Slashdot Mirror
Journal Editor Resigns Over Flawed Global Warming Paper
Layzej writes "Remote Sensing Editor-in-Chief Wolfgang Wagner resigned earlier today (PDF) over a global warming study published in his journal that was said to cast doubt on global warming models but was later found to be flawed. Wagner stated that the paper most likely contained fundamental methodological errors and false claims. He further expressed dismay over how 'the authors and like-minded climate skeptics have much exaggerated the paper's conclusions in public statements.' The author of the paper, Dr. Roy Spencer, has responded to the resignation."
I don't know why you guys argue about this. The world's gonna end in 2012 anyway, who cares about the climate?
Wolfgang Wagner didn't quite his job. He quit what was most likely a volunteer position as editor.
So, he resigned without bothering to find out for sure whether the paper in question contained fundamental methodological errors and/or false claims?
I can see resigning as editor because "I screwed up by allowing fundamentally unsound science into my magazine", but I have a hard time with resigning because it MIGHT have been bad (but he's not sure).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Well if I remember correctly Dr. Spencer's conclusions at best would have questioned whether some satellite imagery could detect the effects of global climate change; however his one paper was heralded by many to be the penultimate refutation of climate change supposedly negating the research of many, many scientists.
As an analogy in paleontology, scientists have assembled early hominids in terms of lineage based on techniques like carbon dating and skeleton features. They have made slight errors in the past on dates and relationships between hominids. An exaggeration would happen if a scientist with an Intelligent Design agenda questioned the dating on one of the hominids and then the ID community would proclaim that evolution has been disproven.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
For most journals this wouldn't be an editor's fault, unless they used bad judgment choosing the reviewers, or ignored negative reviews and published it anyway.
Reviewers wouldn't resign because they're not part of the staff, but the editors should avoid inviting someone to review again if they passed a bad paper. (And that can happen for non-ideological reasons. It's really hard to get qualified people to invest the time required for a thorough review. I've gotten feedback where one reviewer wrote two pages and another wrote two sentences.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The paper in question was written by Roy Spencer. Aside from his views on climate change he's also a vocal proponent of intelligent design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Spencer_(scientist)#Views_on_intelligent_design and what he calls "the theory of creation". While in a strict formal logic setting ad hominem attacks are not useful, they are a relevant heuristic to decide if someone knows what they are talking about. In this context, it seems pretty clear that Spencer lets his ideological allegiances dictate beliefs instead of careful scientific thinking. There's a certain point where you just stop assigning large amounts of weight to claims made by an individual because they've demonstrated repeated failure before. Spencer is past that point.
He is also an intelligent designer.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
For all the drama of the editor's resignation letter, he seems to be awfully vague about any actual flaws in the paper. Citing argument against it somewhere on the intarwebs as a reason not to publish it is like asserting that no pro-AGW papers should ever be printed because of wattsupwiththat.com.
Any relatively intelligent warmists want to break down for us specific flaws in the paper?
The following is taken from Desmogblog
Spencer and the “Interfaith Stewardship Alliance”
Spencer is listed as a “scientific advisor” for an organization called the “Interfaith Stewardship Alliance” (ISA). According to their website, the ISA is “a coalition of religious leaders, clergy, theologians, scientists, academics, and other policy experts committed to bringing a proper and balanced Biblical view of stewardship to the critical issues of environment and development.”
In July 2006, Spencer co-authored an ISA report refuting the work of another religious organization called the Evangelical Climate Initiative. The ISA report was titled A Call to Truth, Prudence and Protection of the Poor: an Evangelical Response to Global Warming. Along with the report was a letter of endorsement signed by numerous representatives of various organizations, including 6 that have received a total of $2.32 million in donations from ExxonMobil over the last three years.
Satellite Research Refuted
According to an August 12, 2005 New York Times article, Spencer, along with another well-known “skeptic,” John Christy, admitted they made a mistake in their satellite data research that they said demonstrated a cooling in the troposphere (the earth’s lowest layer of atmosphere). It turned out that the exact opposite was occurring and the troposphere was getting warmer.
“These papers should lay to rest once and for all the claims by John Christy and other global warming skeptics that a disagreement between tropospheric and surface temperature trends means that there are problems with surface temperature records or with climate models,” said Alan Robock, a meteorologist at Rutgers University.
Spencer and the Heartland Institute
Spencer is listed as an author for the Heartland Institute, a US think tank that has received $676,500 from ExxonMobil since 1998.
