Journal of Geophys Res JGR

legit but got punked?  see Climate Research [von storch?](soon & B?)

<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Willie_Soon" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soon_and_Baliunas_controversy
</a> 6 eds resigned, incl main2003 bogus paper allowed B43 pivot?
guardian.com/environment/2010/feb/02/hacked-climate-emails-flaws-peer-reviewguard uk no links
...The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, as a top expert in his field, was regularly asked to review papers and he sometimes wrote critical reviews that may have had the effect of blackballing papers criticising his work.
Here is how it worked in one case.
A key component in the story of 20th-century warming is data from sparse weather stations in Siberia. This huge area appears to have seen exceptional warming of up to 2C in the past century. But in such a remote region, actual data is sparse. So how reliable is that data, and do scientists interpret it correctly?
In March 2004, Jones wrote to Professor Michael Mann, a leading climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, saying that he had "recently rejected two papers [one for the Journal of Geophysical Research and one for Geophysical Research Letters] from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised".
He did not specify which papers he had reviewed, nor what his grounds for rejecting them were. But the Guardian has established that one was probably from Lars Kamel a Swedish astrophysicist formerly of the University of Uppsala. It is the only paper published on the topic in the journal that year.
Kamel analysed the temperature records from weather stations in part of southern Siberia, around Lake Baikal. He claimed to find much less warming than Jones, despite analysing much the same data.
Kamel told the Guardian: "Siberia is a test case, because it is supposed to be the land area with most warming in the 20th century." The finding sounded important, but his paper was rejected by Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) that year.Kamel was leaving academic science and never tried to publish it elsewhere. But the draft seen by the Guardian asserts that the difference between his findings on Siberia temperatures and that of Jones is "probably because the CRU compilation contains too little correction for urban warming." He does not, however, justify that conclusion with any data or analysis.Kamel says he no longer has a copy of the anonymous referee judgments on the paper, so we don't know why it was rejected. The paper could be criticised for being slight and for not revealing details about its methods of analysis. A reviewer such as Jones would certainly have been aware of Kamel's views about mainstream climate research, which he had called "pseudo-science". He would also have known that its publication in a journal like GRL would have attracted the attention of professional climate sceptics. Nonetheless, the paper raised important questions about the quality of CRU's Siberian data, and was a rare example of someone trying to replicate Jones's analysis. On those grounds alone, some would have recommended its publication.
Kamel's paper admits the discrepancy "does not necessarily mean the CRU surface record for the entire globe is in error". But it argues that the result suggests it "should be checked in more regions and even globally". Jones was not able to comment on the incident.
Critics of Jones such as the prominent sceptical Stephen McIntyre, who runs the Climate Audit blog have long accused him of preventing critical research from having an airing. McIntyre wrote on his web site in December: "CRU's policies of obstructing critical articles in the peer-reviewed literature and withholding data from critics have unfortunately placed issues into play that might otherwise have been settled long ago." He also says obstructing publication undermine claims that all is well in scientific peer review.Dr Myles Allen, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford and Professor Hans von Storch, a climate scientist at the Institute for Coastal Research, in Geesthacht, Germany signed a joint column in Nature when the email hacking story broke, in which they said that "no grounds have arisen to doubt the validity of the thermometer-based temperature record since it began in about 1850." But that argument is harder to make if such evidence, flawed though it might be, is actively being kept out of the journals.In another email exchange CRU scientist Dr Keith Briffa initiates what looks like an attempt to have a paper rejected. In June 2003, as an editor of an unnamed journal, Briffa emailed fellow tree-ring researcher Edward Cook, a researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, saying: "Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting [an unnamed paper] – to support Dave Stahle's and really as soon as you can. Please."Stahle is a tree-ring professor from the University of Arkansas. This request appears to subvert the convention that reviewers should be both independent and anonymous.
Cook replied later that day: "OK, today. Promise. Now, something to ask from you." The favour was to provide some data to help Cook review a paper that attacked his own tree-ring work. "If published as is, this paper could really do some damage," he said. "It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically, but it suffers from the classic problem of pointing out theoretical deficiencies, without showing that their improved [inverse regression] method is actually better in a practical sense."
Briffa was unable to comment. Cook told the Guardian: "These emails are from a long time ago and the details are not terribly fresh in my mind."
Jones did not restrict his harsh criticism of papers he saw as flawed to pre-publication reviews. He and Mann also had a reputation for harsh criticism of journals that published papers they disagreed with.
