I guess I am not sure why you are surprised Roger. This entire sordid affair is very much the current state of climate science in a nutshell. Imagine a disaster that could be caused by CO2. Scour the internet to find a data set to support the conclusion, regardless of the provenance. If the data set doesn't exist, derive it from another set with zero valid provenance, or just make it up if you cant find anything close. Write a paper using the data set. Make sure it predicts the end of the world as we know it, so that the alarmist community will be happy to produce a couple of shills to provide a spell check. Have a couple of shills spell check it, and perhaps add more doomsaying. Publish the paper. We have been watching this trend get worse every year, as the IPCC seems to have gone from extreme to conservative, without actually changing anything...
Roger: I don't know if you are aware of this but I suspect that you must be. I am talking about a totally separate and unrelated aspect of scientific and engineering publishing. Every week I get a couple of email messages asking me to please submit a manuscript to somebody's (often rather unknown) emerging journal. Most of these charge a significant publication charge but some are free. For example, one said:
"we are contacting you to find out whether you are interested in publishing a paper in our journal. ------- is an open access journal that provides high-quality original articles of significance in all disciplines of resource conservation and sustainable management. Could you please let us know your decision on whether you have a plan to contribute one research paper, review article, letters, editorials, commentaries, perspectives, case report or communication to this journal? We are pleased to inform you that if you submit your article before 30 July, We will promise to publish your article for free."
There seems to be a proliferation of web-based publishing groups that are hungry for manuscripts for journals created in the last few years. I continue to get invitations to publish, not only in my field of Mars technology, but also incredibly, in a wide range of areas such as agriculture, medicine and AI. --- LOL The ones that charge a sizable article processing fee might be making a profit? The ones that do it for free might be trying to establish themselves? I don't know. They all do peer reviews but there are peer reviews and there are peer reviews. Then again, as you observed, peer reviews in politically tense areas are not worth much. And publishing in outlier journals might be good for one's vanity but it is not clear whether the Google search engine will pick them up. By the way I found that the Yahoo search engine is better.
I suppose you don't need much in the way of assets to publish a paper online.
In fact, I am interested in starting a journal on line myself. About twenty years ago an online journal was operational for several years called the "Mars Journal" for papers related to Mars and it was legitimate and rigorous. Several papers were published including two by me. The Mars Journal lost grants and faded out about a decade ago. I would like to resurrect it but I don't know how to get sufficient notice. I could start it but who would know about it? New websites hardly get any attention from the Google search engine.
Aside from all that, maybe the answer to the climate science publishing problem might be to sidestep the major science journals and start a new climate journal online that has unbiased editors that can avoid biased reviewers (are there any?). However that might not go anywhere because some small time climate journals have already been originated and they are not widely cited, and yet another web based journal might get lost in the multitude of new journals.
I suppose that there is nothing better to do than you are doing right now, acting as an independent to point out these absurdities to those willing to listen.
Just like prosecutors who loathe to overturn flawed convictions, PNAS and other climate group-think outfits are doing the same thing. Sad state of science research publication.
The corruption of climate science started prior to the assault against Roger Pielke Sr.. It has only gotten more flagrant over the decades of corruption being rewarded. PNAS, like Scientific American for the public, have no interest in integrity regarding science in general and in particular any science adjacent to woke interests.
Alan Simpson, the US senator from Wyoming, once said, "If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters." Seems to fit this particular situation.
I find it hard to believe you are surprised by this. It seems to be modus operandi in climate research these days. It doesn't matter that there are errors as long as they err in the right direction.
Kerry Emanuels response reeks of self interest. It is a shame, I wonder if he truly believes history will be nice to him and his peers?
If NOAA is creating a new data series inclusive of indirect losses surely they or Grinsted et al would be interested in extending that method back to 1900 at least on an estimated basis. I could see the scientific value in attempting that. And Grinsted et al could make a decent case for using such a series in a normalized damages paper.
Switching data sets though in a way that is guaranteed to bias the results in favour of the preferred narrative (as per Patrick Brown)…not so good.
Roger, imagine a logarithmic table published with errors, or a calculator that occasionally produced incorrect sums, or an accountant's record of receipts that had incorrectly placed decimals. No one would ever trust any of them or even refer to them. The publication, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, does care not if the papers that appear in its journal are accurate or useful at all. Its reputation depends on citations, not accuracy. And when we see a reference for an article in PNAS, we will always doubt it.
What an unethical response by Kerry Emanuel to your (Roger’s) reasonable request. It’s despicable that he is using such self-serving tactics. It makes me wonder if editors are really needed. Heeson and Bright (2021, 10.1093/bjps/axz029) argue that authors skip the review process, post their papers on a server (similar to a pre-print server, but the papers would be considered published) and "subsequently publish updated versions that reply to questions and comments from other scientists, which may have been provided publicly or privately." At least in this way comments by other scientists will be in plain view for all to see and cannot be removed by editors or others.
And you are somehow surprised that a) The paper based on false/non-existent data was published in a 'peer reviewed' paper, and b) that same paper's editors are much more adept at stonewalling than they are at science?
These folks are never going to change - they are quite comfortable doling out garbage, as long as they get paid. The only remedy is real competition. Start your own peer-reviewed e-magazine to offer real scientists a publishing outlet with some real integrity.
I recently read a book about how new major scientific theories can take years before the elite status quo finally acknowledge the change (continental drift for one). No surprise the keepers of gate don't want to acknowledge the errors you point out.
