Roger, you write: "Whether or not a “climate crisis” is happening is of course a political judgment and not one that emerges from data and evidence — though people can look at data and evidence and certainly make the case for or against a crisis."
I do not understand this comment. As I read it you are stating that a "climate crisis" can exist without there being any way of measuring it with actual instrumentation, observations or data. It can exists apart from the physical world.
Do I understand you correctly?
I would think a situation might arise which is a "climate political crisis" or a "climate policy crisis" where there is a total disconnect to the real physical world. That is not strange to politics.
A "climate crisis", in my view, must be found in data. In audition to politics.
I agree with Reviewer 1 in one point: to assert that there is 'no evidence of climate crisis', 'crisis' has to be defined. However, I am sure that 299,999 of the 300,000 mentions of 'climate crisis' that Roger found on Google do not use any accurate definition either but are not forced to be retracted.
This type of action by climate alarmists has been going on for well over a decade. In my 2014 book, I described similar cases of rejection of articles presenting contrarian results.
Below I provide a few examples:
Dessler’s 2011 publication was discussed by Pielke, Sr. Pielke Sr. said: “Dessler’s paper was received 11 August 2011 and accepted 29 August 2011. This is some type of record ... and indicates that the paper was fast-tracked. This is certainly unusual ...” – to say the least. He went on to say:
“It is not clear whether the Editor of GRL included Roy Spencer as one of the referees, [and if they did not] they were derelict in their responsibilities. Dessler’s paper should have been submitted to Remote Sensing as a Comment [on Spencer’s paper]. Then Roy Spencer would submit a Reply.”
The climatology orthodoxy seems to have united into an informal association dedicated to (1) prevent contrary analyses and interpretations from being published, and (2) to quickly respond to those few contrarian publications that slip through their net with vitriolic attacks on the paper on orthodoxy blogs, and in the literature via rapid rebuttal publications such as that of Dessler (2011). It seems evident that many editors are in cahoots with the orthodoxy; certainly, the editor of GRL was, and the editor of Remote Sensing who let Spencer and Bradwell’s paper through the net, suddenly resigned for unclear reasons.
When the article by McLean et al. (2009) appeared in the literature suggesting an important role for El Niños as a dominant cause of warming in the NH in the latter part of the 20th century, it produced great animosity and consternation amongst the members of the climate alarmism cabal.
This paper was reviewed and accepted by three independent referees. One referee commented in part: “I found the paper to be well-organized, well-written, and clear on the importance of the research… The findings are likely to be of interest to a wide variety of readers.” A second referee commented in part: “This very clear and well-written manuscript is an analysis of the relationship between MSU-derived and radiosonde-based tropospheric temperature variability and the Southern Oscillation, as modified by major tropical volcanic eruptions.”
In their rush to rebut the original McLean article, they published Foster et al. (2010), that constituted a rather vicious criticism of McLean et al. (2009), but JGR refused to publish McLean’s response. Evidently, the JGR was acting in collusion with the alarmist cabal, and probably regrets that McLean et al. (2009) “slipped through”. McLean et al. attempted to rebut the criticism by Foster et al. (2010), but the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) refused to publish it. Their rebuttal was published on the Internet at a site that has since disappeared. The original McLean article did need some correction, but it did not need the vitriolic, one-sided response that prevented him from responding.
A rather parallel situation occurred regarding the paper by Douglass et al. (2007) that examined measured tropospheric temperature trends and compared them with “Climate of the 20th Century” model simulations. They concluded that observed temperature trends were in significant disagreement with model predictions in most of the tropical troposphere.
After publication of Douglass et al. (2007), the cabal came forth with Santer et al. (2008) as a rebuttal.
In 2009, McIntyre pointed out that when the data used by Santer et al. (2008) that ended in 1999 was extended through 2008, the discrepancy reported by Douglass remained, and “the claim by Santer et al. (2008) to have achieved a ‘partial resolution’ of the discrepancy between observations and the model ensemble mean trend is unwarranted”. McIntyre also noted the difficulty in obtaining data from Santer et al., and indicated that the International Journal of Climatology (IJC) was stalling in responding to him. It appears that this article could not pass through the cabal’s lock on the IJC, and McIntyre had to be content with merely posting his article on the Internet. Yet, alarmists continue to refer to Santer et al. (2008) as evidence that climate models have been adequately tested.
