In his bid to cast doubts on the seriousness of climate change, University of Alabama’s Roy Spencer creates a media splash but claims a journal’s editor-in-chief. 

The science doesn’t hold up.

by Kevin Trenberth, John Abraham, and Peter Gleick

Reposted from the Daily Climate

The widely publicized paper by Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell, published in the journal Remote Sensing in July, has seen a number of follow-ups and repercussions.

The latest came Friday in a remarkable development, when the journal’s editor-in-chief, Wolfgang Wagner, submitted his resignation and apologized for the paper.

As we noted on RealClimate.org when the paper was published, the hype surrounding Spencer’s and Braswell’s paper was impressive; unfortunately the paper itself was not. Remote Sensing is a fine journal for geographers, but it does not deal much with atmospheric and climate science, and it is evident that this paper did not get an adequate peer review. It should have received an honest vetting.

Friday that truth became apparent. Kevin Trenberth received a personal note of apology from both the editor-in-chief and the publisher of Remote Sensing. Wagner took this unusual and admirable step after becoming aware of the paper’s serious flaws. By resigning publicly in an editorial posted online, Wagner hopes that at least some of this damage can be undone.

Unfortunately this is not the first time the science conducted by Roy Spencer and colleagues has been found lacking.

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Wow.  Double wow.  Stop the Presses, Deniers!  Your effort to deny basic climate science based on bunkum has met its match.

Here’s an editorial by Dr. Wolfgang Wagner, Editor-in-Chief of Remote Sensing, taking responsibility for the egregious blunder of publishing a “fundamentally flawed” paper by climate science denier Roy Spencer:

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.

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” published by Forbes [4], and the story “Does NASA data show global warming lost in space?” published by Fox News [5], to name just a few.  Unfortunately, their campaign apparently was very successful as witnessed by the over 56,000 downloads of the full paper within only one month after its publication. But trying to refute all scientific insights into the global warming  phenomenon just based on the comparison of one particular observational satellite data set with model predictions is strictly impossible.

For those who want the full debunking from “climate researchers and engaged observers” that persuaded Wagner, see “Climate Scientists Debunk Latest Bunk by Denier Roy Spencer.”  The key scientific point is that there are multiple lines of evidence that the climate is quite sensitive to greenhouse gases and that Spencer’s approach is deeply flawed.

For a list of the overblown hyping of this paper by the deniers, see Media Matters’ post, “Climate Science Once Again Twisted Beyond Recognition By Conservative Media.”  All of them should issue retractions, but few if any will.

While resignation of an editor over a bad decision to publish a flawed denier paper is extremely unusual, it isn’t completely unprecedented.  As Deltoid (aka Tim Lambert) points out on his blog, ”This reminds me of what happened in 2003, when several editors at Climate Research resigned because of the publication of Soon and Baliunas, another paper that should not have been published.”

Wagner has much more to say that is worth reading:

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Long wrong climate science disinformer Roy Spencer has published another deeply flawed article.  That ain’t news.  What is news is that the deniers have a couple of new tricks up their sleeves.

First, the disinformers have figured out they should focus on journals that don’t seem to have a very deep understanding of climate science.  In May, it was a paper in a statistics journal, which was ultimately withdrawn because of “evidence of plagiarism and complaints about the peer-review process.”  This time it’s an article in the open-access Remote Sensing co-authored by Spencer.

It bears repeating that Spencer committed one of the most egregious blunders in the history of remote sensing — committing multiple errors in analyzing the satellite data and creating one of the enduring denier myths, that the satellite data didn’t show the global warming that the surface temperature data did.

It also bears repeating that Spencer wrote this month, “I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government.”

That doesn’t mean Spencer’s new paper on remote sensing is wrong, but it means his work on the subject does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, as most climate journals would know.  And it means we should pay attention to serious climate scientists when they explain how Spencer is, once again, pushing denier bunk.

As the famous critique goes, “Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good”:

1. “He’s taken an incorrect model, he’s tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct,” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.
2. “It is not newsworthy,” Daniel Murphy, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cloud researcher, wrote in an email to LiveScience.
3. NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth in an email:  “I have read the paper. I can not believe it got published. Maybe it got through because it is not in a journal that deals with atmospheric science much?”
4. Trenberth and John Fasullo at RealClimate:  “The bottom line is that there is NO merit whatsoever in this paper.”

As for the second denier trick, well, they got Yahoo News to host a “news story” on the article — written by James Taylor.  Not the brilliant singer song-writer who wrote, “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain, I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end.”  No, the uber-denier James Taylor whose Heartland Institute wants to bring to America’s heartland too much fire and too much rain — and heat waves that you thought would never end.  Sorry, couldn’t resist.

And so Yahoo enables this headline of denier bunk — “New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism” — to spread through the web like so much kudzu.  LiveScience noted in its debunking post:

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The climate denier blogosphere is going mad over a new paper that supposedly “should dramatically alter the global warming debate” by showing that “far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted.” The paper, written by conservative climate scientist Roy Spencer and his University of Alabama colleague William Braswell, finds that “satellite observations and climate models display markedly different behaviors” and posits, with caveats, that there may be “lower climate sensitivity of the real climate system.” As LiveScience’s Stephanie Pappas writes, the paper then was promoted by a Heartland Institute blogger on the Forbes.com website:

The study, published July 26 in the open-access online journal Remote Sensing, got public attention when a writer for The Heartland Institute, a libertarian think-tank that promotes climate change skepticism, wrote for Forbes magazine that the study disproved the global warming worries of climate change “alarmists.” However, mainstream climate scientists say that the argument advanced in the paper is neither new nor correct.

Pappas interviewed climatologists Gavin Schmidt, Kevin Trenberth, and Andrew Dessler, who eviscerated Spencer’s shoddy science:

The study finds a mismatch between the month-to-month variations in temperature and cloud cover in models versus the real world over the past 10 years, said Gavin Schmidt, a NASA Goddard climatologist. “What this mismatch is due to — data processing, errors in the data or real problems in the models — is completely unclear.”

“He’s taken an incorrect model, he’s tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct,” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, said of Spencer’s new study.

“I cannot believe it got published,” said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

In his paper, Spencer relies on a toy model of the climate system which geochemist Barry Bickmore (a Republican) had previously exposed as being one that could “give him essentially any answer he wanted, as long as he didn’t mind using parameters that don’t make any physical sense.”

This case is an excellent example of how the right-wing climate disinformation media machine works. Roy Spencer, one of the handful of publishing climate scientist ideologues, gets his work into an obscure journal. Then James Taylor, an operative for a fossil fuel front group, claims it is “very important” on Forbes.com, a media website owned by a Republican billionaire. The Forbes blog post was redistributed by Yahoo! News, giving the headline “New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism” a further veneer of respectability, even though the full post is laughably hyperbolic, using “alarmist” or “alarmism” 15 times in nine paragraphs.