In March 2003, Mann discussed encouraging colleagues to "no longer submit [papers] to, or cite papers in" Climate Research. He was angry about that journal's publication of a series of sceptical papers "that couldn't get published in a reputable journal", according to Mann. His anger at the journal had evidently been building for some time, but was focused in 2003 on a paper published in January that year and written by the Harvard astrophysicists Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas. The pair claimed that Mann's famous hockey stick graph of global temperatures over the past 1,000 years was wrong. After analysing 240 studies of past temperatures from tree rings and other sources, they said "the 20th century is neither the warmest century over the last 1,000 years, nor is it the most extreme". It could have been warmer a thousand years before, they suggested.Harvard press-released the paper under the headline "20th century climate not so hot", which would have pleased lobbyists against the climate change consensus from the American Petroleum Institute and George C Marshall Institute, both of which had helped pay for the research. Mann told me at the time the paper was "absurd, almost laughable". He said Soon and Baliunas made no attempt in the paper to show whether the warmth they found at different places and times round the world in past eras was contemporaneous in the way current global warming is. If they were just one-off scattered warm events they did not demonstrate any kind of warm era at all. Soon did not respond to Guardian requests to discuss the paper.The emails show Mann debating with others what he should do. In March 2003, he told Jones: "I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper. They've already achieved what they wanted – the claim of a peer-reviewed paper. There is nothing we can do about that now, but the last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper"But Jones told Mann: "I think the sceptics will use this paper to their own ends and it will set [the field of paleoclimate research] back a number of years if it goes unchallenged." He was right. The Soon and Baliunas paper was later read into the Senate record and taken up by the Bush administration, which attempted to get it cited in a report from the Environmental Protection Agency against the wishes of the report's authors.Persuaded that the paper could not be ignored, Mann assembled a group of colleagues to review it. The group included regular CRU emailers Jones, Dr Keith Briffa, Dr Tom Wigley and Dr Kevin Trenberth. They sent their findings to the journal's editorial board, arguing that Soon's study was little more than anecdote. It had cherry-picked data showing warm periods in different places over several centuries and had provided no evidence that they demonstrated any overall warming of the kind seen in the 20th century.The emails reveal that when the journal failed to disown the paper, the scientists figured a "coup" had taken place, and that one editor in particular, a New Zealander calledChris de Freitas, was fast-tracking sceptical papers on to its pages. Mann saw an irony in what had happened. "This was the danger of always criticising the sceptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal." But Mann had a solution. "I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues … to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board."Was this improper pressure? Bloggers responding to the leaking of these emails believe so. Mann denies wanting to "stifle legitimate sceptical views". He maintains that he merely wanted to uphold scientific standards. "Please understand the context of this," he told the Guardian after the scandal broke. "This was in response to a very specific, particularly egregious incident in which one editor of the journal was letting in a paper that clearly did not meet the standards of quality for the journal."Naturally de Freitas defends his actions during the incident. "I was never ever found to have done anything wrong, even in the rumpus over the Soon and Baliunas paper. All accusations against me were fully investigated and my performance as editor of this journal was shown to be flawless."But many on the 10-man editorial board agreed with Mann. There was a revolt. Their chief editor von Storch wrote an editorial saying the Soon paper shouldn't have appeared because of "severe methodological flaws". After their publisher Otto Kinne refused to publish the editorial, von Storch and four other board members resigned in protest. Subsequently Kinne himself admitted that publication had been an error and promised to strengthen the peer review process. Mann had won his argument.Sceptical climatologist and Cato Institute fellow Pat Michaels alleged in the Wall Street Journal in December last year that the resignations by von Storch and his colleagues were a counter-coup initiated by Mann and Jones. This is vehemently denied by von Storch. While one of the editors who resigned was a colleague of Jones at CRU, von Storch had a track record of independence. If anything, he was regarded as a moderate sceptic. Certainly, he had annoyed both mainstream climate scientists and sceptics.Also writing in the Wall Street Journal in December, he said: "I am in the pocket of neither Exxon nor Greenpeace, and for this I come under fire from both sides – the sceptics and alarmists – who have fiercely opposing views but are otherwise siblings in their methods and contempt ... I left the post [as chief editor of Climate Research] with no outside pressure, because of insufficient quality control on a bad paper – a sceptic's paper, at that."The bad blood over this paper lingered. A year later, in July 2004, Jones wrote an email to Mann about two papers recently published in Climate Research – the Soon and Baliunas paper and another he identified as by "MM". This was almost certainly a paper from the Canadian economist Ross McKitrick and Michaels that returned to an old sceptics' theme. It claimed to find urbanisation dominating global warming trends on land. Jones called it "garbage".
More damagingly, he added in an email to Mann with the subject line "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL": "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow – even if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is!"
This has, rightly, become one of the most famous of the emails. And for once, it means what it seems to mean. Jones and Trenberth, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, had recently become joint lead authors for a key chapter in the next IPCC assessment report, called AR4....... =not same as EOS?  <div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">see Mann bk Holdren Harvard aaas prez support early, also EOS am geophy jrnl</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">around p 114</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"></div>

