Several years ago, there was a great controversy at the journal Climate Research regarding the publication of an article by Soon and Baliunas. Three editors, including Hans von Storch, felt that the peer review leading to acceptance of this article was flawed and resigned in protest. I want to compare some of these events to some events in progress at GRL, where the most powerful climate research corporation in the U.S. appears to intervened at GRL, causing them to abandon their usual procedures, after an article by one of its scientists was rejected.
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) is a corporation carrying out climate research with $200 million in annual revenue. It is a powerful force in the climate research industry. The Technical Support Unit for the IPCC Working Group 1, the working group which authored IPCC TAR featuring the hockey stick graph, is housed at UCAR. In fact the IPCC Working Group 1 website goes so far as to include UCAR as part of its name http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/
Given the prominence of the hockey stick in IPCC TAR and the close connections between UCAR and IPCC Working Group 1, it is perhaps no coincidence that the most vociferous counterattack on certain hockeystick critics (other than Mann himself) have been sponsored by UCAR.
On May 11, 2005, on the day that Ross McKitrick and I were presenting in Washington, UCAR issued a press release announcing that one of its scientists, Caspar Ammann ( a former student of Raymond Bradley) and one of its former post-doc fellows, Eugene Wahl, had supposedly demonstrated that our criticisms of the hockey stick were "unfounded". The press release announced that they had submitted articles to Climatic Change and GRL.
Unfortunately for UCAR, on June 6, 2005, GRL rejected the submission by Wahl and Ammann. This was never announced. The rejection by GRL was not mentioned in two letters to the House Energy and Commerce Committee by Mann and the European Geophysical Union, which cited this press release.
The Comment by Ammann and Wahl was one of four Comments submitted to GRL on our work. Two Comments, one by von Storch and Zorita and one by Huybers, were accepted and, together with our Replies, will be published in the near future. One other Comment, by David Ritson, was rejected.
I can’t imagine that UCAR was very happy about the rejection of Ammann and Wahl, especially with the press release hanging out there. There have been some strange events. In late August, the editor-in-chief of GRL, James Famiglietti, told a reporter at ES&T that he had taken over the Comment file pertaining to our article.
In the last week, a couple of curious events occurred. On Sep. 27, 2005, Famiglietti told us that the rejected Ritson Comment had now been accepted. In breach of AGU policies which require that both a Comment and Reply be sent together for refereeing, Famiglietti had sent the previously rejected Ritson Comment out without a Reply; after getting the Comment accepted, Famiglietti invited us to reply.
On Sept. 29, 2005, someone inquired at realclimate.org about the status of the Ammann submissions, which had gone silent since the May 11, 2005 press release. Mann replied:
[Response: Rumour has it that both manuscripts are pending final acceptance from the respective journals. – mike]
On Oct. 1, 2005, one of our posters noticed that the UCAR webpage for the Ammann and Wahl submission to GRL had been changed – it now showed that the article had been resubmitted on Sept. 25, 2005. So the article had made remarkable progress through the system by Sept. 29, 2005, when Mann reported that it was "pending final acceptance". We have still not seen a copy of the re-submission.
I’m providing here some details of the chronology. The tone that I’m trying to capture (and I may have to edit some more) is irony. Think back to the shrieking by climate scientists about the peer review of Soon and Baliunas. Now let’s see how many climate scientists speak up about Famiglietti directly taking over editorship, rescuing of the UCAR submission from the garbage can saving face for them and completely breaking AGU policies on Comments in order to expedite acceptance of the previously rejected Comments.
Soon and Baliunas [2003] and the Climate Research Flap
Let’s start off with the controversy about the Soon and Baliunas article. This article was published in Climate Research in 2003. Shortly thereafter, Mann and various other colleagues (including Raymond Bradley and Caspar Ammann) published a criticism of Soon and Baliunas [2003] in EOS. At the time, hearings were scheduled at the U.S. Senate in connection with McCain-Lieberman. Hans von Storch, the editor-in-chief of Climate Research was contacted by Sen. Jeffords’ staff, who were preparing for the hearings, where both Soon and Mann were scheduled to appear. A contemporary article by Antonio Regalado of the Wall Street Journal said:
After hearing from Sen. Jeffords, Dr. von Storch says he decided to speed an editorial into print criticizing publication of the paper. But publisher Otto Kinne blocked the move, saying that while he favored publication of the editorial, Dr. von Storch’s proposals were still opposed by some of the other editors. "I asked Hans not to rush the editorial,; Mr. Kinne said in an e-mail.
Von Storch and 2 other editors then resigned. Another contemporary report says :
“They submitted a flawed paper,” said Hans von Storch, editor-in-chief of the journal, Climate Research. He said that the journal’s peer review procedure failed to identify methodological flaws in the study.
Their resignations were actually announced in the Senate hearings:
Jeffords announced Von Storch’s resignation, as well as that of another Climate Research editor, Clare Goodess, in the middle of a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing called in part to air the views of one of the Harvard authors, astrophysicist Willie Soon.
There was lots more fall-out in the von Storch story – not least of which was that it rose to the attention of the Wall Street Journal article. The article was not particularly favorable to the "skeptics" and serves as a counterpoint to any suggestion that Regalado might be "soft on skeptics"
UCAR 2005
Fast forward to 2005. UCAR’s budget was cut from $207 million in 2003 to $192 million in 2004, with most of the decrease coming from reduced NSF grants. Support came almost entirely from federal sources – $105 MM from NSF, $16 MM from other agencies, $56 MM from other government awards. Expenses were $118 MM for science programs, $58 MM for science support and $17 MM in overheads and administration.
