The Good Explanation – Apologies
June 13th, 2005Posted by: Roger Pielke, Jr.
Welcome to the weblog… as I sat down to write a disgruntled letter to Donald Kennedy tonight, I went through my old email and discovered that it was Nature, not Science that rejected our hurricane paper without review.
My apologies for the error and for creating short-lived false hopes for conspiracy theorists. We call it like we see it here, especially when we are in error (surely won’t be the last time). Meantime, do read the various papers on hurricanes and climate change, a comparison will be informative.
June 14th, 2005 at 6:27 am
Dear Roger,
Your comment about “conspiracy theorists” appears disingenuous considering Nature has a long history of bias against scientists who are politically incorrect on climate issues. What is the point of publicly disclosing ill-treatment if you deny its cause. The editors of both Nature and Science have publicly confessed their intentional bias for reasons of politics, not justified by a search for fact and accuracy, as your case further illustrates.
Of late,they also refuse to print Christy and Spenser, two of the most knowledgeable on satellite data, or even invite them as reviewers.
Your “calling them” like you see them appears to have the scent of fear, leading to a half “calling.”
Regards,
Bob Ferguson
Haymarket, VA.
June 14th, 2005 at 6:43 am
Thanks Bob for your comments. I will agree that that the two-stage peer review processes of Science and Nature open the door to mischief in the peer review process. However, I am unaware of the admissions that you claim from these journal admitting a “bias for reasons of politics.” On Christy and Spencer, their work has received plenty of visibility in the community and is widely viewed as a valuable contribution to science. The fact that their work is attacked and studied disproportionately as compared to other areas certainly does say something about the biases of the community, but I have no hard data to suggest bias from the journals (again, the journals may have bias, but I don’t have evidence). However, if you have hard data showing bias in journal behavior, I’d be interested to see it.
June 14th, 2005 at 6:47 pm
Robert Ferguson might wish to make the acquaintance (posthumonously of course) of Philip Abelson, the late, long time editor and deputy editor of Science and a noted non believer in anthrogenic climate change. http://www.answers.com/topic/philip-abelson
June 15th, 2005 at 3:40 pm
Dear Eli,
Your point is well taken in that I should have been less general by specifying the more recent editors of Nature and Science, such as the highly political former Stanford biology professor, Donald Kennedy (Science).
Dear Roger,
It’s a fair request. I am not sure “data’ is the proper word in this context. More like evidence, and a reasonable interpretation of it. Numerous editorials by both publications over recent years have been overtly political and made it clear to anyone questioning the “consensus” view that the science is settled and all that is left is the “right” and dramatic policy response, usually tinged with transparent anti-capitalist slogans nurtured in the Academy and alarm-oriented NGOs.
This “un-science” and non-professional attitude is made sharper with editorials like July 12, 2001 (page 103) in which Nature birthed yet another surly denunciation of “skeptics” and accused them of an “unscrupulous determination to deny the facts” and maligned them as stooges of industry who lack scientific credentials.
This approach, duplicated by Science, sends a strong message to “real” scientists (those, like you, who have pointed out that science is not about “consensus’) that their research results are not welcome, and will get sent only to “consensus” clergy reviewers for rejection, often being deemed “not of interest to our readers.” This distasteful political behavior is compounded when other journals, scientists, certain US Senators and high-ranking officials of the previous Administration take their own cues from such gratuitous attacks.
Fred Singer made these observations: “Science’s Editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy uses his Editorials inappropriately to advocate politically derived goals-undermining the proper role of Science and endangering credibility with the public. In “An unfortunate U-turn on carbon” (Editorial, 30 March 2001, p. 2515), he accused President George Bush of reversing his position on the Kyoto Protocol….
Next came “The policy drought on climate change” (Editorial, 17 Jan., p. 309), in which Kennedy attacked the White House research plan for the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP). Kennedy faults the strategic plan for concentrating on, yes, science. He wants studies on regulation of energy – putting the cart before the horse!
Then we get “The climate divide” (Editorial, 21 March, p. 1813), where Kennedy bemoans the CCSP’s lack of recommendations for emission controls to avert what he considers a climate catastrophe that would trigger an abrupt cooling of the temperate Northern Hemisphere.”