misinterp by inhofe: <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/schwartz-study-leaves-james-inhofe-utterly-breathless">http://www.desmogblog.com/schwartz-study-leaves-james-inhofe-utterly-breathless</a>

stephen schwatz

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<a href="http://deepclimate.org/2009/07/30/is-enso-responsible-for-recent-global-warming-no/">http://deepclimate.org/2009/07/30/is-enso-responsible-for-recent-global-warming-no/</a>

Is ENSO “responsible for recent global warming?” No.

Posted on July 30, 2009 | 18 Comments

A raging controversy, one almost as hot as the record-breaking heat wave on the North American west coast, has broken out over a recent paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres), a peer-reviewed periodical published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Authors John McLean, Chris de Freitas and Bob Carter all have a long history of links to climate disinformation groups and associated PR campaigns (many of which lead back to Canadian spinmeister Tom Harris, director of the International Climate Science Coalition).

Now the trio have claimed that their analysis demonstrates that global warming is primarily a result of natural processes with little role for anthropogenic influences such as greenhouse gases.

A barrage of criticism has forced the authors and their champions to backpedal furiously. Along the way, a PDF of the paper has been removed from the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) website, presumably to rectify an egregious copyright breach. Even worse, the NZCSC parent affiliate, the above-mentioned International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), was caught substituting its preferred title for the actual one in its link to the paper.

And, of course, a look at the actual data clearly shows that the trio’s touted source of global warming, namely a 1976 “shift” in the El Nino Southern Oscillation (or ENSO), can not possibly account for the recent upward trend in temperatures. All this raises serious questions about JGR’s editorial processes, and leads to the inevitable conclusion that the paper should be withdrawn.

To be sure, much of the paper’s analysis is unremarkable. ENSO has long been recognized by scientists as the main source of short-term ( year-to-year) variability in mean global temperature. But as discussed in relevant posts at RealClimate and Tamino’s Open Mind, that fact has little bearing on the attribution of the warming trend, which is clearly anthropogenic.

Naturally, then, criticism has focused on various unsubstantiated claims by McLean et al, including this concluding sentence:

Finally, this study has shown that natural climate forcing associated with ENSO is a major contributor to variability and perhaps recent trends in global temperature, a relationship that is not included in current global climate models. [Emphasis added].

The authors also claimed that “trends” over the last 14 years were similar for global temperature and ENSO (as measured by the Southern Oscillation Index or SOI), but did not actually present any evidence for the assertion:

The post-1995 period illustrated in Figure 7c shows that the respective trends across the last 14 years will be very similar, albeit from 1997 onward the average global temperature anomaly is consistently slightly higher than the relationship would suggest.

In discussing ENSO and tropical temperature trends, the authors made this unequivocal (but unsupported) claim:

We have shown here that ENSO and the 1976 Great Pacific Climate Shift can account for a large part of the overall warming and the temperature variation in tropical regions.

In two press releases, the trio went even further. The first press release, entitled “Nature, Not Man, Is Responsible For Recent Global Warming”, was apparently produced by the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition and released through Marc Morano‘s Climate Depot website (a project underwritten by the anti-AGW pressure group Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow, better known as CFACT).

The same press release, which featured NZ “corresponding author” Chris de Freitas, was apparently pressed upon New Zealand columnist Paul Gorman by NZCSC “foundation member” Brian Leyland (who also serves as ICSC Secretary). [Hat tip to BigCityLib].

Here, Bob Carter claimed:

The close relationship between ENSO and global temperature, as described in the paper, leaves little room for any warming driven by human carbon dioxide emissions.