By 2005, UCAR had become host to the IPCC Working Group 1, whose website is at the UCAR server http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1_org.html. The Working Group 1 Technical Support Unit (TSU) is headed by a UCAR employee, Martin Manning.
Not surprisingly for a corporation essentially reliant on a single customer for over $200 million in revenue (and nearly 100% of its revenues), and given its vulnerability to any reductions (such as occurred from 2003 to 2004), UCAR has an active Office of Governmental Affairs.
UCAR’s Office of Governmental Affairs sponsored a presentation on April 6, 2005 in Washington, discussed here as UCAR Webcast of Bradley, Crowley, Ammann. The presentation was given by one of its scientists, Caspar Ammann, hockey stick author Raymond Bradley, Ammann’s former Ph.D. supervisor and Thomas Crowley, another multiproxy author. I’ve commented on this presentation on this site previously.
Ross McKitrick and I were invited to make a presentation responding to the UCAR presentation and did so on May 11, 2005. On the very day of our presentation, on May 11, 2005, UCAR issued a press release announcing the submission of two papers by Ammann and Wahl:
Their results appear in two new research papers submitted for review to the journals Geophysical Research Letters and Climatic Change.
Was the timing a coincidence? Not at all. UCAR referred to that presentation in the press release as follows:
Caspar Ammann, a paleoclimatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), is available to comment on the so-called hockey stick controversy discussed by Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Linked to the press release was the following abstract for the submission to GRL by Ammann and Wahl.
The practice of press releasing submissions has been denounced by Nature for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that papers are sometimes rejected. I have been unable to locate any other press releases by UCAR in which they announce the submission of papers, although they have issued many press releases upon acceptance or publication of papers. So UCAR’s behavior in this instance was both worthy of denunciation under Nature’s policies and inconsistent with their own practices.
Ammann and Wahl [2005]
Ammann and Wahl was immediately proclaimed by Mann and others as being "independent verification" of MBH. There are issues as to whether it is "independent" and exactly what it differs.
First how "independent" is Ammann from Mann and Bradley? (See for example Crichton’s testimony on independence in medical trials.) Ammann took his Ph.D. at the University of Massachusetts under Raymond Bradley. He has coauthored a number of articles with both Mann and Bradley, jointly and severally, including the 2003 denunciation of Soon and Baliunas. Ammann is obviously not "independent" in any usage of the word outside climate science.
Did it "verify" MBH as claimed? For example, do Ammann and Wahl show that MBH passes cross-validation R2 statistics? Of course not. Ammann and Wahl have withheld the cross-validation R2 statistic, as Mann did before them. It was one thing for Mann to get away with this. It would be pretty farcical for any journal to acquiesce in this a second time – but hey, this is the Hockey Team. Likewise, did Ammann and Wahl show that MBH is robust to the presence/absence of bristlecones. Of course not. They move the pea under thimble like magicians, but try watching the bristlecones. They are always there. I posted up some comments and Ammann and Wahl in May.
Ammann and Wahl submitted their Comment to GRL in May. AGU is the publisher of Geophysical Research Letters and has the following explicit policies concerning Comments:
AGU journals will consider for publication Comments on papers that have previously appeared in the journal. The Editor of the journal determines whether a Comment meets the standards for publication and may elect to decline a Comment without further consideration or require revisions before further consideration. If the Editor decides to go forward with consideration of a Comment, a Reply by the author of the paper commented upon will also be considered for publication.
A Comment will first be sent to the author of the original paper, who will be given the opportunity to write a Reply. ..If a Reply is submitted in a timely way, the Editor will have both the Comment and Reply reviewed… The referee will be asked to prepare separate reports on the Comment and Reply…Upon receipt of the referee’s reports, the Editor will forward the Reply, along with the referee’s report on the Comment, to the author of the Comment. The Comment may be revised one time in response to the Reply and the referee’s report. The revised Comment will then be sent, together with the referee’s report of the Reply, to the authors of the Reply. One revision of the reply will be allowed.
At this point, a final decision will be made whether or not to publish the Comment and the Reply. If it is decided to proceed with publication, both the Comment and Reply will appear in the same issue of the journal (i.e., will be posted online on the same day).
In accordance with these policies, we were provided with a copy of the Ammann and Wahl Comment in mid-May 2005.
At this time, there were a total of four Comments in play. One of the problems we’d faced with some of the Comments was misrepresentation of what our actual claims were. In some previous Replies, we had replied to these mischaracterizations. Our editor, James Saiers, made it very clear that he did not want to have this type of argument under his watch. He instructed us to present any concern over mischaracterization directly to him and he would assess it editorially, rather than having a needlessly rancorous exchange in the article itself.
This presented a real problem when the Ammann and Wahl Comment arrived. They were so bilious that they could barely see straight. You’ll eventually see why "mini-Mann" is not merely a term of sarcasm. Aside from the bile, their GRL submission is essentially a pyramid scheme. The conclusions in their GRL article are not supported or based on any analyses in their GRL article, but on their other submission. The conclusions of their other study are cited in the text, carried forward to their Summary and quoted in their Abstract. But there was nothing in the four corners of their GRL submission to support their Abstract. We pointed this out to Saiers on May 24, 2005, shortly before he rejected Ammann and Wahl. I’ve reproduced our cover letter to Saiers below (there is a link to a detailed schedule).
