[quote]
I would like direct answers from some dendroclimatologists to the following absolutely critical questions to the legitimacy of the science, on issues which are almost entirely unrelated to the issues I’ve raised in my paper:

1) Is Loehle* (2009) fundamentally correct in his description of the potentially very serious problems caused by unimodal responses of ring size to temperature. If not, why not?
2) On what mathematical basis, if any, can a modeled, linear (straight line) relationship between climate driver and ring response be used to accurately predict a strongly non-linear relationship?
3) On what basis does one assert that the climatic states experienced during the calibration period are fully representative of the set of states experienced during the pre-calibration (“reconstruction”) period, and that the tree sizes/ages sampled during the calibration period are also representative of the ages/sizes of the pre-calibration period.

Somebody, anybody, please answer those questions, directly.
[\quote]

Heads up on a developing issue with serious potential implications for PNAS standards/reviewing and also IPCC issues….. Jim Bouldin is quite incensed at what he regards as a seriously flawed PNAS review process on a paper which was not rejected until just after the IPCC deadline. Most details are still to come, but it is interesting that RC teammate Jim Bouldin is sufficiently disillusioned with PNAS reviewing standards and process on this paper to go public in this way.

Jim Bouldin on a PNAS rejection process which he regards as highly biased and irresponsible

Third, the rejection without revision occurred just after the IPCC’s August 1 deadline for initial submission of any manuscripts that can be discussed and cited in the upcoming “AR5″ climate assessment report. Therefore, the AR5 now does not have to consider the issues I raised, and one can be quite confident that the reviewers and handling editor would have been well aware of this fact, since the IPCC Assessment Report is by far the most important climate document in the world. I can’t be sure that this was a reason for their outright rejection, but I’d be more than willing to bet on it. Fourth, I know who one of the reviewers was (because they signed their review), the organization this individual works for, and some background on various activities conducted by members of that organization over the last decade or more. Nor am I alone in that knowledge.

Yes you did change one of the three occurrences of that error, you still didn’t get it right, Kemp is a post-doc at Yale, a former graduate student at UPenn.

I don’t understand why you would hysterically call a “deliberate misrepresentation” or an “egregious error”. It seems like a pretty minor error to me.

I would class it as an egregious error, not only is he not a grad student but you got the school and advisor wrong, at best that’s sloppy work which you would have criticized in others!

As is my practice, I’ve corrected the error when brought to my attention (I had already corrected the description of Kemp, but ad overlooked a further reference to Penn State).

You overlooked two further references for 4 days after they had been pointed out to you, again sloppy.

If your concern is that Kemp’s standing in the community would be diminished by the perception that he was a student at Penn State, rather than Penn – a university with a far more distinguished squash program certainly his current school, Yale, was arguably the best squash program in the NCAA this year. Penn State have had their moments though, Gail Ramsay, after whom the women’s individual trophy is named, played for them and won an unprecedented and unequalled 4 times.

As far as “deliberate misrepresentation” goes calling the paper “Mann et al.” certainly qualifies, even someone as inexperienced in scientific publishing as you should know better than that!

This line surely also qualifies: “It was certainly generous of PNAS to give a “prearranged editor” to a submission by a graduate student at Penn State. I’m sure that Lindzen, an actual NAS member, would have appreciated a similar courtesy.” It was of course up to Lindzen to chose to ask for a ‘prearranged editor’, to do so he would have had to submit via the normal channels, instead he chose to submit via his privileged route as a NAS member, it didn’t work for him, tough.

There are several other errors in the piece, e.g. despite your mistake in referring to Fig 4 having been pointed out to you several times you haven’t corrected it. Perhaps you should consider retracting the piece rather than have copious amounts of strikethroughs?

Since you are not familiar enough with the data as presented and represented by Lindzen and Choi, let me give you a brief summary of the troubled history of this data

Your “history” is a rather biased and one sided account of the facts, as we shall see.

For one thing, L&C 2009 contained a blatant (high-school level) scientific mistake

How appropriate to reference high school when engaging in schoolyard name calling.

the results of that flawed L&C paper were being promoted on Fox News as being “the end of the (AGW) scam”.

A comment that reveals your political orientation! How nice.