Douglass and Christy presented evidence for their claim that Ben Santer, Phil Jones, Timothy Osborn, Tom Wigley, and 13 other climate alarmism cabal members apparently conspired to compromise the peer review process, with the willing cooperation of the editor of the International Journal of Climatology (IJC), Glenn McGregor. Douglass and Christy provided the entire sordid story; there is no need to reproduce the details here.
Even if your assumption, that the sentence on media was the critical one, is correct the reaction is totally unjustified. The issue here is that we are living in a world of Inquisition: there is a supposedly official truth on various topics that can’t be questioned. If you do then you become a denialist, a flat earth believer, a no vax, an anti science; there is no dialogue based on numbers, on evidences but it is all about emotions and riding the funding wave. The level of corruption, political and financial, among scientists has never been as high as it is now and it is self evident how highly politicized sciences (?) have delivered little in the last few decades. Think of macroeconomic for example....
My apologies for the buckshot, it was over the top. The climate topic feels quite often like a gaslighting situation that won't let up. Tyranny is a slow roll that inevitably leads to smart people forced into compliance out of seeming necessity. But compromise is not in a tyrant's interest just as delayed gratification is not in a child's. I fear scientists are trying to reason with a tiger regarding why it shouldn't eat them.
During the republican debate this week, one of the candidates referenced the “climate hoax” and advocated building more coal plants in the US.
Activist scientists build distrust in the general public, who may not be well educated on climate science, but can sense when they are being subjected to a firehose of propaganda.
These activist scientists are contributing to a backlash among ordinary people who are keenly aware that science has been heavily politicized across a large number of disciplines. People are rightly distrustful of most institutions at this point in history, and will feel free to insert their half-baked opinions in the place of information from those who used to be regarded as expert sources. It’s a completely understandable human phenomenon.
It’s a real shame, and many of us can remember a time when science was viewed as objective and mostly disinterested in partisan politics. Undoing this mess will take a very long time.
Perhaps the authors should have traced the origins of the 'climate crisis' to define it primarily as a political term that need not be commented on at all. I found this comment by one reviewer refreshing and worthy of publicizing: "I am actually totally aligned with the authors in stating that “burdening our children with the anxiety of being in a climate emergency” (in the Conclusions of [1]) is not
the right way of proceeding, and I totally agree that the origin of the large increase in the
number of weather and climate related catastrophic events is largely due to increased
exposure and vulnerability connected to demographic and economic growth rather than to
This will continue to become more of a crisis until scientists en masse have the balls to give their universities, academia at large, journals and the mass media the finger. Guess what happens in a socialist tyranny like the pathetic one that "S"cience is now composed of? Every educated person who isn't corrupted is disappeared. So either recognize that you aren't alone and speak honestly instead of insipid half truths or be eaten as the climate bullshi* becomes an unstoppable force. Every tyranny counts on the obeisance of its population to a falsehood.perpetuated by elites. Speak truth and know you might have to get another job. There are thousands of professionals who know they are lying in their work. Ugh.
Anybody, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, knows that the whole process is based on a lot of irrationality and arbitrariness.
A correct mathematical derivation does not mean that a reviewer accepts the result. Empirical observations, which are significant, according to statistical conventions, are rejected by reviewers, because they do not like the potential political consequences.
Science has become a lottery. I have retired now, and I'm very happy that my income is no longer influenced by the result of peer-review processes...
Since then, both systems have gotten worse. Now, federal agencies fire peer reviewers who might dissent from the agencies' policy narratives. Now, journal editors abandon any pretense to advancing scholarship if it conflicts with the approved narrative. Both groups of peers are now hopelessly conflicted such that the imprimatur of peer review of either type confers little or no incremental credibility.
More substantive comment (2): Journals have become much more political. I believe this is a lagging indicator of the politicization of research funding. As an increasing fraction of research (especially government-funded research) has political motives, ideological scientists have sought and obtained journal editorships. Policing the ideology of papers published is a key part of these editors' self-identified job description.