It goes on and on.
In exasperation of this behavior by Nature and Science, Craig and Keith Idso opined:
An Unfortunate Statement from the Editors of Nature
Volume 4, Number 17: 25 April 2001
“The table of contents of the 29 March 2001 issue of Nature calls its readers’ attention to the eminent science journal’s primary opinion piece of the week: “The trouble with Bush.” The actual editorial on page 499 carries a slight variant of this title – “Problems with the president” – perhaps to make sure no one misses the point of their carping. Carping? Yes, carping, for like their editorial counterpart at Science (see our last week’s editorial), the editors of Nature have chosen to discard the detached and impartial methods of the scientific enterprise for the more subjective implements of politics. And like the impetuous child who stamps his feet and shouts when he loses at his favorite game, the editors of Nature attack the character and motives of those who do not bow to their intellectual and ethical eminence when they lose at theirs.
The official voice of Nature introduces its weekly wisdom by saying President Bush’s decision not to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants “stands firmly with the employers and polluters who helped to pay for Bush’s singularly unimpressive election victory last November.” Isn’t it amazing that a journal devoted to science would feel it must begin what should be a scholarly discussion of this science-based issue with such pejorative remarks, the only purpose of which would appear to be to bias the reader against the side of the scientific issue that Nature’s editors seem to detest so vehemently? How sad! And how sad that they feel they must end their diatribe (what else can we call it?) in much the same way: “Bush has seen fit to capitulate to the coal industry at the first available opportunity.”
Perhaps those responsible for the brief essay have stooped to this low level of discourse because of their inability to make a truly scientific case for their cause (yes, it’s no longer just an hypothesis, or even a theory; it’s a political cause), which surely says volumes about the scientific basis of their position (maybe it’s missing because there is none!). They talk, for example, about the president’s “summary rejection of the accumulated scientific evidence that greenhouse-gas emissions are contributing to climate change,” but they present not a single morsel of that wonderful evidence for their readers to chew upon. Why? Because it likely would leave a bad taste in their mouths, seeing most of it is not real evidence at all but synthetic support in the form of vastly imperfect climate model simulations. Yet the Nature editors incredulously say science “sits low in the pecking order of influence inside the new Bush administration,” when it is totally missing from their own exposition of the matter!
The Nature editorial ends with the statement that “a bigger price will be paid by many others if Bush persists in ignoring what science is telling him,” as if the entity they call “science” spoke with a singular clarion voice of truth and virtue (and emanated from the editorial pages of Nature!). Of course, in the end, it does just that (the first of these things, that is), but one must have ears to hear it; for there are many who say “Here am I, listen to me, I have the truth,” and in the din of clamoring and confusing voices the still small sound of truth is hard to hear, making it easy for one to embrace an enticing counterfeit – as, for example, a sophisticated climate-model simulation – and thereby reject the real thing, which may be oh so very different.
What happened to our father twenty years ago, and then again ten years later, seems now to be occurring on a vastly larger scale. People who dance to the tune of a different environmental drummer than the ones employed by the climate alarmist establishment are said to be “trouble” and to have “problems.” Even presidents are not immune to this age-old form of character assassination, as evidenced by the recent Science and Nature editorials. Truly, we are seeing science by the scientific method replaced by the concept of “science by decree,” as our father so aptly described it in his initial book on the subject of CO2 and global change (Idso, 1982). And the sight is not pretty.
So what shall we do? Boycott corporations that disagree with what we believe to be the truth, like certain politicians and greens are advocating the public should do to companies that think like us? Give the editors of Science and Nature one week to recant the remarks they made in their unscientific editorials, like Greenpeace gave top U.S. firms one week to oppose the Bush administration’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol? No. Science doesn’t operate that way. Science does not use force to make people accept its findings. Science prevails on the strength of truth alone. And if all the world rise up against it, what is that to truth? Will the combined voices of every green group on the face of the earth change the ways the laws of nature function? Of course not. But they may fool a lot of people. Therefore, those of sound mind and good data must speak out and see to it that the message of real-world scientific observations, such as those we have archived under nearly every letter of the alphabet in our Subject Index, is spread to every nook and cranny of the globe.
