As you know, we are eagerly awaiting the publication of the following article by Wahl and Ammann reported here:
Wahl, E and C Ammann (In press). “Robustness of the Mann, Bradley, Hughes reconstruction of northern hemisphere surface temperatures: Examination of criticisms based on the nature and processing of proxy climate evidence.” Climatic Change (accepted).
May 10, 2005 — In review
September 27, 2005 — Revised
December 12, 2005 — Provisionally Accepted
February 28, 2006 — Accepted for Publication
I have made many posts on Wahl and Ammann – see here for Category and have been following the snail-like progress of this article for some time as it slouches towards Boulder. I objected to its inclusion in IPCC AR4 on the basis that it did not meet IPCC publication deadlines of acceptance by December 2005 and in print by February 2006. This objection was disregarded. Their revised version is the version that includes their confirmation of our result that MBH verification r2 was ~0 – although they and UCAR had issued a press release that our results were unfounded. As I reported previously, Wahl and Ammann withheld this information in their first draft and included the information in their revised version only after I filed an academic misconduct complaint against Ammann.
Their Climatic Change submission relies on a concurrent submission to GRL for their benchmarking of the RE significance. Their GRL submission, said to be “in review” in their version filed with IPCC, had in fact been rejected before they filed their revised version with IPCC.
I’m intrigued as to what the final Wahl and Ammann version will look like. They have an intriguing choice: the inclusion of a reference to this article in AR4 was premised on their article being “in press” which would prohibit them from re-working their article to deal with the GRL rejection. But the article needs to be re-worked since it will look pretty silly to describe their GRL article as “under review” over 18 months after it has been rejected.
I check Climatic Change from time to time to see how they are coming along. Today, to my great surprise, I noticed that Climatic Change had published an Ammann and Wahl article online on August 24, 2007 abstract . However, it’s not the Robustness article. It’s a different article: Caspar M. Ammann and Eugene R. Wahl, The importance of the geophysical context in statistical evaluations of climate reconstruction procedures. They continue to toil in MBH vineyards however.
Abstract A portion of the debate about climate reconstructions of the past millennium, and in particular about the well-known Mann-Bradley-Hughes (“MBH” 1998, 1999) reconstructions, has become disconnected from the goal of understanding natural climate variability. Here, we reflect on what can be learned from recent scientific exchanges and identify important challenges that remain to be addressed openly and productively by the community. One challenge arises from the real, underlying trend in temperatures during the instrumental period. This trend can affect regression-based reconstruction performance in cases where the calibration period does not appropriately cover the range of conditions encountered during the reconstruction. However, because it is tied to a unique spatial pattern driven by change in radiative balance, the trend cannot simply be removed in the method of climate field reconstruction used by MBH on the statistical argument of preserving degrees of freedom. More appropriately, the influence from the trend can be taken into account in some methods of significance testing. We illustrate these considerations as they apply to the MBH reconstruction and show that it remains robust back to AD 1450, and given other empirical information also back to AD 1000. However, there is now a need to move beyond hemispheric average temperatures and to focus instead on resolving climate variability at the socially more relevant regional scale
The submission-acceptance schedule says the following:
Received: 22 August 2000 Accepted: 13 June 2007 Published online: 24 August 2007
This seems like a long time for acceptance of this article, even for Ammann and Wahl; the topic also seems prescient for 2000; I presume that there is a misprint. It is also curious that this article, accepted only on June 13, 2007, has been published prior to their Robustness article “accepted” in February 2006.
Anyway I eagerly await the final version of this article to see exactly what decision Stephen Schneider, editor of Climatic Change, took, when faced with the Hobson’s Choice described above.
Climate Audit 