- Bishop Hill blog

Environmental Research Letters has published a statement on the Bengtsson affair, protesting its innocence over the accusation that it rejected the paper on political grounds. At least it seems to be arguing that there were scientific, as well as non-scientific reasons for rejecting the paper; certainly the offending editor's quote is acknowledged:

Summarising, the simplistic comparison of ranges from AR4, AR5, and Otto et al, combined with the statement they are inconsistent is less then helpful, actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of "errors" and worse from the climate sceptics media side.

Regarding the scientific issues, the journal says it is trying to get permission to publish the referees' reports and indeed the first of these appears at the bottom of the statement. As far as we can ascertain from this, Bengtsson's paper focused on similar ground to the Lewis/Crok GWPF report, namely the stark difference between GCM estimates of climate sensitivity and those derived from the observational record and energy budgets. The referee quoted seems to object to this approach because of claimed inadequacies in the nergy budget approach. He says in essence that you wouldn't expect consistency because the energy budget approach is flawed.

People closer to the climate sensitivity debate need to look at the full review, but noted something rather interesting among the list of objections to energy budget models. This is the paragraph that caught my attention:

Even more so, as the very application of the Kappa model (the simple energy balance model employed in this work, in Otto et al, and Gregory 2004) comes with a note of caution, as it is well known (and stated in all these studies) to underestimate ECS, compared to a model with more time-scales and potential non-linearities (hence again no wonder that CMIP5 doesn't fit the same ranges).

I'm going to check my facts, so I'll leave this as a tease for you.

Update on May 16, 2014 by

Bishop Hill

Some wry laughter from Steve McIntyre in response to the ERL statement.

...the “error” (according to the publisher) seems to be nothing more than Bengtsson’s expectation that models be consistent with observations. Surely, even in climate science, this expectation cannot be seriously described as an “error”.

And he notes that several efforts to examine the model-observation discrepancies have been rejected by journals.

...when AR5 was released, I noted that there was negligible literature available to AR5 about the discrepancy between models and observations, leaving IPCC in a very awkward position when it came for assessment. I noted that journal gatekeeping had contributed to this dilemma – both Lucia and coauthors and Ross and I had had submissions about model-observation discrepancies rejected. The Bengtsson rejection seems entirely in keeping with these earlier rejections.