Editor Steps Down For Publishing Denialist Paper

Peer-reviewed journals are a pillar of modern science. Their aim is to achieve highest scientific standards by carrying out a rigorous peer review that is, as a minimum requirement, supposed to be able to identify fundamental methodological errors or false claims. Unfortunately, as many climate researchers and engaged observers of the climate change debate pointed out in various internet discussion fora, the paper by Spencer and Braswell [1] that was recently published in Remote Sensing is most likely problematic in both aspects and should therefore not have been published.


After having become aware of the situation, and studying the various pro and contra arguments, I agree with the critics of the paper. Therefore, I would like to take the responsibility for this editorial decision and, as a result, step down as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Remote Sensing.
 
The paper at issue, “On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance”, was authored by Roy Spencer and William Braswell.  It was pretty clear several months ago that Spencer was trying to sneak it through the peer review process, refusing to name the journal that had accepted it so as to head off attempts by outraged climate scientists to have the thing yanked. 
 
Wolfgang Wagner, the editor in question, has behaved honourably, stepping down so as to protect the good name of his journal (Remote Sensing).  Mr. Spencer and Mr. Braswell's only accomplishment, other than grabbing a few headlines on Fox news,  has been to damage the reputation of that journal.  And I say "only" because at this point it is hard to imagine how their own scientific reputations could become more sullied by this incident than they already are.

Hard Rockin Denier' Endorses CRU Data!!!

By night AGW Denier and Creationist Roy Spencer rocks out with his band Christian rock band EcoFreako. By day, he maintains the UAH (University of Alabama) database of daily satellite temperature readings .


Lately, Roy has been engaged in a little side-project--comparing CRU's surface readings to his satellite data to see how they match up. His preliminary conclusion:

I’ll have to admit I was a little astounded at the agreement between Jones’ and my analyses, especially since I chose a rather ad-hoc method of data screening that was not optimized in any way. Note that the linear temperature trends are essentially identical; the correlation between the monthly anomalies is 0.91.

Furthermore, and more specifically, there seems no evidence of an urban heat island effect:

Of course, an increasing urban heat island effect could still be contaminating both datasets, resulting in a spurious warming trend. Also, when I include years before 1986 in the analysis, the warming trends might start to diverge. But at face value, this plot seems to indicate that the rapid decrease in the number of stations included in the GHCN database in recent years has not caused a spurious warming trend in the Jones dataset — at least not since 1986. Also note that December 2009 was, indeed, a cool month in my analysis.

So: validation from a most unusual source. Unfortunately, the EcoFreako website seems to have disappeared. However, here's a link to MP3s of them playing "Earth Has A Fever" (sung to the tune of "Cat Scratch Fever", and "I Want To Mock Al Gore All Night", sung to the tune of...well, you figure it out.

Hottest July Ever?

Though Dr. Spencer tells us, via Roger Pielke Sr., that the readings might be skewed a tad high by satellite drift, nevertheless it looks very much as though July 2009 will go into the record books as the hottest July ever recorded on a worldwide basis. Note that the yellow line represents July 2005, and that the deep red line for July 1998 remains buried in the pack. These two years, depending on where the numbers come from, are generally considered to be the hottest on record.

Whatever the final July ranking, it seems pretty clear (as Roger Pielke Jr. suggests here) that the notion that the planet is going through a phase of global cooling is no longer sustainable.

Pielke Sr. Responds...

...to continuing record high temperature readings from the UAH satellite. Specifically, I asked him when we might know the result of this "short term test" of Roy Spencer's hypothesis (vs.the IPCC's, read through link). He responded::

Thanks for alerting me to your weblog. I contacted them [UAH], and they reported there is a drift in the part of the diurnal cycle that the AMSU sensor samples. I have urged them to write a weblog on this issue to clarify as all of us are comparing with their long term average.

In the July analyses of UAH and RSS (which is from a different set of satellites without the drift) we will see if this record warm anomaly appears. I have been informed that since 1992, the RSS and UAH data closely agree with each other. The differences that do occur provide us with a measure of the uncertainty in the assessment of these climate metrics.

All of us should follow this data closely (along with the upper ocean heat data) as I feel a much better consensus can be achieved if we focus on this information, rather than the use of a global average surface temperature trend to assess global warming.

And later:

On the two hypotheses, however, we need to go through the current El Nino to see if the heat remains elevated or returns to a long term average. The upper ocean heat data will also be key in this assessment.

Given the other side of El Nino: some time in 2010 or 2011.

Roy Spencer Refuted By Own Website?

