Journal Editor Resigns Over Flawed Global Warming Paper 396
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."
You know... (Score:3)
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Re:You know... (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know why you guys argue about this. The world's gonna end in 2012 anyway, who cares about the climate?
Actually, Jesus is (re)scheduled to come back before this year is out, so all us Lisp programmers won't even care about next year's weather, let alone climate change.[*]
[*] Lisp being God's preferred programming language, as everyone should know. (Presumably making the righteous choice on that will get you rapturized as surely as making the righteous choice about which religion to join.)
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But which church is right? The Schemers or the CLOSets?
Re:You know... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, that's not far from the truth when it comes to the likes of the Know-Nothing "Hyperchristian" Republicans. You know the ones, the Palins, the Perrys, the Bachmanns, all the ones that sign up for the Dominionist/Reconstructionist "christian warrior" woo-woo Rushdoony claptrap.
Because they honestly, truly, believe that the end of the world is nigh and you may as well loot the planet before you're yanked bodily from Earth. The future of Earth is going to be full of raining blood and plagues anyway. Worrying about the future of the Earth in 100 years is a load of horse-shit to them because they'll be sitting at the right hand of Jesus while the Tribulation is happening.
Or so they hope.
--
BMO
Re:You know... (Score:4, Informative)
The only things those kinds of people believe in is their own greed. Once their rich, grow old and die, as far as they are concerned the world can choke to death on the pollution they created to get rich, even if it takes their own children and grand children's lives.
Those people are either narcissists or psychopaths either way, they don't care about the chaos they create, the lies they tell or the people that die along the way to them getting rich. A substantial Tea Bagger segment of the Republican party has turned into nothing more than 'the bug con' with it's political members not interested in anything else but getting rich and will tell any lie, no matter how ludicrous, to do it. Even when caught out they, just like your typical conman shameless repeat it, again and again and again.
As the rest of the world watches on via the internet, those blatant narcissist are making a public mockery of the US political process.
Re:You know... (Score:5, Insightful)
>The only things those kinds of people believe in is their own greed.
See, that's what's so great about Dominionism. It justifies their greed. Really, it does. Suddenly the whole worship of Mammon is A-Okay and righteous. This peculiar bit of philosophy is exhibited in the Merchant Church or otherwise known as the "Prosperity Gospel." It's all Dominionsm and Reconstructionism. It is the seeking of power and money on Earth to advance a particular brand of "christianity" (I don't dare give it a capital C) that is diametrically opposed to anything you or I have read in the Bible. And they mean to force all of us to toe the line, by the sword if necessary.
I am an agnostic/soft atheist, but I particularly like the book of John, and I can't see where they come up with the justification for any of their bullshit. They are the American Taliban.
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BMO
Re:You know... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it's the Republicans that are invariably the Dominionists/Reconstructionists and that if you read this paper: http://www.discernment-ministries.org/ChristianImperialism.htm [discernmen...stries.org] , you find that the Dominionist/Reconstructionist beliefs are the exact ones you hear coming out in their speeches /daily/.
It's not my fault that the Republican Party has been on mission in the last 20 years to purge rational people from its ranks. Look at Huntsman. He's the only one running for President that takes science seriously. Because of this, he is a "RINO" and his candidacy is dead in the water as a result.
Sorry if the truth fuckin' hurts, but there it is.
--
BMO
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Most likely? (Score:3)
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).
Re:Most likely? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Most likely? (Score:5, Informative)
Let's take the mitts off here. Spencer is a posterboy for the Heartland Institute, and so basically an oil company shill.
ID (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:ID (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd say being an ID advocate is a damned good litmus test for rationality. Actually claiming that Creationism can be scientifically validated simply because you remove the word "God" from your assertions and replace it with "Intelligent Designer" suggests a troubling lack of rational capacity.
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I'd say being an ID advocate is a damned good litmus test for rationality.
I've known some really smart and rational people that were strong believers in Christianity. I used to find this dumbfounding, but it just seems that a certain percentage of people are able to compartmentalize their scientific skepticism from religion.