Truly, the truth shines brightly; but people must be able to see it in order to recognize it. And when they finally do, we can all say goodbye to the IPCC’s more-than-mischievous myths that currently masquerade as scientific fact. Each of you has a part to play in this endeavor. Play well your part!”
One could go on near endlessly, but you get the picture.
Regards.
Bob
June 15th, 2005 at 7:41 pm
So Dr. Ferguson, what do you think Nature’s policy on quantum theory deniers should be? (and believe me there are one whole bunch of them http://www.crank.net/physics.html
June 16th, 2005 at 10:27 am
Dear Eli,
I am glad you feel young enough to act silly.
Regards,
Bob
June 16th, 2005 at 10:46 am
Bob- Thanks for your comments. I agree wholeheartedly that the AAAS, and the editorial staffs of both Science and Nature have taken overt political positions, So too has Lancet and the NEJM. With respect to the journals, this seems to me to be more like the editorial/news distinction in journalism (yes there issues in that context as well). Both Science and Nature clearly time articles so as to be newsworthy or published in the context of a political event (e.g., a Framework Convention meeting). What I have not seen, though I hear plenty of anecdotes, is that the process of peer review in these journals is influenced because of political considerations. I do not find it implausible that they would be — we have seen this occur in Energy and Environment and Climate Research. But I await evidence in the case of Science and Nature.
June 16th, 2005 at 8:26 pm
Dear Prof. Pielke, I think you are confusing a policy position with a political decision. I see nothing wrong with a science organization/magazine taking a policy position if they believe the science to be clear, for example the AGU official position on climate, etc.
The same issue reflects my comment to Bob. Whether you like it or not the basic science on anthropic climate change is clear, at least to those who study climate. You don’t get a right to your own facts, and you certainly don’t get the expectation about being taken seriously if you don’t know the basics.
June 18th, 2005 at 2:29 pm
Dear Eli,
With respect, the basic science is far from clear to anyone without a political agenda. You need to listen more to what the EU and UN representatives are saying. This has been a political issue devoid of any certainty since Maggie Thatcher utilized it to break the coal unions in Britain. No one, repeat no one, in the EU now believes Kyoto targets can be met, or that it would make one measurable bit of difference if they were. Their socialist economies have mostly been driven into the ground and they know that if they can pressure the US into binding carbon agreements, the NGOs in this country will do what they always do, take it to the courts to enforce no matter how useless or harmful, while the EU simply does nothing and faces no domestic or international enforcement.
Most of the IPCC scientists, the ones who do the work BEFORE it gets into the hands of the policy makers for the Executive summary rewrite, know “certainty” is not only tripe, but unscientific on its face. ”Uncertainty” has a precise scientific definition, and is properly represented by error bars.
For example, the warming of the globe might cause more hurricanes. But we do not
have a scrap of evidence to say that it is so; in fact there is plenty of
evidence saying it is not so, and for Dr. Trenberth to say that it “certainly” is
so makes a mockery of the scientific process. Without evidence, Dr. Trenberth is abusing his position as a scientist and IPCC lead author by making that claim. This obviously disturbs you not a bit.
Jim Hansen has admitted publicly the down playing of uncertainty and that breathless hype has been orchestrated to get the attention of policy makers ever eager to “do something,” and dole out billions in research dollars.” He now weakly appeals for calling off the dogs a bit while pocketing a quarter million from the Heinz foundation for his political services. You may enjoy your self-appointed role as “crank,” but human lives are at risk to bad policy. And if you can’t see the long-term damage exposure to Science for scientists taking hardened political positions, then we have nothing further to discuss.
Roger,
Roger, one cannot simply “await” the evidence to come to him. Like most all things discovered, it has to be actively sought, examined and tested. Unless one is willfully ignoring it because once accepted there’s the hard choice of exposing oneself to doing something about it, or hiding from it. As Frank Herbert wrote in DUNE, “Fear is the mind killer.”
Give Chris Landsea, and any of the other of your colleagues who have dropped out because they are scientists and not politicians or pugilists, a call. Their real life experiences are not “anecdotes.” While the history of science has seen some nasty personal quarrels, there has likely not been such a politically coordinated and executed attack on “non-consensus” (climate) scientists since Galileo or the Soviet Union.