More substantive comment (1): The adjectives applied to "climate" have grown increasingly severe: change --> emergency --> crisis --> ????????). Presumably this has been done to motivate broader public enthusiasm for mitigation. This has not happened. What has happened, however, is that the adjective has become a rote appendage such that scientists (and journal editors) no longer recognize it as non-scientific.
Absolutely agree that this is a travestry. It is just another nail in the coffin containing what remains of "the science"'s credibility. I have a post of Climate Etc. documenting from original sources how the pandemic made the existing replication crisis vastly worse and how it has led to a new censorship industrial complex. Search for computational fluid on Climate Etc.
Aug 26, 2023·edited Aug 26, 2023Liked by Roger Pielke Jr.
Roger, the only solution to this mess is to make 'the marketplace of ideas' work for you instead of against. Start your own peer-reviewed journal with no presumptive 'climate crisis' bias. Call it 'The Journal of Climate Science Without the BS', and use your own (hopefully more scientifically oriented) rules for publishing papers. There's really no barrier to entry - you don't have to have office space or a printing press - and I'm sure such a journal will attract LOTS of papers from real scientists. It might take a while, but surely as the sun rises in the east, superior science will win out over pseudo-scientific crap.
From a completely different field.. we didn’t used to editorialize, or generalize from our own data to that of Worldwide Collapse of All Systems. But it has grown through time with the reward system and press honoring the most headline-worthy “findings” or way-extrapolations. My committee was always on top of students’ extrapolations to anything outside the parameters of what was studied. Then there’s models and assumptions.. when did we decide that quantifying assumptions- without sensitivity analysis- somehow converted the products into “science.” The solution I see is a group of academic publishers getting together and determining a “no editorializing ever, and we will resolve it by editing it out, not rejecting the paper.” Or maybe since academic publishing depends on unpaid work anyway, maybe we need to start an alternative publishing option.. as Substack is to traditional Media, so Real Science would be to academic publishers... and Real Science would be open source and open review...
"Not asserting or believing their [there] to be a “climate crisis” is not a legitimate basis for publishing, not publishing or retracting a peer-reviewed paper."
Roger, you write: "Whether or not a “climate crisis” is happening is of course a political judgment and not one that emerges from data and evidence — though people can look at data and evidence and certainly make the case for or against a crisis."
I do not understand this comment. As I read it you are stating that a "climate crisis" can exist without there being any way of measuring it with actual instrumentation, observations or data. It can exists apart from the physical world.
Do I understand you correctly?
I would think a situation might arise which is a "climate political crisis" or a "climate policy crisis" where there is a total disconnect to the real physical world. That is not strange to politics.
A "climate crisis", in my view, must be found in data. In audition to politics.
Where do we disagree?
I agree with Reviewer 1 in one point: to assert that there is 'no evidence of climate crisis', 'crisis' has to be defined. However, I am sure that 299,999 of the 300,000 mentions of 'climate crisis' that Roger found on Google do not use any accurate definition either but are not forced to be retracted.
This type of action by climate alarmists has been going on for well over a decade. In my 2014 book, I described similar cases of rejection of articles presenting contrarian results.
Below I provide a few examples:
Dessler’s 2011 publication was discussed by Pielke, Sr. Pielke Sr. said: “Dessler’s paper was received 11 August 2011 and accepted 29 August 2011. This is some type of record ... and indicates that the paper was fast-tracked. This is certainly unusual ...” – to say the least. He went on to say:
“It is not clear whether the Editor of GRL included Roy Spencer as one of the referees, [and if they did not] they were derelict in their responsibilities. Dessler’s paper should have been submitted to Remote Sensing as a Comment [on Spencer’s paper]. Then Roy Spencer would submit a Reply.”
The climatology orthodoxy seems to have united into an informal association dedicated to (1) prevent contrary analyses and interpretations from being published, and (2) to quickly respond to those few contrarian publications that slip through their net with vitriolic attacks on the paper on orthodoxy blogs, and in the literature via rapid rebuttal publications such as that of Dessler (2011). It seems evident that many editors are in cahoots with the orthodoxy; certainly, the editor of GRL was, and the editor of Remote Sensing who let Spencer and Bradwell’s paper through the net, suddenly resigned for unclear reasons.
When the article by McLean et al. (2009) appeared in the literature suggesting an important role for El Niños as a dominant cause of warming in the NH in the latter part of the 20th century, it produced great animosity and consternation amongst the members of the climate alarmism cabal.