Check out Neil deGrasse Tyson's video [youtube.com] on God of the Gaps and scientists.
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I can think of two off-hand -- a good friend from high school (very bright), and my freshman honors calc prof.
However, neither one was especially in-your-face about it; they did a really excellent job of leading by example.
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Yes, we should.
PS: Religious folks can and do accept evolution.
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We should leave the science to the scientists. Considering literal creationism to be scientifically bullshit does not make one an atheist. Not considering it to be bullshit doesn't make one a bad scientist, either, but pretending it has anything to do with science (which the term Intelligent Design inherently does by recasting it as a scientific hypothesis) does.
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Science is more than a convenient process. It's a way of thinking about the world rationally. Creationism isn't science.
I have no faith in somebody's intellectual capability if they are willing to throw reason out the window because it challenges their beliefs. Particularly if that person is a scientist. Creationism is almost the embodiment of unscientific thinking - roughly, an unwillingness to question the world and the state it's in. How does one think scientifically about one part of the world, and not
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Yes.
And. no.
You can believe in a God and do science. The moment you give your god a falsifiable property, be ready to have it tested.
Understanding both evolution, and the start of the universe in no way means you can't have belief.
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And we should use that as a litmus test for deciding whether or not someone could possibly be rational about any science topic?
Shall we leave the science only to strict atheists?
Absolutely. Even the most rarefied, intellectualized faith, or even the most ecumenical, encompassing spirituality is still irrational; they are incompatible with the title of "scientist."
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An extreme position to take, but I can respect your vehemence in taking it.
I'll sadly note that we have precious few atheist scientists in the historical record - and somehow, we've still had science progress :)
I'll further note that CAGW, without a concise statement of a falsifiable hypothesis, is simply intellectualized faith :)
Re:ID (Score:5, Informative)
The main problem is that Spencer and Christie have been wrong and made serious mistakes before about climate, not just biology. They previously published results from spacecraft data which purportedly showed much less warming than the ground stations, implying that the ground stations were contaminated by 'heat island' effects, etc etc.
Turned out that they were just plain wrong; they didn't apply the proper calibration for the satellite orbit. When this was done (not by the original authors unfortunately), the revised satellite data and ground station data showed consistent behavior and with results in agreement with mainstream climate change results (i.e. it's happening).
So it appears that Spencer now likes making intentional and difficuilt-to-find mistakes in order to push his anti global-warming position. The mainstream results have had far more cross-checks and internal consistency and external consistency. That's why they're correct.
There are a very small number of contrary scientists (the same ones, nearly always, Spencer, Christie, Lindzen) as opposed to thousands of others whose names you don't know.
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For sake of playing the science game, though, could you concisely state your understanding of a falsifiable hypothesis of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming?
John Nielsen-Gammon has a characteristically wry response [chron.com] to this classic canard:
Observation: analyses of global surface temperatures indicate a long-term warming trend.
Hypothesis: the surface of the Earth is warmer than in the past.
Testable prediction: phenomena sensitive to Earth’s surface temperature will reflect that increase.
Results: satellite temperature measurements show similar warming; most glaciers are shrinking; lakes and rivers are freezing later and thawing sooner; oceans are expand
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Spencer's results, conclusion or methodology anywhere near as much as how it was announced - in FORBES, of all places, by a senior shill for the Heartland Institute. I lost count of how many times "alarmist" was written in a half-page article.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/07/27/new-nasa-data-blow-gaping-hold-in-global-warming-alarmism/ [forbes.com]
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Oh poop. Science needs to be evaluated on it's scientific merits, not on the basis of how it was funded.
Re:Most likely? (Score:4, Informative)
Go to his bloody blog, where three or four actual researchers are doing that right now. But do it quick before Spencer bans them and deletes their posts.
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Before you start jumping up and down on the ad hominem, Roy Spencer's arguments are taken seriously, and responded to in detail (as your google search will easily uncover). The problem is that Roy and his ideological peers never
Re:Most likely? (Score:5, Informative)
As his critics have pointed out, Spencer has basically just created a model that confirms his own claims. More to the point, he avoided going to a mainstream journal with this paper, obviously knowing that he'd get laughed out of the room. Where someone is going to try to publish pseudoscientific bullshit, this is the preferred method is to do so via some obscure journal, thus proclaiming "We are published!"