I guess I am not sure why you are surprised Roger. This entire sordid affair is very much the current state of climate science in a nutshell. Imagine a disaster that could be caused by CO2. Scour the internet to find a data set to support the conclusion, regardless of the provenance. If the data set doesn't exist, derive it from another set with zero valid provenance, or just make it up if you cant find anything close. Write a paper using the data set. Make sure it predicts the end of the world as we know it, so that the alarmist community will be happy to produce a couple of shills to provide a spell check. Have a couple of shills spell check it, and perhaps add more doomsaying. Publish the paper. We have been watching this trend get worse every year, as the IPCC seems to have gone from extreme to conservative, without actually changing anything...
I’m sorry, by my 14 year old boy sense of humor can’t take “PNAS” seriously after the first instance of saying it phonetically.
Great rhetorical battles are often won with mockery as much as reason.
Roger: I don't know if you are aware of this but I suspect that you must be. I am talking about a totally separate and unrelated aspect of scientific and engineering publishing. Every week I get a couple of email messages asking me to please submit a manuscript to somebody's (often rather unknown) emerging journal. Most of these charge a significant publication charge but some are free. For example, one said:
"we are contacting you to find out whether you are interested in publishing a paper in our journal. ------- is an open access journal that provides high-quality original articles of significance in all disciplines of resource conservation and sustainable management. Could you please let us know your decision on whether you have a plan to contribute one research paper, review article, letters, editorials, commentaries, perspectives, case report or communication to this journal? We are pleased to inform you that if you submit your article before 30 July, We will promise to publish your article for free."
There seems to be a proliferation of web-based publishing groups that are hungry for manuscripts for journals created in the last few years. I continue to get invitations to publish, not only in my field of Mars technology, but also incredibly, in a wide range of areas such as agriculture, medicine and AI. --- LOL The ones that charge a sizable article processing fee might be making a profit? The ones that do it for free might be trying to establish themselves? I don't know. They all do peer reviews but there are peer reviews and there are peer reviews. Then again, as you observed, peer reviews in politically tense areas are not worth much. And publishing in outlier journals might be good for one's vanity but it is not clear whether the Google search engine will pick them up. By the way I found that the Yahoo search engine is better.
I suppose you don't need much in the way of assets to publish a paper online.
In fact, I am interested in starting a journal on line myself. About twenty years ago an online journal was operational for several years called the "Mars Journal" for papers related to Mars and it was legitimate and rigorous. Several papers were published including two by me. The Mars Journal lost grants and faded out about a decade ago. I would like to resurrect it but I don't know how to get sufficient notice. I could start it but who would know about it? New websites hardly get any attention from the Google search engine.
Aside from all that, maybe the answer to the climate science publishing problem might be to sidestep the major science journals and start a new climate journal online that has unbiased editors that can avoid biased reviewers (are there any?). However that might not go anywhere because some small time climate journals have already been originated and they are not widely cited, and yet another web based journal might get lost in the multitude of new journals.
I suppose that there is nothing better to do than you are doing right now, acting as an independent to point out these absurdities to those willing to listen.
Just like prosecutors who loathe to overturn flawed convictions, PNAS and other climate group-think outfits are doing the same thing. Sad state of science research publication.
The corruption of climate science started prior to the assault against Roger Pielke Sr.. It has only gotten more flagrant over the decades of corruption being rewarded. PNAS, like Scientific American for the public, have no interest in integrity regarding science in general and in particular any science adjacent to woke interests.
Alan Simpson, the US senator from Wyoming, once said, "If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters." Seems to fit this particular situation.
I find it hard to believe you are surprised by this. It seems to be modus operandi in climate research these days. It doesn't matter that there are errors as long as they err in the right direction.
Kerry Emanuels response reeks of self interest. It is a shame, I wonder if he truly believes history will be nice to him and his peers?
Same monkey business in mainline medical science publishing
https://open.substack.com/pub/vinayprasadmdmph/p/what-is-going-on-at-jama-network?r=mzsbg&utm_medium=ios
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
If NOAA is creating a new data series inclusive of indirect losses surely they or Grinsted et al would be interested in extending that method back to 1900 at least on an estimated basis. I could see the scientific value in attempting that. And Grinsted et al could make a decent case for using such a series in a normalized damages paper.
Switching data sets though in a way that is guaranteed to bias the results in favour of the preferred narrative (as per Patrick Brown)…not so good.
Roger, imagine a logarithmic table published with errors, or a calculator that occasionally produced incorrect sums, or an accountant's record of receipts that had incorrectly placed decimals. No one would ever trust any of them or even refer to them. The publication, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, does care not if the papers that appear in its journal are accurate or useful at all. Its reputation depends on citations, not accuracy. And when we see a reference for an article in PNAS, we will always doubt it.
Seems PNAS pretty much ='s UN, now, don't ya think?
"We'll believe what we want to believe so you can go pound sand."
This reminds me of the "fake but accurate" news reporting from CBS News about George W. Bush's service in the Air National Guard.
What an unethical response by Kerry Emanuel to your (Roger’s) reasonable request. It’s despicable that he is using such self-serving tactics. It makes me wonder if editors are really needed. Heeson and Bright (2021, 10.1093/bjps/axz029) argue that authors skip the review process, post their papers on a server (similar to a pre-print server, but the papers would be considered published) and "subsequently publish updated versions that reply to questions and comments from other scientists, which may have been provided publicly or privately." At least in this way comments by other scientists will be in plain view for all to see and cannot be removed by editors or others.
But trust the science!
Roger,
And you are somehow surprised that a) The paper based on false/non-existent data was published in a 'peer reviewed' paper, and b) that same paper's editors are much more adept at stonewalling than they are at science?
These folks are never going to change - they are quite comfortable doling out garbage, as long as they get paid. The only remedy is real competition. Start your own peer-reviewed e-magazine to offer real scientists a publishing outlet with some real integrity.
I recently read a book about how new major scientific theories can take years before the elite status quo finally acknowledge the change (continental drift for one). No surprise the keepers of gate don't want to acknowledge the errors you point out.