And lead author McLean chimed in:

When climate models failed to retrospectively produce the temperatures since 1950 the modellers added some estimated influences of carbon dioxide to make up the shortfall.

A second press release, this one from the Australian Climate Science Coalition (a second ICSC affiliate), was reproduced nearly verbatim at FarmOnline. Naturally, this release focused more on Aussie lead author McLean, who elaborated further on the implications of the study for climate models:

This paper shows that the missing component [of climate models] was the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The difference in output when using these two factors is that one predicts a continuing rise in temperature and the other predicts fluctuations according to the ENSO. The data particularly over the last 10 years indicates that the latter is correct.

Reaction, of course, was swift. RealClimate called the paper “atrocious”, while Tamino at Open Mind demonstrated that the “differencing” analysis technique employed completely removed any trends whatsoever.

Back in New Zealand, National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research principal climate scientist James Renwick told Paul Gorman:

They have used their favourite versions of the radiosonde data and don’t discuss the possible issues with some of the radiosonde and satellite data. They try and confuse the year-to-year variation and they have deliberately taken out the trend in their analysis.

Renwick also said the conclusions were unsupported by the paper’s analysis.

[The concluding statements] strike me as being questionable at best, not based on anything that’s been shown. It is a real surprise it got through the peer review.

Picking up on the same theme, James Annan focused on what appeared to be a grievous lapse in editorial process at AGU journals. Commenters everywhere wondered how such a travesty could have been published. Annan’s answer seemed the most likely – that the AGU’s system of letting authors nominate reviewers was an “open invitation to game the system.”

It’s also worth noting that Chris de Freitas has been involved in editorial shenanigans before. Half the editorial team of the journal Climate Research, including chief editor Hans Van Storch, resigned in protest over the journal’s’ refusal to repudiate an anti-AGW piece that was accepted by de Freitas when he was an editor there. And one of the co-authors of that paper, Willie Soon, just happened to have been a reviewer of the de Freitas article published by the Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology in 2002. [See PDF at p. 27].

Since he is the brother of the present CSPG Editor [Tim de Freitas], the paper was handled by one of our most capable Associate Editors, Dale Leckie, and review by Willie Soon, an Astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, the scientific editor of Energy and Environment and a climate scientist at the University of Hull, UK. These individuals are recognized globally for their contributions to climate research. They also recommended publication of the paper with minor revision. However, their names were not included in the acknowledgements at the end of the paper, which was an oversight.

Ah, yes, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, the “scientific” editor of the contrarians’ favourite periodical, Energy and Environment, is “recognized globally”, all right – mainly for her decision to publish McKitrick and McIntyre without even bothering with pesky peer review, not to mention the truly atrocious George-Ernst Beck paper on historical CO2 concentrations. Now that’s how to “game the system”!

Anyway, in the face of the unrelenting attacks, a third press release has now been issued, with control reverting to the NZCSC. (Interestingly, this is the only one of the three that is actually available in its original form).

In contrast with the claim of the first NZCSC release, entitled “Nature, Not Man, Is Responsible For Recent Global Warming”, the latest headline backpedals somewhat: “Compelling New Research Shows Nature Rules Climate”. The news item announcing the latest press release has the rather illogical title “Three Australasian Scientists Find AGW Link To Southern Oscillation”.

More hilarity awaits in the news release itself, as the authors actually claim that the whole exercise of “differencing”, with its attendant detrending, was only done to find the correct lag between the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and mean global temperature (MGT).

Regarding the various previous claims about “trends”, they have this to say:

The results in Figure 7 clearly show that the SOI related variability in MGT is the major contribution to any trends that might exist, although the McLean et al study did not look for this. The key conclusion of the paper, therefore, is that MGT is determined in most part by atmospheric processes related to the Southern Oscillation.

That’s it? That’s the “compelling” analysis that shows that a shift in ENSO “is responsible for recent global warming”?

While we absorb fully the fact that key findings of this paper are pretty much admitted by the authors themselves to be empty hand waving, here are a couple of other interesting footnotes.

The link to the NZCSC version of the paper no longer works. Most likely, this is related to the fact that the NZCSC appeared to have been in egregious violation of the authors’ copyright agreement with the AGU. That agreement permits alternate electronic publication only of unformatted versions of published articles, and these must be hosted only at the authors’ personal websites.

Even worse, in its original news item on the paper, the International Climate Science Coalition had actually substituted the title of the first press release for for the actual title in its link to the paper:....

Journal of Geophys Res JGR

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