See the Synthese [evolvingthoughts.net] debacle for a similar ID stunt.
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Re:Most likely? (Score:5, Informative)
FTA: "...research was not properly peer-reviewed and wrongly accepted"
The core of the matter is the paper was given credence by its publication, which is supposed to be backed by a review process. It never received that, the reputation of the publication was harmed and the person responsible is resigning.
Re:Most likely? (Score:4, Informative)
With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate sceptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements, e.g., in a press release of The University of Alabama in Huntsville from 27 July 2011 [2], the main author’s personal homepage [3], the story “New NASA data blow gaping hole in global warming alarmism”
I guess Wagner felt he was the victim of a climate denial drive-by shooting. We see this phenomena all the time in intelligent design. Publish a "rebuttal" in a little known non-mainstream journal, and then press-release the hell out of it. Note that the author, Roy Spencer, is also an intelligent designer too.
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You could just jump to the most emotionally convenient conclusion.
And that is what makes a skeptic a denier.
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Isn't that what makes an CAGW believer a denier of natural climate change as well? :)
No, because non-anthropogenic causes of warming are thought of and examined to see if they can explain what is happening. So far there is a strong preponderance of evidence that they cannot, and that human-created emissions can.
And that's not exactly a convenient conclusion for many of us. Convenient would be if it were natural (or just not happening at all), and we could hope it'd just go away on its own before causing any big problems, or was just a minor blip in our otherwise mostly stable climate. Th
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Yeah, we're doing a shitload of fiddling. I look at claims of "80% reduction of CO2 emissions by whenever", and I start listing all the things I know we would have to change in our own life, and it's a hell of a lot. That 30mpg car, would need to be a 150mpg car. Or a 75mpg car driven half as much, or carpooled constantly. The house has to be re-insulated to a fare-the-well, not sure what to do for heat.
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There is a book called "Heads in the Sand", which goes into the psychological mechanisms of denial, which I understand very well from my academic background. The first rule of denial is to project your intellectual shortcomings onto anybody who questions you. This is really quite bizzare when seen from the outside, but the person doing it really cannot tell that they are doing it. In this way, the emotionally confronting e
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If we cannot discuss falsifiability when talking about science, we've left the realm of science.
Now, if you'd like to continue calling names, and avoiding argument on the merits (as perhaps is useful to do as a lawyer), please feel free. If you'd like to learn more about the disturbing political nature of the resignation, you can read here:
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/comment-on-the-resignation-of-wolfgang-wagner-as-editor-in-chief-of-the-journal-remote-sensing-in-response-to-the-public [wordpress.com]
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Brett Buck is posting on Slashdot because he's getting threatened behind the scenes by a global shadow organization of ex-KGB who have kidnapped members of his family pending his cooperation with their Slashdot forum agenda.
Making grandiose claims without the slightest hint of factual basis or evidence is FUN!
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Are you hoping to evade the question in this manner?
I asked a pretty straightforward question, so are you going to give a straightforward answer?
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You got to figure it out: Wrong paper showing global warming is true gets you promoted Wrong paper showing global warming is false gets you fired^W to resign.
Do you know ANYTHING about what happened at all??? Aside from issues with the peer review process, Wagner took issue with exaggerated claims that the papers /authors/ made in public press releases.
On what basis do you think the guy was fired? Do you have anything at all? Wager was very specific about why he resigned.
If you are in doubt, then go read about the issue, and not just from Andy Watts' website, but from original sources.
Only someone in denial can interpret a protest resignation as proof of
Amazing (Score:2)
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Yes the earth goes in cycles, however there is an increase of temperature OUTSIDE those cycles. That is man made climate change.
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"Ever wonder why Greenland is named 'Greenland'?"
Marketing.