May 24, 2005
Dear Dr. Saiers,
RE: AMMAN AND WAHL
In preparing our reply to Amman and Wahl (A&W), we have encountered some matters which appear to fall into categories where you have previously intervened editorially. We would like to bring them to your attention and obtain some guidance and/or rulings before going further. We are first bringing these matters to your attention informally, rather than through the GRL online submission system. But if it is your preference not to deal with anything raised herein other than through the GRL online submission system, please advise and we will proceed that way.· Much of the A&W submission pertains to issues not raised in our GRL paper. It is difficult to reply to such comments while confining attention to the material in our GRL paper.
· We are troubled what we see as a “pyramid scheme”‘? in which the key arguments and findings as stated in the A&W summary and abstract are themselves unsupported in the paper but instead are based on an unpublished submission by Wahl and Ammann to Climatic Change, which has not been accepted. These findings are stated in paragraph 8, levered up somewhat into the summary paragraph (para. 9) and then into the main conclusions of the Abstract; hence they are central to the conclusions made by the Comment. We are hardly in a position to respond to unpublished findings. To make matters worse, the conclusions in question all pertain to issues presented in MM05 (EE), but not in our GRL article. It’s almost as though the GRL article is simply used to provide a platform for discussing these other topics. Within the four corners of a GRL response, it is obviously very difficult, if not impossible, for us to defend our EE results against criticisms arising from a separate, unpublished article. Our view is that any points which rely on unpublished arguments submitted to another journal about points made in EE should be excluded and we request that this be done prior to our submitting a Reply, so that we can focus on the GRL-related topics. In this case, it would involve the exclusion of para. 8, sentences 2,3 and 5 of the summary paragraph (para. 9) and the exclusion of the last 2 sentences of the Abstract (which would then be replaced by a claim, such as sentence 1 of para 9 which is actually argued in the running text and which relates to our GRL article.
· In your editorial response to our first Reply to Ritson, you stated that you would deal with concerns about being misquoted at an editorial level by requiring revision of the Comment and that such points did not need to be considered in a Reply. This was an important but minor issue in Ritson, but is a big problem in Ammann and Wahl. We have no idea how to cope with the numerous misquotations and mischaracterizations in the limited scope of a Reply and we doubt you would wish us to get involved in this sort of commentary. We have parsed the A&W submission and, as you will see, the problems are pervasive. We apologize for the length of the attachment but we want to spell out our concerns thoroughly now so we don’t go off on a tangent in our reply. If you asked A&W to use or demonstrate actual quotations from our articles, and preferably from our GRL article, it would certainly reduce the problem. We request that you advise us whether you prefer to deal editorially with misquotation issues so that we can avoid these matters in a Reply and, if so, which items we can avoid.
· There are many points where A&W present calculations or results as if they were novel when they are, in fact, already given in our own papers. The issue is not simply that we are not cited but that A&W phrase their paper so as to insinuate oversights or omissions on our part.· There are several assertions made by A&W for which no argument or source is provided and which appear to be merely unsupported speculations.
· There are numerous instances where key terms are not defined. We can deal with these in our response but you should look at them to see if the statements are simply extraneous and ought to be taken out.
· In important cases, several of these issues interact.
A full listing of problems is attached as Schedule A.
Our overall impression is that when the “pyramid scheme”‘? assertions in paragraphs 8 and 9 are set aside, the next most important point in the A&W article is that the hockey stick shaped PC series [of the bristlecones] occurs in PC series of different order depending on the standardization “€œ the PC1 under MBH98, the PC4 and PC2 under other circumstances. This is not a new observation: we made equivalent points in connection with principal components calculations using a covariance matrix (PC4) and using a correlation matrix (PC2). Since Huybers brought up the exact same issue we have made a detailed reply on this matter already (though we are certainly able to do so again if needed).
Ammann and Wahl are at best making a portion of the argument that Huybers already spelled out with greater clarity and depth. But at the moment, to the extent that they have made any comment on our GRL material, it is overlaid with a lot of extraneous, unsupported and inaccurate material, so we are seeking advice on how to focus our response.
We apologize for the trouble, but think that it is better to deal with this earlier rather than later. Thank you for your attention,
Yours truly
Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick
Shortly thereafter, on June 6, 2005, our GRL editor, who had the authority to "determine whether a Comment meets the standards for publication and may elect to decline a Comment without further consideration" sent us the following notice:
I have decided not to proceed with the review of the Ammann and Wahl Comment; therefore, you need not compose a Reply to this manuscript.
Sincerely,
James Saiers
Editor, Geophysical Research Letters
Meanwhile, at GRL, by the end of July, the dust had pretty much cleared. Of the 4 Comments which had been submitted on our original article, one other comment (by David Ritson) had been rejected. Two Comments (one by von Storch and Zorita and one by Huybers) were well on their way towards acceptance, together with accompanying replies.