As noted here, July 14th proved to be the warmest day on record, according to data at the UAH website, a website co-authored by none other than Dr. Roy Spencer. Until, it would appear, July 18th:

A particularly interesting take on this comes from Roger Pielke Sr. He wrote on July 16th:

This record event is an effective test of two hypotheses.

Hypothesis #1: Roy Spencer’s hypothesis on the role of circulation patterns in global warming (e.g. see) might explain most or all of the current anomaly since it clearly is spatially very variable, and its onset was so sudden. If the lower atmosphere cools again to its long term average or lower, this would support Roy’s viewpoint.

Hypothesis #2: Alternatively, if the large anomaly persists, it will support the claims by the

IPCC and others (e.g. see Cool Spells Normal in Warming World) that well-mixed greenhouse gas warming is the dominate climate forcing in the coming decades and is again causing global warming after the interruption of the last few years.

Only time will tell which is correct, however, we now have short term information to test the two hypotheses. The results of this real world test will certainly influence my viewpoint on climate science.

I guess the question is: how long must we wait for the results of this real world test? At this moment, it seems to be going against Mr. Spencer.

More Shuffling The Deck Chairs On The Good Ship Denial

International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) Executive Director Tom Harris is looking for an Executive Director for their American afficliate, to be known as the Climate Science Coalition of America (CSCA).

With Dr. Roy Spencer’s acceptance of the Chair position for the new Climate Science Coalition of America, we are now seeking candidates for the Executive Director position, the person who will actually lead the organization from an administrative perspective. Please see the following link which describes the sort of person we are seeking and forward this on anywhere you think would help us in our search for the ideal candidate:

[Here] is the job ad.

Thanks very much!
Tom Harris
Executive Director
International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC)
P.O. Box 23013
Ottawa, Ontario
K2A 4E2
Canada

The ad is self is quite revealing. PR/Advocacy/looking good on the Rush Limbaugh show are all desirable requirements. So are skills at designing "communications packages for the general public, especially young people."

Giant Snakes And Global Warming...Together At Last!

Yesterday, I touched briefly on the subject of Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the 40+ foot fossil snake discovered recently in a Colombian coal mine. Interestingly enough, the discovery of such a huge snake has implications for the AGW theory. From Not Exactly Rocket Science:

The giant snake's measurements even tell us something about the climate of this ancient world. Snakes are cold-blooded. Their body temperature, and therefore their metabolism, depends on their surroundings, which slaps an upper limit onto the evolution of giants. At any given temperature, a snake can only become so large before its metabolic rate becomes too low to support its bulk. If Titanoboa was bigger than living species, its environment must have been much hotter.

Head estimated that the tropical rainforests where it lived must have had average yearly temperature of 32-33 degrees Celsius, far hotter than the equivalent temperatures for modern tropical forests. These estimates suggest that the forests of that period were experiencing greenhouse conditions. These conditions, part of the planet's history, have been written in stone, left for us to glean among the petrified bones of an ancient snake.

Now, so what if the tropics at the time were quite a bit warmer than today? Well, according to researchers like Lindzen and, more recently, Spencer, the Earth possesses an

...“adaptive infrared iris” that opens and closes to keep the earth’s temperature fairly steady even in light of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. It was proposed to work something like this—when the temperature in the tropical oceans begins to warm up, it causes in increase in the amount of low-level water clouds and an even greater decrease in total coverage of high-altitude ice clouds. Since ice clouds are net warmers (that is, they trap more outgoing longwave radiation (heat) than they reflect away incoming shortwave (solar) radiation) and water clouds are (generally) net coolers (reflecting back to space more incoming solar shortwave radiation than they absorb outgoing longwave radiation), more of the latter and a lot less of the former leads to a net cooling, and the temperatures of the tropical oceans decrease. However, cooler tropical ocean temperatures lead to less low-level (water) clouds and more high altitude ice clouds. This configuration tends to lead to a net radiation increase and to higher temperatures. And the cycle starts over again. Lindzen’s moniker “adaptive infrared iris” refers to the mechanism in which the tropical ice cloud cover opens and closes in response to tropical ocean temperatures to allow more heat to escape to space when the oceans are warm and less heat to escape to space when the oceans are relatively cool (much like the iris of an eye which opens and closes in response to varying light levels to try to maintain a constant level falling on the retina). Lindzen et al. proposed that the iris acts as a global thermostat that will keep the earth’s temperatures from rising very far even as atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases increase.

In other words, there are planetary feedback mechanisms that kick in whenever temperatures become too hot or too cold, and keep the global average temperature in essentially the same place (Gaia fights back! as it were).

...which is to say that a tropical temperature high enough to allow the existence of Titanoboa ought not to occur. If Jason Head and co. (the paper's authors) are correct, then Lindzen's Iris Theory, not in particularly good shape these days to start with, takes another hit.