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Ever wonder why Greenland is named "Greenland"? Maybe the Earth's climate goes through cycles... nah, that's too crazy of an idea..
Actually, the likeliest and most often cited reason the place's obvious misnomer is because Erik the Red was trying to entice more Scandinavians to migrate there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Greenland#Norse_settlement [wikipedia.org]
Not that I disagree with you about Earth's climate going through cycles.
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"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
Why did he resign? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why did he resign? (Score:5, Insightful)
And I should add...
Even passing a good review doesn't mean that a paper is correct. Reviewers are not expected to re-do the authors' work, and some ideas that seem sound at the time of publication just turn out to be wrong.
But if a paper states something that is known to be wrong at the time it is reviewed, the reviewers should catch it. Assuming they're qualified.
Roy Spencer again (Score:5, Insightful)
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Who gives a flying fart if he supports ID. A whole shitload of great science has been done by religious people. Like Einstein and Newton. It is a complete red herring to assert that his science is no good because he also holds religious beliefs.
The science is either right or wrong on it's own merits. Period.
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First, Einstein wasn't religious in any traditional sense. He did occasionally have his deistic moments, and his views changed over time. (He was like most humans in this regard. There's a mistake in viewing him as some monolith. That's why there are so many duelin
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But it still doesn't fly.
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Applying hueristics to decide what science is worthwhile?
How about an article written by someone with these credentials:
XXX is a principal research scientist for University of Alabama in Huntsville. In the past, he served as Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASAâ(TM)s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. XXX is a recipient of NASAâ(TM)s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
That's Roy Spencer. So your Heuristics are a big old wonking FAIL.
You win the award for the mos
Flawed? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
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Read Spencer's own blog, where three or four other climatologists tear his claims apart. But do it quick. Spencer, I suspect, won't let any post that isn't from like minded ideologues survive long.
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For all the drama of the editor's resignation letter, he seems to be awfully vague about any actual flaws in the paper.
If you want a peer-reviewed rebuttal you'll have to wait till next week when Andrew Dessler's paper is due to appear in Geophysical Research Letters -- the wheels of peer review grind slowly, which is why blogs tend to get used for more instantaneous responses. If you are happy with a non-peer-reviewed rebuttal by two respected climate scientists go here [realclimate.org].
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.
The difference here is that Anthony Watts is not only not a respected climate scientist but not in fact a climate scientist at all.
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Realclimate is difficult to take seriously - simply asserting that a model is too simple seems a critique that should be heeded by the various climate modelers out there who don't have any sort of realistic cloud modeling at all. It's not an identification of a flaw, it's hand waving.
I certainly can tell that Realclimate wishes to interpret the results in a different light than Spencer, but they haven't addressed the central questions regarding the flaws of the models we currently have. It seems less of a
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Any relatively literate reactionaries want to do their own research?
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I did the research, and didn't find any flaws. Now do you want to enumerate the flaws you've found, or do you simply expect people to take it on faith?
Nothing Remotely Sensible... (Score:2, Informative)
The following is taken from Desmogblog [desmogblog.com]
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 d
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I don't give a rat's ass where someone get's their funding from. Calling out a person on those grounds is a classical red herring and is totally irrelevant as a means of evaluating their science.
What is important is whether or not the science in the article is right or not. Nothing else. Not the personality of the author, what he writes in his blog, how the article was publicized, yadda yadda.
The fact is there has been damn little written on the most salient point - the science.
So what if some guy editing t
Uggggggh! (Score:3)
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).
Re:Uggggggh! (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, more to the point, read his critics, who he seems determined to ban. They are making cogent points, calling him on his methodological failings, and he's basically sticking his fingers in his ears and shouting "Neener neener neener!" and basically claiming that the IPCC is screwing with him.
As I said, Spencer is a shill, and his peers know this. He's the Michael Behe of climatology, except even Behe is smarter than to try to get any of his ID bullshit published in any biology or molecular biology journals. Of course, Behe's benefactors don't have the vast sums of wealth that the oil companies do.
