As the Climategate analysis starts to flow from Steve McIntyre's keyboard, it's interesting to note the theme of "climategatekeeping" emerging from the first few posts. It seems clear that there have been multiple instances of attempts to suppress or delay sceptic papers and just as many examples of warmist papers being rushed through to print on the nod. This angle to the climategate affair has been given added impetus in recent days by the extraordinary revelations of Spenser and Christy in their American Thinker article, showing how the journal editor at the International Journal of Climatology (IJoC) conspired with Hockey Team members to delay the appearance in print of a sceptic paper (Douglass et al).
IJoC, which is a journal of the Royal Meteorological Society of the UK, appears more than once in the gatekeeping stories. In 2004, McKitrick and Michaels submitted a paper to the journal looking at the connection between temperature and economic growth. This would have been threatening to the warmist cause because it suggested that some of the observed temperature increases might not be due to carbon dioxide. With depressing predictability, one of the reviewers was Phil Jones and as sure as night follows day, the paper was rejected.
But even this is not the end of it. In 2008, McIntyre became involved in the ongoing debate between Douglass and Santer. McIntyre's interest was piqued by Santer et al 2008, the latest attempt by the Hockey Team to refute Douglass's finding that the instrumental records and the climate models didn't match. Having found some interesting issues in the text of the paper, McIntyre requested Santer's model data in order to help him test the findings more fully. His request received a startlingly rude response:
I gather that your intent is to “audit” the findings of our recently-published paper in the International Journal of Climatology (IJoC). You are of course free to do so. I note that both the gridded model and observational datasets used in our IJoC paper are freely available to researchers. You should have no problem in accessing exactly the same model and observational datasets that we employed. You will need to do a little work in order to calculate synthetic Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) temperatures from climate model atmospheric temperature information. This should not pose any difficulties for you. Algorithms for calculating synthetic MSU temperatures have been published by ourselves and others in the peer-reviewed literature. You will also need to calculate spatially-averaged temperature changes from the gridded model and observational data. Again, that should not be too taxing.
In summary, you have access to all the raw information that you require in order to determine whether the conclusions reached in our IJoC paper are sound or unsound. I see no reason why I should do your work for you, and provide you with derived quantities (zonal means, synthetic MSU temperatures, etc.) which you can easily compute yourself.
I am copying this email to all co-authors of the 2008 Santer et al. IJoC paper, as well as to Professor Glenn McGregor at IJoC.
I gather that you have appointed yourself as an independent arbiter of the appropriate use of statistical tools in climate research. Rather that “auditing” our paper, you should be directing your attention to the 2007 IJoC paper published by David Douglass et al., which contains an egregious statistical error.
Please do not communicate with me in the future.
Ben Santer
What Santer was saying was that the raw model output was freely available and that he thought McIntyre should convert this into the synthetic MSU numbers using the published algorithms. He was saying that the synthetic MSU data was therefore not raw data but an intermediate and that he shouldn't have to release it, a case that was extremely weak, to say the least.
McIntyre followed up with requests to NOAA, who had funded the research, as well as to Glenn McGregor, the editor of IJoC, asking about the journal's policy on data availability. Although McGregor indicated that he would find out from the publisher, it was over 2 months later before McIntyre had a response. It turned out that the journal did not require data to be made available as a condition of publication and to add insult to injury, McGregor now invited McIntyre to ask Santer for the data, in the full knowledge that Santer had already refused to release it.
The freedom of information request to NOAA, however, turned out to be effective, and at the end of January the data was made available, the bureaucrats claiming unconvincingly that it was due to to be published anyway.
At this point yours truly enters the story. At the start of 2009 I decided to take up the issue of a data policy with Professor Paul Hardaker, the Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society. As the publisher of IJoC, Hardaker was the one man in a position to do something about the lack of a data policy. His reply was quick in coming and was very encouraging, indicating that he would take the issue up with the RMS publications committee in May.
Shortly after this, another Climate Audit reader, Geoff Smith appears to have taken the issue up with Phil Jones, a co-author of the Santer paper, encouraging him to adhere to the highest standards of data availability and also telling him about Hardaker's intentions. This seemed to be a worry to Jones, who set out his concerns in an email to Santer:
I'm not on an RMS committee at the moment, but I could try and contact Paul Hardaker if you think it might be useful. Possibly need to explain what is raw and what is intermediate.
Santer agreed that this was a sensible course of action and in March, Jones contacted Hardaker setting out the Hockey Team position on materials availability:
I had been meaning to email you about the RMS and IJC issue of data availability for numbers and data used in papers that appear in RMS journals. This results from the issue that arose with the paper by Ben Santer et al in IJC last year. Ben has made the data available that this complainant wanted. The issue is that this is intermediate data. The raw data that Ben had used to derive the intermediate data was all fully available. If you're going to consider asking authors to make some or all of the data available, then they had done already. The complainant didn't want to have to go to the trouble of doing all the work that Ben had done. I hope this is clear.
Santer seemed pleased with this approach, but held out the possibility of stronger actions:
If the RMS is going to require authors to make ALL data available - raw data PLUS results from all intermediate calculations - I will not submit any further papers to RMS journals.
This seems a remarkable position for a publicly-funded scientist to take but despite this, Jones seemed to agree. In his reply he also suggests that pressure has been put on the RMS over another journal article.
I'm having a dispute with the new editor of Weather [another Royal Met Soc journal]. I've complained about him to the RMS Chief Exec. If I don't get him to back down, I won't be sending any more papers to any RMS journals and I'll be resigning from the RMS.
In June I contacted Professor Hardaker once more to see what progress had been made on formulating a policy and once again received a cordial response. The committee, it seemed, had looked at some example policies Hardaker had shown them and had tasked him with drafting a formal policy for presentation at the next meeting in the autumn.
Professor Hardaker is now in a position that appears "interesting". He can see clear evidence that his editor at IJoC has been tipping the scales in favour of the Hockey Team - delaying sceptic papers and sending them to hostile reviewers, accelerating critiques of them. Even if the threats of Santer and Jones to refuse to publish in IJoC were never relayed to him, he will also now know that this is what the two Hockey Team members are thinking. He can have little doubt that if Jones and Santer boycott RMS journals then the rest of the cabal will follow too. Could this have commercial implications for the journals? Who knows? But meanwhile Hardaker can also be in little doubt that the scientific method requires that the RMS insists on openness in data and in code. Santer's argument that intermediates can be withheld seems to me to be without scientific merit.
Hardaker's position must be profoundly uncomfortable. The "editor problem" aside, there is no doubt what the correct decision regarding the materials policy is in scientific terms. This one acceptable course of action must also be absolutely clear to Hardaker, who is on the board of Sense About Science, a body which promotes "good science and evidence in public debates". It is hard to see how he could credibly permit the withholding of any data or code while holding this position.
I wonder what decisions were made at that meeting in the autumn? I'll write and see.