The Heartland Institute has also received funding from Big Tobacco over the years and continues to make the claim that “anti-smoking advocates” are exaggerating the health threats of smoking.
Spencer and the George C. Marshall Institute
Spencer is listed as an “Expert” with the George C. Marshall Institute, a US think tank that has received $630,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.
Naomi Oreskes, who wrote Merchants of Doubt has quite a bit to say about the George C. Markshall Institute and their anti-science "scientific research."
CONGRATULATIONS, OBSCURITY, YOU ARE THE FIRST TO BE BANNED FROM THIS SITE. THE CHARGE IS EITHER (1) CHRONIC IGNORANCE, OR (2) MALICIOUS OBFUSCATION. YOUR CHOICE.
Reading the whole discussion is like watching the dick-waving comments go back and forth on Youtube, or like watching a transcript from a Bill O'Reilly episode where the guest speakers just yell at each other until someone gets their mic cut off.
This kind of petty bickering has got to stop if we're ever going to make any progress in this country again. We have to stop putting value in the antics of drama queens. It may have been cute in high school politics but this kind of crap is going to render our country irrelevant if it keeps going on much longer. (And for the pedants and assholes, I am American, so I use the term, "our country," to refer to the United States).
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Man made Climate Change is the biggest scam in history.
If it's man made who the heck are we affecting every planet in our solar system also?????
I really love the way it is possible nowadays to instantly find the answer to that, which you must have known about but you didn't bother to list here. It's an excellent illustration of exactly what this case is about. Scientific truth requires you not just to not just mention your own evidence but also explain away the evidence on the other side. Probably you guys need to start reading things by Feynman. Here's one to start you. Have a look at how the article I referenced not only points out your statement is wrong (Mars and Jupiter are not warming) but then goes on to address in detail the evidence behind your claim (the warming on other planets is explainable by other means).
However the difference is, slashdot posters don't have science as part of their job title. That's why you don't need to resign and the guy who's running the journal should. When he decided to take on something outside his area he had an extra duty to be sure he had consulted the areas experts. Probably he did his best and he failed deeply. If he continues on as the journal's editor then people will have difficulty believing the other articles in the journal have been correctly verified.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
The only gravy train I see around here is the Heartland Institute gravy train, funded to a rather huge sum by Big Oil. And shockers, Spencer has a close association to them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Acutally, Wagner also took issue with exaggerated claims that /the authors/, and other skeptics made about the paper. This is an obvious allusion to being played by a political machine. I would probably resign as well.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
LOL. The paper Phil Jones refers to did get included in the IPCC report so they're not as powerful as you might believe.
Lemme guess, we're going to hear more about Al Gore, the pseudo-skeptics' favorite whipping boy.
No, just that the consensus in 2000 to 2003 was that we'd continue warming and have ever-increasing amounts of hurricanes. And neither has happened. Now that reality has deviated from what the models said should happen, we should suspect the models are wrong and go back and look at the conclusions from those models...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
If the Spencer paper has problems isn't that just an opportunity for someone else to publish? Why would the editor resign other than for politics?
The journal promises to release only peer reviewed papers. The editor's job is to ensure that happens. Normally the reason bad papers are published is because the peer review failed to work properly, but in this case it's because the proper peer review failed to take place. If he didn't clearly own up to his mistake it would be impossible to trust this editor to ensure peer review in future. His continuing to edit this journal would not only damage the journal (which could not claim to have an appropriate editor) but could also damage his future chance of editing journals since there would be no clear way to show he learned from his mistake.
Resigning is not just good for the journal, it's good for the guy himself who can now apply for future editing positions and be clear that he got there on merit and with the people knowing fully what he had done before.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
That would probably be the recent CERN CLOUD paper that was also trumpeted as refuting anthropogenic climate change.
Holy strawman Batman! (not you, him)
Literally thousands of papers, all dealing in numbers, have shown that the climate is warming. Almost all of them (well more than consensus) show that human activities are responsible. These are the "scientific arguments" that the editor refers to - the thousands of papers that make the case for AGW. Meanwhile, the author's rebuttal discusses a different opponent - those "generalities and talking points". He does not seem to be addressing flaws - systemic or particular - in any individual or collective model of the long-term climate. I've read his paper, and while I'm not a climatologist, I have studied climate and I do know quite a bit about academic research. Not properly addressing related work, particularly when you refute it, is amateur hour. And he doesn't do it properly. You can't say "they're wrong" without extremely detailed specifics, none of which he provided. It's all in broad strokes. The point is to refute your critics before they say anything, as in "yes, we know we don't have a number for this factor but here's why we think it's unimportant".