The Lobbying
As for UCAR, although UCAR had issued a prominent press release, they did not announce the above rejection by GRL nor did they remove the abstract from their website until late September (when it was replaced by the abstract of a re-submission). As someone with experience with mining speculations, I am dumbfounded by this. UCAR has an ongoing duty of integrity. Having taken the risk of announcing the Ammann and Wahl submission to GRL, they were stuck with the problem of announcing its rejection. They failed to do so. This would not be acceptable in a mining promotion and I see no reason why UCAR should adhere to lower standards than mining promotions.
UCAR’s failure to comply with ongoing full, true and plain disclosure requirements has had an unfortunate knock-on effect. Both Mann and the European Geophysical Union cited the UCAR press release in submissions to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as though the GRL article had not been rejected.
I suspect that this rejection by GRL did not rest easily with UCAR, especially after its grandiose press release. Would it surprise me to learn that pressure was brought to bear on GRL? Well. it wouldn’t surprise me.
The Coup at GRL
Later in the summer, I read in an article at Environmental Science & Technology here or here that the Jay Famiglietti, the editor-in-chief of GRL, had decided to personally assume control of this file. ES&T:
Famiglietti, editor-in-chief of GRL, says that because the McIntyre paper generated a total of four letters, an abnormally high number, he will personally supervise their acceptance. He says that the letters differ in their specific criticisms and adds that he is ignoring the political controversy and focusing on the science.
Notice the phrasing. At that time, two comments were in play and two were in the garbage can. The Huybers and von Storch comments were both proceeding nicely. There was no apparent reason to replace Saiers on the file. So why was there a coup at GRL?
The pennies began dropping towards the end of September. On Sept. 27, we received an email from GRL that the rejected Comment by Ritson had been pulled out of the garbage can, re-submitted and accepted. We were advised that we had 3 weeks to submit a Reply, if we wished to do so. We were thunderstruck to say the least. The Ritson Comment was goofy, as will become apparent. He seems to have no idea that MBH98 uses the hockey stick shaped PC series in a regression analysis and purports to show that the flawed MBH98 PC method has minimal impact on calculating the column mean of the data set as approximated by the first few PCs. It’s a goofy comment. My inclination right now is to write about a 500-word Reply. It’s hard to see why Famiglietti would break AGU Comment policies in order to pull the Ritson Comment out of the garbage can
Yet it had been sent out for review without notifying us, without an accompanying Reply, on and on, all in breach of the AGU Comment policy. Needless to say, we were irritated – not because of the Comment, we can live with that, but because of the GRL editor putting his hand on the scale. We sent the following letter to Famiglietti, copy to John Orcutt, president of AGU.
Dear Dr Famiglietti,
We are concerned about your handling of Comment 2005GL024359 by David Ritson.
A virtually identical Comment was submitted to GRL in April 2005 as 2005GL023538. In accordance with AGU policies regarding Comments, as stated at http://www.agu.org/pubs/comments_guidelines.html, GRL editor James Saiers sent us the Comment and we submitted a Reply. The Comment and Reply were considered together by referees. On July 7, 2005, based on reviewer reports, the Comment by Ritson was rejected by GRL Editor James Saiers, who informed us:
I sent Dr. Ritson’s Comment and your Reply out for review several weeks ago. I received a review on Dr. Ritson’s Comment, and, based on this evaluation, I decided to decline his manuscript for publication in Geophysical Research Letters. Because this Comment will not be published, your Reply will not appear in the journal.
It appears that, despite Saiers’ "final decision", the Ritson Comment was re-submitted about a month later (with only microscopic variations) as a "new" Comment and was given file number 2005GL024359. However, in this case, you handled the file instead of Saiers. In your handling of the file, you have not complied with AGU policies regarding Comments:
– you did not notify us of the "new" Comment by Ritson;
– you did not ask us to prepare a Reply for reviewers to consider in conjunction with the "new" Comment;
– you did not submit the Comment and Reply to referees so that they could be considered jointly;
– in fact, you made a decision to publish the Comment before you even notified us of the existence of the "new" Comment.It is hard to imagine a more thorough disregard for AGU policies on Comments. We will submit a Reply, but we object in the strongest possible terms to this handling of the matter.
We are particularly concerned over this disregard for editorial policies in light of some recent remarks attributed to you by Environmental Science & Technology. In the article, you are quoted as saying (in a discussion of our GRL paper):
"If I had a student come to me and say, "I found this one paper that proves that climate change is hogwash," I’d say, "Well, that’s one paper out of how many? In science, you never look at [only] one paper."
Our paper does not state that "climate change is hogwash" nor does it express any views on climate change. Our paper was limited to statistical issues. We are accordingly concerned that you may hold certain ideas about our work that are inconsistent with what we have actually published.
The ES&T article also stated you had decided to take over editorial oversight of our file. We all rely on an impartial refereeing process in order to ensure that the publication record is as sound and objective as possible. It is still in the public and professional interest that the rules of the process be followed. We are concerned that you have circumvented these rules in this case, to our detriment, and your public comments on our work suggest that you do not approach this file with impartiality. Therefore we request that you assign another Editor to handle the file.
Yours truly
Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick
We were promptly contacted by Famiglietti, who asked to discuss the matter by telephone. We arranged a conference call, including Ross McKitrick, which Famiglietti insisted be off the record. Famiglietti has not provided on the on-the-record response to the above letter other than allowing us to make the following comment in respect to his comments to ES&T:
We have spoken with Dr. Famiglietti about this. He has assured us that he was not expressing any views on our paper in particular. His point was a general one, namely that an individual paper should not be evaluated in isolation but in the context of the literature of which it is a part. He did not imply any disagreement with the original decision of GRL to publish it.
