Greg Laden: CloudGate: Denialism Gets Dirty, Reputations Are At Stake

CloudGate: Denialism Gets Dirty, Reputations Are At Stake

by Greg Laden, Culture as science -- Science as culture, September 2, 2011

There has been a major dust-up in the climate denialist world. A study published in late July made false claims and was methodologically flawed, but still managed to get published in a peer reviewed journal. The Editor-in-Chief of that journal has resigned to symbolically take responsibility for the journal's egregious error of publishing what is essentially a fake scientific paper, and to "protest against how the authors [and others] have much exaggerated the paper's conclusions" taking to task the University of Alabama's press office, Forbes, Fox News and others.

Let me break it down for you

The paper, by Spencer and Braswell, was called "On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth's Radiant Energy Balance" and it made the claim that the Earth's atmosphere releases more heat into space than climate scientists had estimated, thus removing concern about the warming effects of fossil CO2 being released into the atmosphere. The following things were also true:

(1) The paper was published in a journal, Remote Sensing, that normally does not address climate science, although there were some atmospheric scientists on the editorial board.

(2) The authors, in particular Spencer, had a reputation for being "climate change denialists" which is not a kind of scientist, but rather, a politically motivated contrarian pretending to be a scientist, in this case with some scientific credentials.

(3) Author Spencer was known to have made major mistakes in his research in the past.

(4) The research in the paper had glaring errors, discussed in more detail below.

At the time, I wrote in a Research Blogging review of the paper:

"On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth's Radiant Energy Balance" is a big ol' bunch of hooey. I eagerly await an explanation from the journal's editors, Dr. Wolfgang Wagner and Mr. Elvis Wang and the editorial board as to what they are up to with this paper.

Dr. Wagner's resignation as Editor-in-Chief, which is available in print here (pdf), is a rather startling and definitive explanation! In short, the paper should never have been published.

What was wrong with the paper?

Read more of this excellent article here:

http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2011/09/cloudgate_denialism_gets_dirty.php