And this paper is only 11 pages long, two of which aren't content. A little short to refute 3 decades worth of work by thousands of people. While this is a very specific topic (confounding factors getting in the way of observing the impact of the sun), it has been extensively studied. Saying "they screwed up in their understanding", without a ton of detail, is either a high-school level mistake, or violent handwaving. And it shouldn't have been published without those details, which is why the guy responsible is resigning.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
"have much exaggerated the paper's conclusions in public statements"
You mean in much the same way climate change promoters exaggerate claims from other papers?
Actually, several recent studies have indicated the consensus in academic journals over the last 15 years has understated the actual effects both in terms of overall temperature change and cloud trends. I suppose you could argue there is no difference between a supposed scientist and author of a study on global warming and the press, but for those of us that pay more attention to scholarly journals than mainstream media sound bites, the difference is stark.
You don't have to be a creationist to be an AGW skeptic, but it helps.
Then again, you only need to work for a creationist, or oil company, and that's just as good.
I get a kick out of you guys who registered as Slashdot users a few days ago just to refute climate science. You even go to the trouble of making one, maybe two short little posts on a few other stories before you get to the real reason you came here.
Be honest - which of the "New Media Strategies" outfits do you work for? How well do they pay? There are three of you here in this one discussion, all who joined Slashdot within a few days just to post in the climate stories, all posting exactly the same tone in the same language, so I assume you're all the same guy. With the "yourmommycalled" username you didn't even bother to post comments to any story but the climate stories. I guess you're still learning the ropes. Is it hard to keep your usernames straight?
Look, I know it's hard to make a buck right now and recent grads are having a real hard time of it, but don't you feel a little bit like a shit for doing what you're doing? Like someone who's giving blowjobs for ten-spots in a bus station bathroom? Because that's kind of what it seems like to me. You might be a perfectly decent guy who just needed the work, but at some point, you've got start to think that there has to be better ways to make a living.
I wish you luck, friend. It can't be easy.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yet another idiot. I tried to give you a simple analogy to consider and you want to show us just how smart you are. Want to show us smart you are yet you failed to mention that southern hemisphere warms at a much slower rate than the northern hemisphere because the southern hemisphere is mostly water covered and the high latent heat of water prevents the temperatures from rising as much. BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY YOU DIDN"T DENY/MENTION THAT THE PLANETS ARE NOT WARMING AS YOU CLAIM. THE PLANETS ARE MERELY EXHIBITING SEASONAL CHANGES AS I POINTED OUT. GO BACK TO LISTENING TO Rush/Beck/Hannity/Fauxnew so you cvan get a stab at talking point.
"Maybe the Earth's climate goes through cycles... nah, that's too crazy of an idea.."
yeah, and every single one of those cycles had specific physical causes. If technological civilization had been around, they would ahve figured out why.
We do have such knowledge and data now. We also know the specific cause, and we have ruled out all sorts of other causes.
You can't just say "whah it could be the purple flying monster effect" and "we don't know anything about climate", when the work of decades of scientists and the physical laws we know which predict successfully everything else we can measure about the planet say the same bleeping thing.
You need to show an alternative which has BETTER explanatory power and better empirical justification from measurements. Not just throw out "oh in the past climate changed" which is true, and the implication that if it's also changing now humans have no responsibility for it, which is preposterous.
It's like saying that because trees fell down in forests in the Jurassic, then a team of loggers with power saws can't be responsible for felling a forest grove, despite clear evidence from satellites that they were there, and they were using power tools, and the phsyics of the power tools has been discovered, and we measured the exhaust from the use of their power tools.
I.e. "Oh it could be a natural tree-falling-down-cycle!" is plainly idiotic. And this is EVERY BIT THE SAME as climate change denialism with our current state of knowledge.
Considering that 2005 and 2010 are tied for the warmest year on record (according to GISS) it's pretty hard to justify saying it hasn't warmed in the past decade.
We'll see, won't we. Too bad Dr Spencer can't take his graph back before 1979. I suspect it would break down pretty fast if he could.
Problem is, there aren't any satellite measurements prior to 1979 - most of the "data" used in climate change study are from proxies and are notoriously sketchy and variant.
I'd pay more attention to those things if they actually posed a physical mechanism for them. Right now it just looks like statistical manipulation to me.
That's what a lot of it is. Predicting temperature changes to hundredths of a degree accuracy when your proxies and thermometer measurements are accurate to a degree or more is just statistical wanking...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!