We are circumscribed by Famiglietti’s insistence on confidence with respect to our telephone conversation, but one doesn’t need to be a brain surgeon to have realized that something was up with Ammann and Wahl. Following the news on Ritson, we requested a copy of any Ammann re-submission, but have not received one yet.
A couple of days later on Mann’s realclimate blog we saw the following:
Thanks for your summary of the "usual suspects"; in reviewing them, I followed the link for the third rebuttal ("yes, they have"), but only found a description of a press release about the submision of two papers about five months ago. Is there any news on when these papers will be available to the general public (e.g. are they now "in press" or are the articles posted somewhere)?
[Response: Rumour has it that both manuscripts are pending final acceptance from the respective journals. – mike]
I looked at the UCAR website and it was still the same. On Oct. 1, one of our posters here pointed out that the webpage discussing the GRL submission had changed and now contained a new abstract, referring to a re-submission on Sept. 25.
So there it stands as of today. Now let’s compare to Soon and Baliunas. It passed peer review at Climate Research; three of the other editors thought that it shouldn’t have and resigned amid a blaze of publicity. Here two papers were rejected, including a paper by scientist at the most powerful climate research corporation in the U.S., which was hanging out with a press release. Shortly thereafter, there was a coup at GRL; the editor handling the file was replaced. The editor-in-chief took over the file and instituted procedures for the rejected papers, which were in breach of AGU policies.
I predict that no climate scientist will protest the coup at GRL.
Climate Audit 
54 Comments
I was wondering if anyone would notice that “interesting” phrasing… 🙂
you are assuming that it has gone to GRL !
I think the phrase “pending final acceptance” is formally equivalent to “submitted”, so I can see that this is a part of realclimate that may get edited soon…
yours
per
Steve,
Proactively send a letter (don’t rely on the blog or the policy) to Famiglietti and ask for the sitauation with Wahl and Amman. Don’t let that thing go out without a reply. If the snake is live again, you need to know…
I’ve extended this comment this a.m. I wrote the first part last night quite late after playing inter-club squash league and left it hanging a little.
Lest anyone misconstrue this posting, neither Steve nor I are trying to prevent critical comments on our work from being published. We’re happy to respond to critics on the substance, following the usual rules of independent review and refereeing. In these 2 cases we did just that and the Comments were rejected. Seeing them come back from the dead just in time for Halloween was rather spooky, but we’ll respond again, and people will understand why they were rejected the first time. Everyone who spends time publishing in academic journals accumulates a list of horror stories by the end, but seeing these two undead zombies walking down the street was a first for me.
And in case there is any criticism about raising these things on the blog, the fact is we said nothing for 4 months while UCAR kept their Wahl and Ammann press release up and allowed it to be cited around the world, even though the authors knew their GRL submission had been rejected.
Settle down, Steve. While I agree that Faglimetti is likely doing you a dirty, you need to just hang in there and tough it out. Getting disgusted and not giving a good reply is not appropriate. Try to disaggregate the problems (the comment/reply science issue versus the how do we handle submissions issue). Fight on both fronts seperately.
Also, try to back up and be clear and explanatory in your responses. You sometimes have a tendancy to assume that people have followed other parts of the discussion other than what is right in front of them. Imagine that an apolitical Martian was reading the articles 100 years from now and just wanted to know how to do/not do proxy reconstructions.
Within the specific comment try to disaggregate the claims/issues of the respondant:
-wrong math assertions
-correct math assertions, but not related to the issue
-mischaracterizations of your paper (in which case, you can very likely do the gracious thing of agreeing with the respondant: “Yes, Amman is correct, the sky is blue. We never intended to say otherwise. However, if there is any confusion, we wish to clear it up at this time. All y’all: the sky IS BLUE.”
-Corrections that do not change the major comments of the paper itself. (Here you want to basically do what Mann did in his Nature comment…but more graciously. Basically to make clear that the remaining criticisms of MBH stand.)
Ross: you should be helping here. Earn your co-authorship by making sure that the writing and logic is clear to a person who’s new to the fight.
TCO,
Did you read the long article linked to as Schedule A? It pretty well does what you ask. It certainly disaggregates all the things claimed to where they belong.
And I certainly disagree that Steve should try some mock “agreement” which leaves the impression that Steve didn’t know the sky is blue. You’re imagining that the hockeyteam is willing to be intellectually honest and not use such a statement in the future to claim that someone who doesn’t even know the sky is blue can’t be trusted to know anything about tree rings either.
And, based on all the analyses performed here, you really ought to have about ten more papers already submitted. Heck published. If you write them well, (laboriously following all directions and making all points and limitations clear) you can get them published without revision, sometimes. I know it sounds silly, but when you are super buttoned up on everything, sometimes they won’t mess with you as much on the big issues. Just works that way.
Need to open up some more fronts in the war. Heck, don’t even think of it as a war. Think of it as the scientific literature. You should be advancing it.
Dave, I read it after my comment. And it changes nothing in the points that I’ve just made. And which I’ve made before to Steve. And you don’t understand my point about agreement. If someone says the sky is blue, it is perfectly clear AND EFFICACIOUS FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF CLARIFYING THE LITERATURE TO READERS IN THE FUTURE to agree with that point so that there is no confusion about what science issues are/aren’t in contention.