Dot Earth's Andy Revkin also suggests that the discovery of Titanoboa challenges

...those using the specter of tropical warming — including the Amazon rain forest turning into a desert — as another reason to move swiftly to curb greenhouse gases.

...because clearly this much hotter tropical forest was a "steamy thriving" place.

Interesting stuff.

Oh, and read the dinosaur list archives for speculation on the answer to the most important question: In a Fight, who would win? Giant snake or T-Rex?

Creationist, Rocker, And Sometime Scientist Roy Spencer Stands With Rush On Global Warming

T'other day NRO blogger Jim Geraghty lamented the problem "so-called global warming" posed for Republican Presidential candidates:

Rush Limbaugh is the King Leonidas of the conservative movement, but I'm struck by how regularly he jokes about the concept of global warming. A lot of his radio talk show brethren are in the same boat, saying day after day, "hey, cold weather today. So much for global warming."

The problem is, they're only preaching skepticism to the converted. The independents and the centrists and the soccer moms and everybody whose vote is needed in the general election is already convinced that it's happening. Whenever there's a big storm or unusual weather, they buy into it. If you put the finest skeptical scientists and researchers from the Competitive Enterprise Institute and American Enterprise Institute into a room with a couple hundred Americans, and let them talk until they're blue in the face, I'm not sure how much you would move the dials.

(To which I say, thank god Americans are finally learning to tell the boyzz from Exxon apart from real scientists. But I digress...).

Now, Creationist and rocker Roy Spencer has taken time off from bashing Al Gore in song to pen an ode of appreciation to Rush Limbaugh and his gut:

But in the case of global warming, Rush Limbaugh has decided to go with his gut instinct. Scientists can be (and have been) spectacularly wrong when pontificating on natural systems as complex as the Earth’s climate — or the human body. This instinct has served Rush well over the years, and in the case of global warming, I agree with him.

This position is also consistent with Rush’s recent emphasis on conservative principles over specific politicians. He frequently reminds listeners that America’s success has not come from its politicians, but from its people. Not from soaring (yet ambiguous) speeches, but from enduring ideals, creativity, hard work, and most of all — freedom.

But what if sticking to one’s guns on such an issue is just enough for the Republicans to lose the White House? Well, what is more important for the future of America: the party affiliation of the next president, or the decision to let government control how much energy people and business can use from now on?

Well, I am all for it when Conservatives are ready to go down on principle. Geraghty's preference, that Republicans

...get past the argument of whether it's happening, and get into the debate over what to do with it, and put GOP support for innovation up against Democratic carbon taxes.

...is a much harder argument to combat, since "encouraging innovation" is at the core of any response to AGW whether left or right, politically. It also leaves open the possibility of acting rhetorically while doing nothing in fact and hoping the population doesn't notice, which has been the Harper government's approach and not entirely unsuccessful (recent polls show a significant portion of Canadians are willing to give the Harper "plan" a few years before they judge it a success or failure).

Hard Rockin' Creationist Solos For Skeptics!

As we wait for Creationist and climate change skeptic Roy Spencer, another of the Inhofe 400, to publish his latest on cloud cover feedback, we can groove to his Christian Rock Band EcoFreako playing "Earth has a fever" (done to the tune of "Cat Stratch Fever") and "I Want To Mock Al Gore All Night" (done to the tune of "I Want To Rock And Roll All Night").

God'll get you for these, Roy.

h/t TT.

Climate Change Skeptic And Creationist Has New Paper Out

Many people have noted the similarity between some of the tactics employed by Climate Change Denialists and Intelligent Designers. Specifically, sow doubt and demand that the media "report the controversy". But before hearing about Roy Spencer, who has guest posts on both Roger Pielke Sr.'s Climate Science and Anthony Watt's "Watts Up With That Blog" , as well as a new paper out, I had never heard of a climate change denier who was in addition an acknowledged IDer. In 2005, Mr. Spencer wrote:

And finally, despite my previous acceptance of evolutionary theory as "fact," I came to the realization that intelligent design, as a theory of origins, is no more religious, and no less scientific, than evolutionism.

Now, astrologers, water witches, La Rouchians...the ranks of the deniers is filled with their like. But a Creationist? Surely Climate Change Denialism is on the march!

And seeing this guy appear on Watt's site doesn't surprise me. What is strange is the connection with Roger Pielke Sr., who appears to have forgotten the old adage about laying down with dogs and waking up with fleas.

But since he's stooping to this level: yo Roger! I have a midget who insists its all down to C02, and a talking duck that taps out climatological equations with his beak. Can they do a guest post too?

h/t to Steve Bloom.