This paper was reviewed and accepted by three independent referees. One referee commented in part: “I found the paper to be well-organized, well-written, and clear on the importance of the research… The findings are likely to be of interest to a wide variety of readers.” A second referee commented in part: “This very clear and well-written manuscript is an analysis of the relationship between MSU-derived and radiosonde-based tropospheric temperature variability and the Southern Oscillation, as modified by major tropical volcanic eruptions.”
In their rush to rebut the original McLean article, they published Foster et al. (2010), that constituted a rather vicious criticism of McLean et al. (2009), but JGR refused to publish McLean’s response. Evidently, the JGR was acting in collusion with the alarmist cabal, and probably regrets that McLean et al. (2009) “slipped through”. McLean et al. attempted to rebut the criticism by Foster et al. (2010), but the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) refused to publish it. Their rebuttal was published on the Internet at a site that has since disappeared. The original McLean article did need some correction, but it did not need the vitriolic, one-sided response that prevented him from responding.
A rather parallel situation occurred regarding the paper by Douglass et al. (2007) that examined measured tropospheric temperature trends and compared them with “Climate of the 20th Century” model simulations. They concluded that observed temperature trends were in significant disagreement with model predictions in most of the tropical troposphere.
After publication of Douglass et al. (2007), the cabal came forth with Santer et al. (2008) as a rebuttal.
In 2009, McIntyre pointed out that when the data used by Santer et al. (2008) that ended in 1999 was extended through 2008, the discrepancy reported by Douglass remained, and “the claim by Santer et al. (2008) to have achieved a ‘partial resolution’ of the discrepancy between observations and the model ensemble mean trend is unwarranted”. McIntyre also noted the difficulty in obtaining data from Santer et al., and indicated that the International Journal of Climatology (IJC) was stalling in responding to him. It appears that this article could not pass through the cabal’s lock on the IJC, and McIntyre had to be content with merely posting his article on the Internet. Yet, alarmists continue to refer to Santer et al. (2008) as evidence that climate models have been adequately tested.
Douglass and Christy presented evidence for their claim that Ben Santer, Phil Jones, Timothy Osborn, Tom Wigley, and 13 other climate alarmism cabal members apparently conspired to compromise the peer review process, with the willing cooperation of the editor of the International Journal of Climatology (IJC), Glenn McGregor. Douglass and Christy provided the entire sordid story; there is no need to reproduce the details here.
Even if your assumption, that the sentence on media was the critical one, is correct the reaction is totally unjustified. The issue here is that we are living in a world of Inquisition: there is a supposedly official truth on various topics that can’t be questioned. If you do then you become a denialist, a flat earth believer, a no vax, an anti science; there is no dialogue based on numbers, on evidences but it is all about emotions and riding the funding wave. The level of corruption, political and financial, among scientists has never been as high as it is now and it is self evident how highly politicized sciences (?) have delivered little in the last few decades. Think of macroeconomic for example....
My apologies for the buckshot, it was over the top. The climate topic feels quite often like a gaslighting situation that won't let up. Tyranny is a slow roll that inevitably leads to smart people forced into compliance out of seeming necessity. But compromise is not in a tyrant's interest just as delayed gratification is not in a child's. I fear scientists are trying to reason with a tiger regarding why it shouldn't eat them.
During the republican debate this week, one of the candidates referenced the “climate hoax” and advocated building more coal plants in the US.
Activist scientists build distrust in the general public, who may not be well educated on climate science, but can sense when they are being subjected to a firehose of propaganda.
These activist scientists are contributing to a backlash among ordinary people who are keenly aware that science has been heavily politicized across a large number of disciplines. People are rightly distrustful of most institutions at this point in history, and will feel free to insert their half-baked opinions in the place of information from those who used to be regarded as expert sources. It’s a completely understandable human phenomenon.
It’s a real shame, and many of us can remember a time when science was viewed as objective and mostly disinterested in partisan politics. Undoing this mess will take a very long time.