Re:#9
After practically every entry where A&W make a correct statement, MM say, “Once again, in addition to failing to credit us, A&W present the result as a novelty, implying that it was something that we overlooked” or the equilivant. This translates, in your terminology to, “Yes, the sky is blue, we pointed it out in paper X and please don’t make it sound like we didn’t.” I don’t see why that’s not a suitable disclaimer / agreement. As I said, if they aren’t careful how they word things, their honesty will be used as part of a later lie.
Anyone reading the exchanges 100 years from now, will know quite well what the candy kids are trying to say. And what the rootbeer boys are trying to pull.
DAve, that is a process note between MM and the editor. It is not the published reply. Certainly I would hope that it would be brushed up as the reply. And I still stand by my comments in terms of how Steve can improve his communications.
TCO, I agree with most of what you’ve said. I should have about 10 papers. I can see why guys like having grad students. I’m getting these things to a certain point and then getting attracted by new topics. I hate the idea of half-eaten sandwiches and realize that I’ve got to finish off some more topics. The blog both helps and hurts. I write up some notes to ensure that I don’t lose track of material. Some of it becomes a bit of an external filing system.
The Replies to Huybers and von Storch took a fair bit of time and will be in print soon.
Re A&W, I wouldn’t expect a published Reply to look anything like the process note. The purpose of the process note was (1) to enable us to engage in an intelligible discussion and (2) seek editorial intervention on matters that we should not have to address in a Reply.
I’m quite prepared to argue issues of principal component technique or tree rings, but I don’t want A&W to present results as their own and as a reproach to us, if we’ve already presented them. The Hockey Team has been very successful in spreading disinformation and we were trying to deal with it at the start.
I think that Saiers realized that it would be impossible to distill an intelligible Comment from the A&W submission. Once you took out the unsupported material and the mischaracterizations, there were only a couple of paragraphs left – which are essentially discussed in the Huybers Comment.
Other than the fact that UCAR had gone out on a limb in their press release, probably no one would have cared. Any substantive issues will be dealt with in the other 2 replies. Now as usual, it’s got all the makings of a cause celebre. The A&W paper was really crappy, but now they’ve got pressure on to produce it. They’ve covered up the situation for months. Now it seems that someone’s muscling Famiglietti. Why else would Saiers get bounced?
You might also consider appealing to the society or to some ethical conflict resolution body (I think ACS has one, maybe the geologists do too). Ask them for a new editor. I would also follow up with a call to Saiers: just talk to him man to man, let him know your concerns and see what he says. He may say nothing, but he might say something to confirm or dissuade you from your suspicions.
I think you realize that my comments to you are in extreme sympathy and are also reflective of some time playing in the same game that you are in (and are new to).
I’m a little concerned about your sharing the details of these within the system kerfuffles and in review documents. Only a little bit for your having done anything wrong. Mostly for the impact that the baddies may say you shouldn’t have shared this info (of course that is a weird stance itself…but still…)
Anyway good luck.
P.s. Don’t get too distracted by the battle in the Appenines. Send some troops to the Pacific and France. Write up the grass paper. I think it will be easier if you publish a bunch of little ones rather than a big huge one. Also, realize that the literature and science build in an iterative, additive way. I sorta get the impression that you are like a typical student in wanting a magnum opus with all the ends tied up. But really the field is more benefited by publishing findings in discrete units and rapidly.
i think it was albert einstein who made a relevant comment. 100-odd scientists had signed a petition to say his work was crap; when confronted, einstein said it didn’t require 100 people signing a petition; only one person had to prove his work was flawed !
If GRL publishes self-evident dross, this simply does GRL damage. I think you should be encouraging them to publish the W&A paper; it will remain a testimonial for all time 🙂
yours
per
I take your comments in the spirit intended and welcome the company. I don’t want to put Saiers in any more of a spot.
I realize that some people will criticize me for posting this stuff up and argue that I’ve breached an understanding with the journal. My thoughts on this are influenced by a lot of experience with contracts. One side can’t pick and choose terms of a contract that it wishes to rely on. AGU has explicit provisions on how to handle Comments and Replies, which are every bit as much a part of our udnerstanding with them as any process confidentiality. I didn’t open up the process confidentiality until Famiglietti blew up the Comment-Reply process. Once he blew off these policies, he can’t rely on process confidentiality. Otherwise I’d have left it alone and put up with being nickel-and-dimed.
I don’t think of myself as picking these fights, but more as not just caving in the way that a young professor would have to.
Ok, Steve. I know you have to pick some spots to fight. And I agree that the air of day is a valuable weapon when right is on your side. Just hope you and Ross think the strategy over as you wage the war. Good luck old bean. I agree it is an ill turn. Please don’t let it shake you.
P.s. Grass paper. 🙂
Re #14:
[Aside from] In addition to the fact they published us, I like GRL (and AGU). I subscribe personally.
I don’t think that the Hockey Team cares whether the thing is dross or not. If they get some harangue by A&W into a journal, then they will cite that as "proof". I don’t mind wading throught the arguments; my beef is with the bilious commentary and mischaracterizations. It’s just like realclimate dressed up in journal clothes. It’s possible that I’m thin-skinned about this, but I’d rather deal with things proactively than rear guard.