Lindzen and Choi 2011 was supposed to be “corrected” form of L&C 2009, but it obtained the same end results as L&C 2009

So they changed the method to accommodate criticisms, but that can’t be, since it should have changed the results! Because correcting errors without changing the conclusions is unheard of…

still inconsistent with multiple other scientific studies of the same satellite data.

Wow, again totally unheard of that people can use different methods on the same data and come to different conclusions. But the methods they used must be right because…because… BECAUSE!

So why does Lindzen still find negative feedback in the same satellite data where other scientists find opposing results ? Well, one reason may be that the Lindzen and Choi 2011 “lead and lag” method has a negative feedback bias.

The methods those other scientists used have documented positive feedback biases.

It will find negative feedback in a system where SST and FLUX are completely uncorrelated.

Nevermind that such a situation is physically impossible (SST and flux cannot be complete uncorrelated), how to explain the fact that it failed to magically create negative feedback when the same technique was used on AMIP data? If this bias were as large and important as you seem to think, then it would have detectably resulted in an underestimate of the sensitivity of the AMIP models, but it didn’t. Funny that.

That shows that Lindzen and Choi 2011 did not just arrive at biased results, but also that they did not do a statistical test of their (“lead and lag”) method.

In point of fact, their APJAS paper did examine this bias, and indeed for strong positive feedback their method can be biased towards negative feedback, although the results would not have great statistical significance if that was the case. However, the methods used by Trenberth, simple regression on all the data, they found a strong positive feedback bias. And yet, once again, this did not cause their method to incorrectly assign negative feedback to the AMIP models, suggesting that the bias is simply not that great.

Lindzen and Choi 2011 obtains conclusions that are inconsistent with previous analyses of the same data, analyses that were not tainted by the fundamental scientific errors that have become a consistent theme for papers originating from Lindzen and Choi.

Not the errors, but problems that certainly do not make their results more correct, in fact the papers they are inconsistent with have seriously flawed methods themselves.

But in case you were wondering, without using lead/lag methods one can in fact find negative feedback in the global CERES data:

http://devoidofnulls.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/radiation-redux/

Your criticisms, while strongly stated,are not nearly so justified as you seem to think.

Is there a list of these errors that I can look at so that I’m on the same page?

I don’t see McIntyre’s unwillingness to become fluent in every sub-specialty within climate science evidence of something nefarious. A lot of us don’t know everything and prefer to stick with the specialty in which their passion lies (and leave the rest to others).

Perhaps you should have spent more time in the preparation of this post and thereby avoided the egregious errors (most of which remain uncorrected despite their being brought to your attention)? The deliberate misrepresentations of course are typical of your vendetta against Mann which we have come to expect from you.

Steve: I try to write accurately. However, in this case, as you observe, I incorrectly described Kemp as a grad student at Penn State, when, in fact, he was a grad student at Penn. I don’t understand why you would hysterically call a “deliberate misrepresentation” or an “egregious error”. It seems like a pretty minor error to me. As is my practice, I’ve corrected the error when brought to my attention (I had already corrected the description of Kemp, but ad overlooked a further reference to Penn State).

Is the paper clearly written, with adequate supporting detail?
Are the experimental design, assumptions and statistical methodology appropriate?
Are inconsistencies with previous research discussed and explained?
Are the conclusions justified by the body of the paper?

A paper could fail all of these tests and still be ‘right’ in its conclusions, or it could pass them all but still be ‘wrong’. That is for history to decide, not for the reviewers or editors.

“Lindzen submitted under a special procedure reserved for NAS members . . .”

Clearly, as the self-appointed apologist extraordinaire for all things pro-AGW alarmist, your evident goal is to spin, explain-away, distort, twist or otherwise weaken any and all criticisms of anything alarmists say or do. As a result, I usually ignore your comments.

In the case at hand, however, your efforts amount to saying that since the treatment of Lindzen’s paper was “within the rules”, then the criticism of said treatment as being a double standard when compared to how other, pro-AGW papers are treated is somehow invalid. A double standard is quite fine with you as long as the institutions stated policies and procedures allow for such a thing.

And so rather than finding fault with a stated policy/procedure that permits such an egregious breach of logic as the use of an unjustified double standard, you instead accept the policy as a given, a not-to-be-questioned absolute that PNAS has a right to follow — and that you have a right to invoke as a means of deflecting criticism.

The mystery to me is precisely who — other than yourself — do you expect to be persuaded by such a lame rationalization of what has happened in this case?