I did NOT expect serious data integrity issues to be uncovered by the merry band at Climate Audit after just a few days of analysis.

Steig et al is essentially a statistical paper, applying new methodology to existing data in an attempt to provide a more coherent picture of recent antarctic climate change.

When such a paper is published in Nature, don’t I have the right to expect that the authors have a sufficient understanding of the underlying data sources that any obvious errors have been fixed or corrected?

How can climate science move forward if even papers in the most prestigious journals must be subjected to additional external analysis before they can be relied upon.

Of course errors are going to occur in the course of science. I am not complaining about a single error. My complaint is that there has been a long series of errors, all of which seem to be in the same direction (towards promoting the IPCC consensus), and that there has been no corrective action by the scientific community.

To answer my original question: After this latest incident I think it is entirely unreasonable to take climate science papers published in Nature at face value without first subjecting them to additional analysis. That is a very sad state of affairs indeed.

I thought Eric Steig’s whole response to Roger’s review and questions was bizarre.

To start with, Steig wrote, “I have to admit I cringed when guest writer Weart wrote the article on RealClimate, which I didn’t get a chance to read first. I’m not sure what models he was talking about that said Antarctica should be cooling.”

But then he changed his position, and insisted, “All. I should clarify my point. When I said that ‘I cringed’ I don’t mean that I thought there was anything wrong with Spencer’s article. I meant that I thought he wasn’t clear enough that he was referring to the models show a slower warming in Antarctica than e.g. in the Arctic, which was and remains the correct assessment of what the model show.”

So he initially seemed to be pretty clearly stating that his interpretation of Spencer Weart’s post was that Weart was saying that there were at least some models that were predicting that “Antartica should be cooling.”

But then he dropped even the idea that Weart’s post implied that at least some models said that Antarctica should be cooling.

The IPCC has published no consensus of the overall risk related to climate change.

As was pointed out by Kevin Trenberth on the Nature blog (“Climate Feedback”) the IPCC has never made any predictions of the amount of future climate change:

http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/2007/06/predictions_of_climate.html

If the IPCC hasn’t ever made any predictions about the amount of future climate change, they can’t have reached any consensus on the amount of risk, since the amount of risk related to climate change is obviously dependent on the amount of climate change.

In fairness, this is a far more sensible application of infilling methods than paleoclimate. Here everything is at least a temperature of some kind. RegEM and PCA have a far better chance of yielding a sensible result in this sort of application than using Graybill bristlecone ring widths.

Data in Antarctic is sparse. It’s odd that it wouldn’t have warmed up with the rest of the world. Readers shouldn’t drop standards of data rigor merely because they like Antarctic data that seems to go down. It’s quite reasonable to cross-examine the Antarctic data to see if a different interpretation of it is possible.

Despite this and other evenhanded statements, Steig intervened at CA as follows: http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=4945#comment-322363

I will not further respond to queries from Steve McIntyre by email, nor via this blog. I have always given you the benefit of the doubt, but your thinly-veiled accusations of scientific fraud (by association!) have crossed an important ethical line. Shame on you.

I had made no such “thinly-veiled accusations” and asked for information on where I had allegedly made such claims. No answer. The matter perplexed me. Perhaps Roger’s idea of “infallibility complex” is the explanation. If they are “infallible”, then an error can only occur through fraud. Thus the mere hint of the possibility of error is a “thinly-veiled accusations of scientific fraud”.

Lucia, the following isn’t correct:

But, if I understand Steve, what he seems to be saying is that, on first glance, he’s not finding anything wrong.

Not at all. At first glance, I have no opinion and I’m nowhere near having an opinion on this. I like to handle the data a bit before looking at the methods and I’m just starting this process.

I don’t exclude the possibility that the methods are reasonable. However, the methods appear to be somewhat homemade and this always introduces an element of risk. I suggested to Steig that archive their code but he told me to suck eggs.

Plus the monthly satellite data as used in the study isn’t available. I requested this from Steig; at first, he said that he would provide it; then he told me to suck eggs. I will, of course, pursue alternative avenues – the journal, FOI – to obtain the data. It’s a nuisance, but will provide some lively blog posts.

http://mclean.ch/climate/docs/IPCC_numbers.pdf