That first sentence could be a little WC Feildsie depending how you think about it…:)
TCO, send it to my e-mail address
At some point, the administration at the University of Texas at Austin will call Dr. Famiglietti up and ask for an explination. His professional behavior does reflect on the quality of his department as well as science taught at the university. That is if this gets more in the public eye.
He is still an Assistant Professor at UT?
I really doubt that UT will take any action at all unless it is a clearcut scandal. And it certainly isn’t. However, MM may have a reasonable recourse with the society that owns GRL.
John G,
He seems to be at UC Irvine now.
TCO, asking for an explanation doesn’t require a scandal does it? It isn’t like he was a tenured professor. Otherwise I agree. Even more so as JerryB points out he is at UC now :).
My comment stands.
The link here http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/ammann/millennium/refs/AmmannWahl_GRL2005.html says publically that the A&W comment was resubmitted to GRL 25th Sept.
Thanks to IL for the link. I must confess that I am left slightly uneasy at the evidence I see.
I do not know GRL; but I do know that in general, if you send a manuscript to a journal, and they reject it out of hand, you cannot resubmit without major changes. This must surely apply in spades to the submission of a comment on another paper.
I see the fact that two authors both resubmitted as an incredible coincidence, and the fact that GRL is considering them pretty strong evidence that GRL are party to this incredible coincidence.
yours
per
FWIW, the “resubmitted” announcement includes a revised summary.
The May 10 summary was:
“Different standardization procedures prior to principal component analysis can change the order in which the analysis is going to extract information. However, if properly performed, all approaches that capture an acceptable amount of the variance in the underlying proxy data lead to essentially the same reconstruction results. This is also the case if no standardization is applied (or even when all tree ring series are entered individually into the climate reconstruction rather than through PCs). The “hockey stick” appears in all the summaries because it is an important part of the ITRDB network. The claim by MM that a spurious “hockey stick” climate reconstruction is introduced by data transformation is unfounded.”
The new (September 30) summary is:
“Climate reconstructions based on proxy records require steps of standardization of the different series prior to their calibration to instrumental data. In a recent publication in GRL, McIntyre and McKitrick [2005a] suggested that the procedure applied to North American tree ring records led to a systematic bias in the famous hockey stick series of Northern Hemisphere temperature [Mann et al. 1998]. We show that this claim is unfounded, and that a proper standardization, independent of the reference period applied, leads to essentially the same result.”
Steve,
I Googled “Executive Officer AGU” and read the following some
way down in the resulting blurb:
The Editors, not the Publication Committee, are responsible for the scientific content of the journals and the need for new journals. The Publications Committee is responsible for investigating complaints and reporting to the President as needed.
Why don’t you communicate with them and not worry about the Editors?
Good Luck
Roger Bell
Don’t both A&W and MBH have a problem with their reconstructions so long as they include bristlecone pines? Until this time series is removed, how can anyone have any confidence in their work?
I Googled: Caspar M. Ammann and found this link. Note Michael Mann’s name is third on Ammann’s list of callaborators.
I also found the AGU July, 2003 release. The AGU used the term “robust consensus view” to support Mann et al and his consensus group. This whole idea of using a consensus for support is a logical fallacy called “Appeal to Belief” according to the NIZKOR site.
Politicians have used logical fallacies to sway the public since we have had organized government. Jeremy Bentham and many others have written books on this issue. The public still falls prey to these tactics. Using logical fallacies in any science is highly unprofessional. I can think of many other decriptions of such behavoir.
The history of “scientific consensus” is not a proud record. Virtually every breakthrough has been counter to the consensus, although scientists seem to have memory lapse in this regard. If we begin accepting the consensus, then we must believe that: the earth is the center of the universe, the earth is flat, germs do not exist, the automobile will never replace the horse, man will never fly, etc. The list is extraordinarily long.
Since logical fallacies have no place in scientific endeavors, perhaps we should start clearly pointing out faulty logic whenever we see it. This is clearly hopeless in the political realm, but this might induce more scientists to consider the soundness of their logic.
Response to #30.
Brooks,
Ammann is listed on Mann’s cv as one of his students.
I quite agree with the point you were making. Famiglietti’s excuse for pursuing the matter was that GRL had received four letters about M&M’s paper. Strange that it didn’t occur to him that this paper was recognised as one of the 10 best recent GRL papers!
This idea of arranging to have comments written about papers has the weakness in that members of a clique can write in separately to criticise a paper that they individually don’t like, thereby giving an excuse to Famiglietti.
Re: #27
The Sep 30 summary is much better-written than the previous one, and seems to focus on a major issue of dispute; I hope that GRL follows its stated procedure for dealing with this comment, as I’d sure like to see the full text of this comment along with a proper Reply.
Roger,
Re: “… this paper was recognised as one of the 10 best recent GRL papers”
Could you elaborate that a bit?
Roger,
Thanks for the comment. Whether Mann was Ammann’s professor (advisor?) or callaborator, it is clear that Ammann’s is not a totally independent voice of support for Mann.
Re #33
Jerry,
Despite the ambiguity, I’m sure that Roger was referring to MM05 and not Wahl/Ammann.
Re #33
John,
Yes, I assumed that was the case.
I was wondering about the nature of the recognition, how is it ascertained, by whom is it decided,etc.
I’m still not clear what the (stated) rationale for the Faglimiatti intervention was. $ comments requires a higher up person? Saiers was not doing job right? Or just isn’t good enough to handle 4 comment situations? How long was it known that there were 4 comments before Saiers got switched out? Did he agree with the change?