Perhaps the authors should have traced the origins of the 'climate crisis' to define it primarily as a political term that need not be commented on at all. I found this comment by one reviewer refreshing and worthy of publicizing: "I am actually totally aligned with the authors in stating that “burdening our children with the anxiety of being in a climate emergency” (in the Conclusions of [1]) is not
the right way of proceeding, and I totally agree that the origin of the large increase in the
number of weather and climate related catastrophic events is largely due to increased
exposure and vulnerability connected to demographic and economic growth rather than to
climate change."
This will continue to become more of a crisis until scientists en masse have the balls to give their universities, academia at large, journals and the mass media the finger. Guess what happens in a socialist tyranny like the pathetic one that "S"cience is now composed of? Every educated person who isn't corrupted is disappeared. So either recognize that you aren't alone and speak honestly instead of insipid half truths or be eaten as the climate bullshi* becomes an unstoppable force. Every tyranny counts on the obeisance of its population to a falsehood.perpetuated by elites. Speak truth and know you might have to get another job. There are thousands of professionals who know they are lying in their work. Ugh.
Anybody, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, knows that the whole process is based on a lot of irrationality and arbitrariness.
A correct mathematical derivation does not mean that a reviewer accepts the result. Empirical observations, which are significant, according to statistical conventions, are rejected by reviewers, because they do not like the potential political consequences.
Science has become a lottery. I have retired now, and I'm very happy that my income is no longer influenced by the result of peer-review processes...
More substantive comment (3): For a 2002 forum on peer review sponsored by the Society for Risk Analysis, I delivered a paper arguing that governmental and scholarly peer review are fundamentally different animals such that the latter system former should not be used for the former. See http://www.rbbelzer.com/uploads/7/1/7/4/7174353/belzer_2002__interests_and_incentives_in_peer_review_.pdf.
Since then, both systems have gotten worse. Now, federal agencies fire peer reviewers who might dissent from the agencies' policy narratives. Now, journal editors abandon any pretense to advancing scholarship if it conflicts with the approved narrative. Both groups of peers are now hopelessly conflicted such that the imprimatur of peer review of either type confers little or no incremental credibility.
More substantive comment (2): Journals have become much more political. I believe this is a lagging indicator of the politicization of research funding. As an increasing fraction of research (especially government-funded research) has political motives, ideological scientists have sought and obtained journal editorships. Policing the ideology of papers published is a key part of these editors' self-identified job description.
More substantive comment (1): The adjectives applied to "climate" have grown increasingly severe: change --> emergency --> crisis --> ????????). Presumably this has been done to motivate broader public enthusiasm for mitigation. This has not happened. What has happened, however, is that the adjective has become a rote appendage such that scientists (and journal editors) no longer recognize it as non-scientific.
Absolutely agree that this is a travestry. It is just another nail in the coffin containing what remains of "the science"'s credibility. I have a post of Climate Etc. documenting from original sources how the pandemic made the existing replication crisis vastly worse and how it has led to a new censorship industrial complex. Search for computational fluid on Climate Etc.
Roger, the only solution to this mess is to make 'the marketplace of ideas' work for you instead of against. Start your own peer-reviewed journal with no presumptive 'climate crisis' bias. Call it 'The Journal of Climate Science Without the BS', and use your own (hopefully more scientifically oriented) rules for publishing papers. There's really no barrier to entry - you don't have to have office space or a printing press - and I'm sure such a journal will attract LOTS of papers from real scientists. It might take a while, but surely as the sun rises in the east, superior science will win out over pseudo-scientific crap.
From a completely different field.. we didn’t used to editorialize, or generalize from our own data to that of Worldwide Collapse of All Systems. But it has grown through time with the reward system and press honoring the most headline-worthy “findings” or way-extrapolations. My committee was always on top of students’ extrapolations to anything outside the parameters of what was studied. Then there’s models and assumptions.. when did we decide that quantifying assumptions- without sensitivity analysis- somehow converted the products into “science.” The solution I see is a group of academic publishers getting together and determining a “no editorializing ever, and we will resolve it by editing it out, not rejecting the paper.” Or maybe since academic publishing depends on unpaid work anyway, maybe we need to start an alternative publishing option.. as Substack is to traditional Media, so Real Science would be to academic publishers... and Real Science would be open source and open review...
Typo:
"Not asserting or believing their [there] to be a “climate crisis” is not a legitimate basis for publishing, not publishing or retracting a peer-reviewed paper."