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Mod parent up (Score:2)
Politics suffers under a chronic failure to listen, and the most puerile level of argumentation demands
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Hmm. I've read Spencer's retort and the comments that follow. He issued a ban on a *single* individual on this topic. More to the point, I could barely find any cogent criticism of his work in that discussion. The one half-way salient link I did see was from William Connolley [google for this guy's history on Wikipedia for some fun] to a realclimate.org article, a site so infamous for selective editing and outright censorship of awkward questions that people have had to set up other sites to fully recor
Another way of looking at it (Score:2)
For every study that says global warming is real there is funding behind it and researchers who need more funding to keep doing what they're doing. The same can be said for studies disproving global warming theories. At this point Occam's Razor could be applied. Is it more likely that humans are affecting the climate or is it more likely that Nature with far more power than humans have yet achieved is the cause?
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"Is it more likely that humans are affecting the climate or is it more likely that Nature with far more power than humans have yet achieved is the cause?"
What a stupid fuckin' argument. Riffs:
- "Did humans cause the dodo to go extinct, or did Nature with far more power than humans do so?"
- "Did humans bring disease to Native Americans, or did Nature with far more power than humans do so?"
- "Did humans create the internal combustion engine, or did Nature with far more power than humans do so?"
Fucking please.
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But, to quit your job because you made a mistake would leave the banking industry with only janitors. ...maybe that is a good idea...
Yeah, I wish they'd quit their jobs. Or better yet: got fired. And then tried, sentenced and locked up. In death row.
Re:How is this different? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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his one paper was heralded by many to be the penultimate refutation of climate change
What would have been the final point that refuted climate change? Was there another paper planned?
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That would probably be the recent CERN CLOUD paper that was also trumpeted as refuting anthropogenic climate change.
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It's interesting to note that the intersection of the sets of AGW deniers and creationists is not a null set.
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Re:How is this different? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:How is this different? (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re:How is this different? (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
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Do you understand the concept of statistics? If I have a run of 5 heads when flipping a coin, does that automatically mean that the coin isn't random?
And if you're looking for predictions that came true, there are quite a few of them. One of the more obscure ones is that some of the botanical organizations had to update their maps of where certain species thrive - generally moving everything northward.
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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.
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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...
Re:Proof! (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [skepticalscience.com], 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 [lhup.edu]. 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.
Re:Proof! (Score:4, Informative)
LOL. The paper Phil Jones refers to did get included in the IPCC report so they're not as powerful as you might believe.
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Re:AG School of Energy Conservation (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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But I guess that since Wagner resigned, and you are a "skeptic", then you already _know_ that Wagner resigned because of some Al Gorian related conspiracy. You should really look up the dictionary and read the definition of "skeptic" again. Then read the definition of "denial". My guess is that you will do neither, and nor will you learn the real story b
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"climatology gravy train"? ?????????? Ha ha ha ha ha!
Have YOU ever tried to get a scientific grant? Or get a professor job at a research institution? Scientific research takes the largest amount of work and largest intrinsic skill compared to the reward of any professional vocation.
It's way way way way easier to spin some pseudo-BS and get a nice retainer from the crankiest right-wing-welfare organizations/
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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 -
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Fair enough, I was being hyperbolic and I freely admit. However, the fact remains:
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Not politics. Roy is blaming politics, but the rational is pretty clear, and reasonable.
The paper wasn't even pulled.
The blog is interesting. Roy is basically resulting to insults and banning to stop rational. Typical of someone who projects how they would r onto others. act
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2011/09/editor-in-chief-of-remote-sensing-resigns-from-fallout-over-our-paper/#comments [drroyspencer.com]
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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.
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Can we... (Score:2)
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Resign vs. retract. Was the resignation due to a 'lazy' selection of reviewers on a politically hot (no pun intended) topic?
Wagner says no in his resignation, but the typically level headed John Neilson Gammon (who has published with sceptics such as Watts and Peilk) says yes: http://blog.chron.com/climateabyss/2011/09/spencer-braswell-and-the-review-process/ [chron.com]
Are Spencer's results based on an allegedly "overly simplistic model"?
Allegedly.