature
• he incorrectly assumes that the cloud cover at a given place isn’t an independent degree of freedom; instead, it is a function of the carbon dioxide emissions
• he incorrectly assumes that it is illegitimate to test the predicted correlations of various physical models by comparing the simulations with the observations; instead, he thinks that it is legitimate to hide his head into the sand and claim that there is nothing to be seen here
• more generally, he seems to incorrectly assume that one may be a complete imbecile such as himself to write relevant papers about the energy flows in the atmosphere.

More interesting reading this morning on this disgraceful episode:

• Maurizio Morabito explains the link between the editor, Wagner, and Kevin Trenberth, which explains why Wagner felt the need to apologise
• Watts Up With That picks over the carcass of scientific integrity
• Roy Spencer has more thoughts on the war waged against his research
• Judith Curry asks has anyone learnt anything from Climategate?
• A great cartoon by Josh:

Josh nails it

Bullied by the warmists

It really does beggar belief. Climate science reduced to the level of playground bullies, with journal editors feeling they have to resign for publishing a paper which the “consensus boys” failed to exclude by their cosy pal-review process.

But not only that, we now read in an article on Daily Climate by Kevin Trenberth, John Abraham and Peter Gleick, the following astonishing statement:

Kevin Trenberth received a personal note of apology from both the editor-in-chief and the publisher of Remote Sensing. Wagner took this unusual and admirable step after becoming aware of the paper’s serious flaws. (source)

So because a warmist scientist considers the paper has flaws, a journal editor chooses to resign and apologise. Let’s turn the situation around for a moment: I would assume that Spencer and many other sceptical scientists would have a few issues with some of the consensus boys’ papers too, but I don’t see any editors rushing to resign because of that, do you? No, of course not.

Note that this has nothing to do with the worth of the scientific claims in the paper itself – this is all about procedure, and the integrity of the scientific process. The proper steps would be for Trenberth et al to rebut Spencer’s claims in a further, peer-reviewed, paper, or alternatively seek a retraction from the journal. Neither of these things has happened. A few comments on a blog is enough now – provided you’re on the warmist side.

Such is the power and influence wielded by the alarmist coterie, and the almost total politicisation of climate science, that almost without lifting a finger, a journal can be intimidated into providing a grovelling apology for daring to publish a paper which challenges the consensus. Truly jaw-dropping.

One has to ask, why are they so afraid? Is their CO2 driven construction so fragile that it cannot withstand a paper which, according to the alarmists, is total rubbish anyway? Why must they shut down scientific discourse, if the sceptics case is so weak, rather than let it be given the public ridicule it so obviously deserves? You can draw your own conclusions – I have mine.

There is much, much more – Roger Pielke Sr takes the whole thing apart here – read it all.

However, Maurizio Morabito, commenting on Pielke Jr’s blog, provides a cheering conclusion to the ridiculous extremes we have now reached:

“If “post-publication discussions of a scientific paper in the media or on blogs” can now “be used as the basis for subsequently re-evaluating the scientific merit of that paper within the scientific peer review process”, it just means that blogs and the media are now to be considered on-par with peer-review as ways to evaluate the scientific merit of a paper.

In other words, all people that support Wagner’s resignation are telling the world that the old complaint against skeptics “your article hasn’t been subjected to peer-review!” is not valid any longer. A blog or an interview will suffice.

Methinks only Gavin could come up with such a spectacular own goal.”