Regards,
Bob
June 21st, 2005 at 4:59 pm
Dear Roger,
I add this to the scales of evidence.
LEADING SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS ‘ARE CENSORING DEBATE ON GLOBAL WARMING’
The Sunday Telegraph, 1 May 2005, Plus correspondence with Science
LEADING SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS ‘ARE CENSORING DEBATE ON GLOBAL WARMING’
The Sunday Telegraph, 1 May 2005
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ixworld.html
By Robert Matthews
Two of the world’s leading scientific journals have come under fire from researchers for refusing to publish papers which challenge fashionable wisdom over global warming.
A British authority on natural catastrophes who disputed whether climatologists really agree that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity, says his work was rejected by the American publication, Science, on the flimsiest of grounds.
A separate team of climate scientists, which was regularly used by Science and the journal Nature to review papers on the progress of global warming, said it was dropped after attempting to publish its own research which raised doubts over the issue.
The controversy follows the publication by Science in December of a paper which claimed to have demonstrated complete agreement among climate experts, not only that global warming is a genuine phenomenon, but also that mankind is to blame.
The author of the research, Dr Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, analysed almost 1,000 papers on the subject published since the early 1990s, and concluded that 75 per cent of them either explicitly or implicitly backed the consensus view, while none directly dissented from it.
Dr Oreskes’s study is now routinely cited by those demanding action on climate change, including the Royal Society and Prof Sir David King, the Government’s chief scientific adviser.
However, her unequivocal conclusions immediately raised suspicions among other academics, who knew of many papers that dissented from the pro-global warming line.
They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents – and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.
Dr Peiser submitted his findings to Science in January, and was asked to edit his paper for publication – but has now been told that his results have been rejected on the grounds that the points he make had been “widely dispersed on the internet”.
Dr Peiser insists that he has kept his findings strictly confidential. “It is simply not true that they have appeared elsewhere already,” he said.
A spokesman for Science said Dr Peiser’s research had been rejected “for a variety of reasons”, adding: “The information in the letter was not perceived to be novel.”
Dr Peiser rejected this: “As the results from my analysis refuted the original claims, I believe Science has a duty to publish them.”
Dr Peiser is not the only academic to have had work turned down which criticises the findings of Dr Oreskes’s study. Prof Dennis Bray, of the GKSS National Research Centre in Geesthacht, Germany, submitted results from an international study showing that fewer than one in 10 climate scientists believed that climate change is principally caused by human activity.
As with Dr Peiser’s study, Science refused to publish his rebuttal. Prof Bray told The Telegraph: “They said it didn’t fit with what they were intending to publish.”
Prof Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama, a leading authority on satellite measurements of global temperatures, told The Telegraph: “It’s pretty clear that the editorial board of Science is more interested in promoting papers that are pro-global warming. It’s the news value that is most important.”
He said that after his own team produced research casting doubt on man-made global warming, they were no longer sent papers by Nature and Science for review – despite being acknowledged as world leaders in the field.
As a result, says Prof Spencer, flawed research is finding its way into the leading journals, while attempts to get rebuttals published fail. “Other scientists have had the same experience”, he said. “The journals have a small set of reviewers who are pro-global warming.”
Concern about bias within climate research has spread to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose findings are widely cited by those calling for drastic action on global warming. In January, Dr Chris Landsea, an expert on hurricanes with the United States National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, resigned from the IPCC, claiming that it was “motivated by pre-conceived agendas” and was “scientifically unsound”.
A spokesman for Science denied any bias against sceptics of man-made global warming. “You will find in our letters that there is a wide range of opinion,” she said. “We certainly seek to cover dissenting views.”
Dr Philip Campbell, the editor-in-chief of Nature, said that the journal was always happy to publish papers that go against perceived wisdom, as long as they are of acceptable scientific quality.
“The idea that we would conspire to suppress science that undermines the idea of anthropogenic climate change is both false and utterly naive about what makes journals thrive,” he said.
Dr Peiser said the stifling of dissent and preoccupation with doomsday scenarios is bringing climate research into disrepute. “There is a fear that any doubt will be used by politicians to avoid action,” he said. “But if political considerations dictate what gets published, it’s all over for science.”
Copyright 2005, The Sunday Telegraph