Re the above posts – I was referring to MM05 as being recognised as one of the 10 best recent papers published by GRL. I know that this has been mentioned on this blog, in roughly the April time frame.
I should have said that Casper Amman was a former student of Michael Mann’s. He certainly is not an independent voice.
I urge everyone to read the following article in the current issue of Forbes (10/17/2005, yes the post office delivers that very quickly) – Warmed Over Hurricane Tort – If some plaintiff lawyers have their way, CO2 is the next tobacco). The URL is
http://www.forbes.com/business/forbes/2005/1017/052.html.
The article describes how plaintiff lawyers have been suing the US Government, individual states and the EPA, alleging that their actions have been contributing to global warming. This probably explains some of the determination by various people to minimize the impact of Steve and Ross’s paper MM05.
Steve please note my comments about the AGU Publication Committee – post #28 above.
TCO,
There was no publicly stated rationale for the Famiglietti (yes, the spelling is more complicated than Smith, but you can work on it) intervention.
The published assertion “that he is ignoring the political controversy and focusing on the science” is about as plausible as Captain Renault’s: “I’m shocked … shocked to find that gambling is going on in here”.
Roger,
Recognised by whom?
I did a google search on this site for recognised, and recognized, without noticing a reference such as you suggest.
I think it would be excellent if M&M’s GRL paper was so recognised by whomsoever, but a statement such as you made needs supporting documentation/links.
Jerry,
I think Roger is referring to this
Please note the major re-edit. No previously made points have been withdrawn; however, the chronology has been edited to hopefully make the sequence more readable. Some new background on UCAR has been added.
re: 39
Casablanca happens to be my all time favourite! 🙂
Professor James (Jay) Famiglietti‘s background!
Steve, I think you’ve established that it is very easy to discredit your work. All it takes is breaking every rule of peer-reviewed science publication.
Jerry B,
Sorry I got the details of the AGU commendation of the MM05 paper wrong. Thanks John A for your response.
SPQR, would you explain your message #45 in more detail? What are the rules of peer reviewed science publication?
I know that when I was starting out, I asked a slightly more senior friend for advice on writing papers. He was very helpful and later on we published several papers together. I always helped my graduate students with their first papers. I think many people ask colleagues to look at their papers as well as at proposals for money, equipment, etc as well. It seems to me that Steve is doing the same using modern technology.
Roger Bell
Roger,
Thanks for the clarification.
BTW, I would guess that SPQR was writing “tongue in cheek”.
Re #29,
Douglas,
I’ll see your two questions, and raise you two:
Don’t both A&W and MBH have a problem with their reconstructions even without the bristlecone pines?
Even with that time series removed, how can anyone have any confidence in their work?
Jerry,
Yes, there are other problems, but including the bristlecones is the most obvious error and the easiest to correct. It should be removed since the authors of the series said it is not a temperature proxy. Other time series are also doubtful and perhaps should be removed.
GIGO seems to apply to MBH and A&W no matter how sophisticated their mathematical techniques are.
As I mentioned in May, the A&W “replication” was virtually identical to ours. It emulated MBH, as we had done before them. But if you look at the issues in question – the dodge every single one of them while cliaming that they replicated MBH. Did they “replicate” statistical skill in the cross-validation? Did they replicate “robustness” to the presence/absence of all dendroclimatic indicators (and a foriori bristlecones). They did not. First time, shame on you, second time, shame on me.
Roger, I wasn’t accusing Steve and Ross of breaking any rules, I assure you. John A and Steve know that I’m a fan of their work. We follow their adventures closely over at Debunkers.
Before the arrival of Mann, a primitive Hockey Team was already making a mess of the field.
Last week Warwick Hughes posted the original critique of the Jones instrumental record: http://www.warwickhughes.com/cru86/wood.htm
The critique, by Fred Wood of the Office of Technology Assessment, was a model of scientific judgement and gentlemanly presentation. The reply, by Wigley and Jones, is a monument of obfuscation, evasion, irrelevance and spite. Its main technique is to say that Wood “implies” something he doesn’t say, and then describe this as “wrong”, a “misconception”, a “serious distortion”, a “misleading representation”, etc. For variation, they occasionally admit that Wood is right, but describe his point as “irrelevant” or a “red herring”.
At the end of Wigley and Jones are the beginnings of that “forged consensus” and effort to anathematise that we still see on this issue. They gratuitously remark that:
“In his acknowledgements, Wood mentions both our names. We did indeed read and comment on a number of earlier Wood manuscripts, but our comments were invariably of a critical nature. Most of the facts [!] above have previously been conveyed to Wood. Indeed, many of our earlier criticisms are now incorporated into Wood’s manuscript as caveats or modifications to his arguments. Many other people are mentioned in his acknowledgements, but the reader should not take the list of names as being a list of people who have endorsed his work.”
There are also marvellous prefigurations of the Hockey Team’s approach to data: vague descriptions of methodology that preclude verification, total refusal to address data issues on specific sites, and several wonderful hints that other work, performed after the original paper, but never published, confirm its results. It’s worth a careful read, to see the whole method in its infancy.
Bump
From 1106322460
In the Climategate emails, on Nov 15, 2005, a week after this comment, Michael Mann wrote to Phil Jones (591. 1132094873.txt)